a new favorite and other thoughts on the extraordinary.

I think I've found a new favorite musician and her name is Susheela Raman. My "favorites" come in stages, but tend to last for years, maybe lifetimes. Like many things in my life, I tend to move from one obsession to the next to the next...yet never entirely leaving any of them behind.

I've heard one of her songs on another disc, but oh....I never knew just how good she is...and, well...the music has been cranked ever since.

At the moment I'm listening to sound recordings of traffic in India ("Idi Samayam"--Music for Crocodiles). The horn of a Tata truck. A rickshaw. A motorcycle. I can't even tell you what this is doing to me.

There are some things that have a way of turning me inside out. Sometimes it's a certain smell. Sometimes a sound. A touch. A color. A movement. Yes, even a specific pitch and rhythm of a horn. At times like this, it is all I can do just to keep myself from boarding the next plane. But someday I know I will. This thought creates quick little fires in my brain. Synapses flash and it feels like the top off my head has been taken off, letting in an extra dose of light and air. Creative epiphanies. I see images. I hear poetry in the sound of traffic. For a moment I understand the direction all of my work should take--in writing, in painting...little fires, my synapses bursting into flames of red and blue, yellow, lime-green, a woman with a thin frame and dark eyes looking past me, a baby on her hip, blue sky, the smell of burning rubbish, morning sunshine, indian red, off-white, everything alive and dying and being born...

I think we're all born with a certain amount of potential--but it depends on our willingness to follow our hearts that determines how close to that potential we'll ever come. I've always been facinated by the word "extraordinary." Extra-Ordinary. Extraordinary. We all have it in us. Finding our own voice in the ordinary is what makes us extraordinary. Some days just the thought of living life to the edges of myself is enough to break me wide open. Some days I think even the sound of a horn or the scent of a certain spice or the flash of an image (real or imagined) is enough to shatter me into a million pieces of sky.