Just like the seasons, we change.  Change comes in many forms. Recently I've been immersed in creating art, reading, coaching, photography and journaling.  When I am not doing one of these, I'm exercising, socializing or simply being.  Blogging, has become less imperative for me these days, therefore I will do so less frequently. 

Moving forward, I will be blogging every first Monday of the month, instead of weekly.  Summertime has me antsy and outside of myself as well as outside. I must listen to the seasons of change.

Enjoy your summer!
Thanks for reading.

​AMO

I had read somewhere, a sentence or two, stating how one has to disintegrate to reconstruct one's life.  It stayed with me, mainly because I believe this to the core.  Sometimes, it's about things getting so bad, whether it's one's health, relationships, or work, or all of the above, to be able to hear one's inner voice screaming for help and then acting on it.















​




​We fall, and keep on falling, down the rabbit hole, the type we believe we may never come out of... but we do. "We can do hard things," as Doyle famously states in her memoir, Untamed, and later uses as the title for her popular podcast. 

​The reward is waiting on the other side of fear.

A recent gift, a bunch of stunning Hosta leaves, put me in a state which I've termed "intentional presence." In this state, I recognize endless possibilities.  The act of seeing changes consistently, and I acknowledge its temporality, just as the object I perceive.  The more I look at this gift, the more patterns and textures I see.  Although the leaves are green, my seeing them in black and white, furthers my interest in line and form.

How time changes the object. How the leaves move inside its vessel.  How I move around it. Come close to it, step away and view it from afar.  How the light informs its textures.  The contrast between the front and back of the leaves.

The eternal possibilities of wonder, form, lines, shape, light.  All this comes into being as I immerse myself in   intentional presence. Even the imperfections  organically align.

The beauty is continues.  It lives inside the vase, in my mind, in my hand, in the soil from which it was born.  Most of all, it lives in the creative force of an eternal continuum.  

AMO

​

This entire month I have posted about my summer of 2016 when Mom and I created 30 songs together.  This four-part series has been dedicated to all mothers and daughters in honor of Mother's day. This is the last of the four posts.

When I asked my Mom to work on music for my songs, she had not touched her guitar or sung in close to ten years.  The guitar was off tune and dusty. To put this time in context, my Mom was the type to play at every party since she was in her twenties, but as she aged, she let that side of her wither away.  She even stopped listening to music, instead she watched TV. It was sad to see her forget her gifts, those she had cherished and enjoyed all of her life.  My request came from a place of awakening.  I wanted for her to feel alive again.  I had no idea, it would do the same for me.

I was overjoyed when she accepted to help with this project and before you knew it, she was sending iphone recordings of her musical renditions at all hours of the day.  At 77, she was once again excited and engaged, and I, in turn, was happy to see her active again and doing what she loved: playing and singing. I realized through this creative journey how we often times let our dreams and passions fall on the wayside when, in reality, it is our life force. 

It is my hope, that our songs inspire you, whether at 21 or 81,  to pick up where you left off and bring your passion back to life. It is waiting for you. 

I leave you with one of our songs titled Hoy (Today).  Thank you for reading and listening.

AMO
​

Most of my love stories, except for my first love, had dysfunctional characteristics, including my two marriages. Songwriting became the tool by which to explore my love life.  As the process took its own path, I realized it was helping me heal, it was showing me the characters I was attracting and attracted to, my behavior, their response.  By the end of the summer, as I began to see my relationships clearly, I made some radical decisions. I moved to a new state, new job, new surroundings.  Although, I made a couple of wrong love choices after my life changes (cause we all know geography won't stop unhealed wounds), with help from my therapist, I caught the behavior quickly, emotionally understood why I was being pulled in those directions, and stopped the demise. My wounds were no longer bleeding. In fact, they were healed and new skin was emerging.

I had finally learned the lesson -   I needed to start by loving myself first so that I could love others fully and have that love reciprocated.   I needed to understand the joy of solitude. How being alone is an opening into the imagination, into listening and receiving. In the company of others, how it merges with mindfulness and presence.

Through this journey of songwriting and creation, I helped my Mom embrace her gifts.  I was giving her an opportunity to explore where they may take her.  For the first time in her life, she not only sang, but also created melodies for my songs and built upon them to make music. To see her do that at 77, was a powerful exercise on empowerment and living out your true nature.  She surprised herself with her own power and to this day, she still talks about that summer and shares our songs with whomever will stop and listen.

Below is one of the songs that claims just that - self love - and it is called Hoy celebro mi amor (Today I celebrate my love), in the style of a Peruvian waltz, sung by my mother, Lizzie. The song is registered.​

Next week is the last of this  blog series dedicated to my mother and all mother/daughter relationships. I hope you come back and listen to more of our songs. 

​Have a love filled day, week, and ... life.

AMO

The music we created, thirty songs all together, were highly influenced by the style of Teresita, as well as other greats like Mexican singer Chavela Vargas and Cuban songwriter, Marta Valdes.  We especially love the style referred to as "filin."

I posted one of two videos of my Mom in last Monday's post, below is the other video I recorded of her practicing my song, En la distancia.   We didn't care that the guitar was off tune, we focused on the moment and creating memories. 

I will post more songs and photos of our summer of 2016 for the month of May in my Mom's honor. 

Today, at 82, she can still play and sing like nobody's watching....
​May we all celebrate our gifts!  

Happy Mother's Day!

Love,
AMO

In the summer of 2016, I was not a happy camper.  I felt stuck, alone and in a state of indecision regarding the steps I needed to take to release myself from feeling like a victim of circumstance.  As usual, I turned to writing to figure it out and get myself out of my stupor.  This time, however, my writing went from journaling and poetry to songwriting.

It wasn't the first time I had tried this, ten years prior, I ventured into the same territory and, coincidentally, recorded the experience in a small recorder.  The "experience" included my mother singing my songs, me telling her what harmony I had in my head, she, trying to interpret my imagination and correcting it with her musical knowledge, lots of wine drinking, and enough laughter to make you weep.   

In 2016 it occurred to me to listen to those old recordings.   As I listened, I was moved and inspired to pick up where we left off and immediately called my Mom who lived five minutes away.  We lived in Doral, Florida at the time, west of Miami.  My Mom had not played the guitar, or sang in almost the same length of time since we had recorded our songs, 10 or so years.  She was now 77 years old and less and less active, so I thought, this exercise of playing together, would help both of us. It would help me get through this dreaded summer of indecision through a creative endeavor and it would help her get back to playing music and singing which I knew would make her feel good, and boost her heart and brain. And so the adventure began.

I started sending Mom songs to put to music.  All my songs are in Spanish, somehow, unlike my regular morning pages, much of my poetry and all my songwriting comes out in my native Spanish. She agreed to give it a try and dust off her guitar. I started to send her songs via text and email, and then on the weekends, I'd invite her over to listen to her sing and play them.  I would send her my ideas, or genre I heard the song in, like a Peruvian waltz, Cuban bolero, or in the style of "filin" like those songs we both love from Chavela Vargas, Martirio and Chano Dominguez, and then she would interpret the song as she heard it.  Sometimes she would send me her version via text, other times, she kept me waiting to surprise me with what she had created. I hadn't seen her that happy in quite the while.

Every weekend, we would  have our words and music sessions  to look forward to. I'd prep a meal, bring out the wine and Mom and I would play and sing all afternoon.  By the end of the summer, we had completed thirty songs, half of which are now registered.  We recorded all the songs on my iphone, very high tech indeed, and two are video recorded.  Below is one of those videos: my Mom, Lizzie Orizondo, performing my song Hoja de Otoño (Autumn Leaf), copyrighted.  We realized after the summer was over that the guitar had been off tune during the entire time, but obviously that was not our priority then.

During those sessions we fantasized over who would sing these songs.  Martirio, Elena Burke, Lena, Gema Corredera, Luis Bofill, Albita, and even Marc Anthony were in our dream list.   Yet, although we dreamed of fame and fortune, the focus was on the moment, how great a time we were having and what beautiful memories we were creating.  We felt the magic, we felt the love.  Since we dreamed of getting our songs out into the world, I took many photos of my mother, one of which inspired a recent artwork for my pastel series, About My Mother, called Guitarra Bohemia (Bohemian Guitar), image below.

Now (drum roll.....), the international, grand reveal, please listen to my Mom performing my song, Hoja de Otoño (Autumn Leaf), copyrighted. This is the first time I share this song and video publicly.

After the summer was over, I took a vacation to the Upper Peninsula, Michigan and spent ten days in a log cabin by myself in an effort to end my indecision.  It worked. By December, I had resigned from my position at work. By January 2017, I had moved and was back in New York City with a new job as Vice President for Institutional Advancement at Hostos Community College in the South Bronx. 

When my Mom was about to turn 80, I asked a dear friend, Cuban singer and band leader Luis Bofill,  (whom I had the privilege of managing when I was an independent promoter) to record one of our other songs, Necesito yo de ti.  I explained it would be to give to my Mom as a gift on her 80th.  He graciously agreed, and not only did he put all his love into it, he did it for free and sought out Landy Mosqueda to produce it.   This is the first time this song has been shared. It is registered and copyrighted.  Below Bofill's rendition, is my Mom's original version, off-tune guitar and all. 

And so.. that's the story of how life transitions take time, and how creativity came to the rescue and transformed darkness into light, love, words and música. 

In honor of Mother's Day, I will posting more songs, photos and documents from summer 2016, every Monday on this blog for the entire month of May. I hope you come back to read, listen and enjoy.
​
Thank you for joining me on this celebration.

With love,
AMO

One simple and yet, profound realization which journaling daily for decades has taught me, is that I am not who I was yesterday.  I am not the same as I will be tomorrow. And yet, I am.  Like rope, my fibers change texture, and color. I disintegrate in some parts, in others, I string with another fiber to form a new extension. An extension with a new identity, a new form which will disintegrate, or reveal yet another fiber. Like tree roots.

In my triptych, Underground, I explore what German philosopher, Martin Heidegger referred to as resisted time-space, "under-the-ground" an "ecstatic" primordial past.  A time-space which is also an accessible present. In this piece, I am exploring a horizon, one which divides "as above, so below", and am asking if it is a break into desecration or birth, concealment or record keeping? Is it part and particle, like cells under my skin, resisting to be seen, yet keeping track of time and space.  A space which I cannot see, yet supports life above it and within it and is alive and in constant transformation.

In his lyrical classic, The Spell of the Sensuous, cultural ecologist and philosopher, David Abram references Dreamtime, which plays a prominent part in the mythology of Aboriginal Australia.  He summarizes Dreamtime as "...a kind of time out of time, a time hidden beyond or even within the evident, manifest presence of the land, a magical temporality wherein the powers of the surrounding world first took up their current orientation with regard to one another, and hence acquired the evident shapes and forms by which we now know them. It is that time before the world itself was entirely awake....that dawn when the totem Ancestors first emerged from their slumber beneath the ground and began to sing their way across the land in search of food, shelter and companionship."  He also references how for some native tribes of the American Southwest... "the people believe that they came into the world from under the ground... in the fourth dark underworld within..... According to the Zuñi Emergence story, all the people (humans and all other animals) originally lived in the fourth dark underworld within the earth".   

The earth asked me to inquire, and interpret these ideas, contemplate on these myths and sense it, the earth, under me. And so, what sprouted forth from within me, was this triptych of tree roots. It encompasses the animate "below" and "within", dividing from the "above".

​The earth left me under its sensuous spell, animate, musical,  vibrant, and mysterious.  It left me with a continuum of questions and answered one- it is alive.

​AMO

Have you ever felt like you were falling into a whirlpool, struggling to go upstream, but can't? I think if you are human, you know exactly what that feels like.  It's exhausting.  I felt like that for years, literally. Going upstream, against the current, and no matter how fast I paddled my arms, I couldn't get myself outside the hole.  It took time and much needed angels in my path.  Mainly, it took all my might, all my commitment, all my surrender, all my responsible self. It took all of me to get myself out. I can't say I don't have days like that anymore, but they are far and in-between.  Today, which is not the day I will post this blog, is one of those days. I feel like I'm swimming upstream and can't get my head above water.  Maybe it is physical.  There is such a thing as menopause which is like Sartre's "hell are other people." For me, hell is menopause, but I won't bother with the details.  Maybe I feel this way from putting myself out there, through my art, my writing, photography, videos, social media, and my most vulnerable self is exhausted, she needs some form of response.  Not just a sale, or more followers, but a dialogue, a deep dialogue of what it is to be human.  A dialogue that goes into the night and lasts till dawn.  I miss that.  I've had few deep existential conversations, unfortunately most of the time they are with myself via my journals or with one of my favorite dead people, Carl Jung or Emerson, O'Keefe, or Kahlo. They are truly great conversationalists. Why is it that most of the time, real people shy away from deep conversations? What are they scared of? What makes them uncomfortable? I don't know.  I'm exhausted today. Mentally, emotionally and physically.  Spiritually, I hear the birds sing.  I didn't wake up this way, exhausted, I got this way after I had an exchange with someone who kept looking at their watch, even when I had an appointment to see her.  Why is it so hard to be present in a conversation.  In the here and now instead of the future? Being present is the biggest act of love, respect and acknowledgment toward another.  It shows the other person that they matter, just like you want to be seen and heard, so does everyone else.  I slowly went downhill after that exchange.  It irritated me. It triggered me.  Possibly it brought back scenes from my childhood when I wasn't being seen or heard. I was invisible.  That's it, my little girl, the inner child I carry was deeply hurt, she wanted to be seen and heard because she matters. Yes, she matters.  I see you little Ana.

AMO

Today's haiku grouping is inspired by nature.  My photography, in turn, is inspired by haiku.

Days fly like birdsong in air.
One day here, and there.
Like a blanket of rose mist.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The sun rises, and I breathe.
Light dances naked.
Moon says, "you are immortal."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The thought of sadness in spring
Takes my smile away.
Can the earth see me crying?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Without smell, no memory.
Could words describe lavender?
You were my garden.

​AMO