1) The universe is saying, endlessly, over and over –  “Go!”

2) It means – “Go make nothing!”

I’ve noticed in dance rehearsals that when a phrase or section starts  to work, it starts to disappear, or camouflage into its context. It becomes right or done; I can move on to the next thing when it loses its fussiness, sheds some extraneous stylizations, becomes essential. Becomes nothing. The meaning is able to beam or punch through. It isn’t ultimately about finding simplicity of construction, although sometimes it is. It’s about the material arriving at itself, or settling into the framework. I’m just starting to get a sense of this same phenomenon in music-making: how to make nothing in music, leave no extraneous imprints.

Dance studios, gyms: empty spaces to detail with movement, energy, rhythm. I spend so much time in them, I can forget. But I love these spaces, aesthetically and intrinsically, inside and out. I love the wooden floor and cavernous height of Mann Gymnasium where I teach and dance: its look, sound, smell, feel, slip and slide. I always end the semester in awe of my students. The energy they’ve given through sheer physical effort, creative intelligence, and instinctual daring hangs in the space, like the sunlight beaming its way across the floor. What does it all mean, a group of bodies gathered in an empty space to move/think together? It means something beautiful, radical, fundamental. Another image I’m thinking about: a person standing or sitting –  or even lying down – playing a guitar. I find the whole image barely discussable.

Aislynn Taber and I played an unusual event last week: an evening of music and ceramics in tandem. The brainchild of brilliant art-connector Margaret Coleman at ONE Arts Collective, it featured artwork by Alissa Faber (the mugs are by Alissa, and we are drinking hot toddies out of them!) and music by Clare and Aislynn. It felt like a picnic, it felt like playing sitars, it felt like Keith Richards in the Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus.

Playing at the Radio Bean in October with Mary and Mark – a beautiful night. I thought after: Trust in the music. Let things come out. Day by day. Don’t weigh on the past – it’s gone skipping away, has its own work to do. It’ll circle back around in good time. The future: it’ll come too, without you worrying about it. Present: now there’s something to pay attention to. It’s the only ground to stand on, break, dig into.

It was great to late-night talk with Mary and Mark about music things like the best picks, pickups, and microphones, but also about leaving space in the music, time wise, tone wise. How a strum on the guitar is a lot of information.  Use it wisely.

I’m gleaning little vital pieces of information from all sources these days: Steve Paxton,  contemporary dance saint, who came through town with a talk and a show at the Flynn Center in Burlington last week; beautiful inspiring monks Francis  I, Francis, a book by Carlo Caretto and Thomas Merton‘s Living with Wisdom ; my dance students, whose curiosity and pure unabashed chutzpah totally inspires me. I’m floored learning Keith Richard’s guitar solo in Wild Horses. It doesn’t take much to make me happy, just one pluck at a time.

Very excited to play with some of my big-time teachers and inspirations, right in my own family. My sister Mary Byrne and her husband and music partner Mark Rogers are touring their debut album, I Line My Days Along Your Weight. You can read a great review of it here. We’ll be playing along side each other for two cozy dates right here in Northern Vermont, at some neat spots: on Thursday Oct 23rd at The Whammy Bar  in dreamy Calais – a bar brilliant enough to situate itself in a general store in a bucolic hamlet in Vermont – and on Sunday Oct 26th at Radio Bean , a venerable Burlington music venue with a really broad artistic outlook. As in they say, “oh yeah we like your folk music and experimental dance mash ups!” I appreciate that.

Mary has been making music brilliantly in the family for a long time, in several bands in Atlanta, and now with Mark in Brooklyn. I was lucky enough to have Mary and band Hot Young Priest perform live for my last full-evening dance in NYC (Rounds, or the First Last Dance, or the Last First Dance, Or An Ordination, 2007). And well, Mark is an amazing guitar player and teacher. He taught me my first chord on the guitar almost exactly four years ago. I told him I wanted to know everything that Bob Dylan knew in his early NYC days. A couple weeks later he supplied me with a three-inch stack of Xeroxes from music workbooks. I said, “Is this info for the next couple months?” He said, “This is info for the next couple years!” He was right, I’m still working my way through that stack.