The lines connecting this landmark to that begin to fill in. I am the spider who, having cast a first thread into the wind, having that thread carried by the wind to a neighboring tree limb or ledge, adds with patience effort those radial spokes that construct his web. Then the outward spiral begins, and the zig-zag connection of this strand to that. Welcome to my lair! (don’t get stuck)

The year is 1990, and I am standing in a field in Glencoe, Minnesota. The horizon is wide here; the trees that rush from the east to greet the Mighty Mississippi seem hesitant to venture far from her safe waters, into the wide, wide prairies, and huddle here and there around farmsteads, brought two or three generations ago by the sodbusters who begged shelter from the merciless Alberta winds, even partially, even for a moment, that sped unimpeded from the Rockies to the Great Lakes.

Multi-instrumentalists Round Mountain deserve more visibility. What fine music, with references and calls out to all parts of the world. It is amazing how much two brothers can do with what they inherently possess.

This track from their album The Goat has as many faces of travel in it as do my next few days – acknowledging their authorship and musicianship, here’s St. Joseph, for your listening enjoyment:

St. Joseph - Robbie and Char Rothschild

An indeterminate date before the turn of the millennium: we both live on our own by now, but find ourselves together that night (a holiday? a vacation from school?) in the basement of my parents’ last family-sized house: the one down the hill from the church, whose grand oaks shaded the back lot until wilt took every one; across the road from a square mile of meadow and marsh, where we would walk our errant husky, waiting an hour until she was ready to return home; a modern design for the pastor and the nurse, dark brown panels accented beautifully (almost nordically) by three graceful birch near the front door.

What is the source of songs? I would think it arrives from somewhere deep within, and is related to your birth, your education, your mother tongue. In short: your music begins with your roots. I would think that.

But then, a song like this arrives. We lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, far from the Midwestern farms and towns and kindnesses and communities, and further from the complicated, vital Brazilian noises from the south of that country. Isabela was just of school age, Nicolas a few years her senior. We walked to their classes each morning.

Every day I want to write a poem to you but every day I swallow my song

then every day a small bird rests and every day a shaft of sunlight brightens him why not be alive? and right now? every day he takes a little breath there at the height of the eastern window and every day my song is in his voice and your voice is in my song

There are points in the career of an artist, whatever his or her art, where the collision of beautiful forces – the fluency of artistic technique, the fullness of life experience, the vibrancy of physical form, and the collaboration with artistic equals – like the splitting of atoms, crash together to release pure and nearly-perfect light.

It is the brilliance of beginnings. No: it is the brilliance of what follows just after, when the uncertainty of a beginning falls away, and there is a comfortable happiness and ease in creating something together. As an audience for that art, you hope that as your favorite performers mature their skill increases, their stamina holds out, and beauty continues to flow from their hands or mouths or minds: like Joni Mitchell or Paul Simon; like the best works of Woody Allen; like Bob Dylan or Georgia O’Keefe, like the dancers and composers and writers and painters that have decorated your generation.

Caetano Veloso is one of the founders of the Tropicália movement in 70s Brazil, a great songwriter, an amazing voice, a remarkable and unique spirit. This early song shares traces of the rural roots of that country, and for me at least reflects the generational and geographic distances between the small-town “campo” families and their urban and world-hungry children.

Elis Regina was the most-loved Brazilian singer prior to her death by unnatural and self-induced causes. Check out her cover of Aguas de março by Tom Jobim, available on YouTube.

Casi no hay quién pasa por áqui en el sábado solitario sábado de las ausencias

cuyos ángeles, de bocas cerradas posan detrás de las ventanas del piso más cercana al cielo.

Es el sábado de tu silencio. Sin tu voz, tus palabras se manifiestan hasta en las llamadas de los pájaros

para las cuales no tengo respuesta sino aproximarme más aun a la tierra: yo no sé del lenguaje de las alas.

Some of the hardest physical work in recent memory is 72 hours on the Improv dance floor.

Also, the most rewarding. I haven’t built a house, or surveyed for a map, or planted a garden. But by listening listening listening I’ve followed the sprite of movement, and on her scent traced the outline of home; through repetition memorized (in the body’s threads and cords) the navigation lines I might follow to get there; and inadvertently collected in these outstretched arms so many wild foods along the way – fruit of this adventure – that I am fed.