The Last Day of Winter

Music moves the soul like teleportation through space and time warps molecules to intertwine with the divine nature of our tapestry-woven lives. 

Music is a time machine. 

Today is the last day of winter. There shifts, tonight, an energetic force... like the release of a spring. What has been held held dormant during this Wintery respite of hibernation now rises forth. Like all nature, this shift doesn't occur in a single moment, but history has proven this veritable change. Winter gives rise to Spring, it's the way things go and today marks that special day, whereupon the dusk will draw the final curtain on Winter's slumberous, dull sting. Tomorrow, when you wake, you can find something new in the air. While the temperature wont jump 20 degrees in a single bound, there is a marked shift in the season of the soul, for here is the dawning of a serious awakening. It comes every year, yet each year I'm finding greater and greater revelation in the season of rising, as though my metaphorical expansion of energy is more and more intense with each passing Spring, for my metamorphosis of spirit projects further into glory like an increasingly tenacious spring. Elasticity.

Call me elementally elastic, I'm finding it more elementary every time the seasons turn, to compress over time and rebound with energetic force. It's our design. 

I went by the Chicago Cultural Center today, whereat I stumbled upon Chris Vallillo performing a number of songs from his prairie-bluegrass-sliding guitar of epicness album, "The Last Day of Winter." It was fitting, given today. His sound moved through me like a fall breeze sings through a field of wheat, each stalk bending in harmony with the other, the whole choral movement of the field betraying the wind's form. My spine exposed the strum of Chris' strings. I sat, yes, but I danced.

Music has a peculiarly beautiful knack of transplanting us to a different time, an old or unfamiliar place. The sheer splendor of a song can paint in vivid colors unseen the whole detail of life in another place. This is the profound beauty of art. 

Here, then, at the turn of one season to a renewed hope and vigor for the coming year, I dedicate my post as a toast to the creative endeavor of passion. May the artistic spirit rise in each one of us, that this new year might be marked as the most radiantly creative one we've e'er known.