music, therapy, and me

I am always the most content with myself when I am thinking through a big project. This type of project can be one that allows me to fix a pain point for either myself or for others. It is something that is just interesting to me and something that makes me want to engage in problem-solving. I am developing several projects at the moment, and this is something that is becoming an interesting exercise in project management as well as in attention. I have things to do with various thoughts that I am having - mostly in the realm of "let's talk about this" projects rather than "let's make this" projects, but it is interesting to me how my brain flits from place to place. This is one of the reasons that I have my book to write things down as they occur to me. At this moment, I remembered that I have a Zoom meeting because of my book. I have to be there since I am moderating the session! I also have a couple of laminating projects to do to finish up another idea, ...

It is Saturday again, and I am two hours away from a video meeting with a friend who is also a music therapist and four hours away from getting a new tire. In that time, I have to blog, shower, clean out the car, and eat something for breakfast. I had some homework to do before meeting, and I did it, but I decided that my health will not allow me to do what I want to do. It involves an evening class that I just will not be able to do due to my work and medication schedules. After the response to later medication ingestion from the past two weeks, I know that I cannot dedicate six weeks of late night Tuesdays that will affect my early morning Wednesdays, but I did write out my responses to the application questions. That helped me think about what I want to do next. Are you ready? I want to do everything I possibly can to support music therapists, students, and interns in doing their jobs. This has always been my mission - for my website, for my business, for everything that I am passio...

Do you remember all the posts that were coming across social media about how rough 2019 was for many of us and how much we were looking forward to the new start that was 2020? I do, and I long for those naive days when 2020 seemed to be a big step forward into life. Little did we all know that 2020 would be what it is now. Since it is now July and quarter three, I've been sitting down to do some things that I do pretty much every quarter. I sit down to make goals for myself and evaluate my progress on the goals for the previous quarter. This quarter also coincided with filling up my old bullet journal, so all of this planning and evaluation is happening in my new journal - the one I'm designing for myself. What have I learned from doing this exercise?? I am great at establishing goals but LOUSY at working towards them at all! I always have really sound and appropriate goals written down for myself, but I rarely make any progress on them at all. I am constantly making grandiose ...

I have always collected things. (I know, you know this if you have read my blog - I collect more things that is good for me.) One of the things that I love collecting is pictures that catch my eye. I have been putting them into a book that I use when I need some ideas for songwriting or therapeutic music experiences (TMES). The pictures are just things from magazines, but they are fun and inspire me to think about the stories behind the pictures. Something else about me is that I enjoy making and filling books and journals. I've been thinking about combining my picture collection with my current love of making books and starting to make myself an inspiration art journal/glue book/junk journal. The purpose of this particular project would be to house these pictures to use when I feel blocked and unable to be creative. I think I'm going to use one of the books that I already have because I can't seem to find paper to make into a book big enough to house some of the pictures ...

Inside cover of a new project I am in a season of introspection. This has quite a bit to do with being socially distanced and also with an upcoming birthday, and it also has to do with being middle aged and not liking it one whit. I am feeling lots of stuff - mostly negative emotions at the moment. I don't like these feelings, but I am striving to learn as much about myself as I can during this down time. Since I am bored with all this stuff happening but have no control over it all, I am trying to find some things to do that are outside of my comfort zone. I examined my social media feeds, and do you know what I found? I only really use those feeds for music therapy things. That is not a surprise but rather just an observation that I had never really paid attention to before. Outside cover in progress I have started to fix this by joining two paper crafting groups. They are groups that encourage folks to make things out of paper. I am simultaneously cowed and challenge...

So, I've been spending the last several weeks writing about the systems that I use, but there are LOTS of things that happen around me that are haphazard and that desperately need systematic analysis and the start of something organized. Here are the things that I want to get started...in no particular order and in no particular priority order or anything... Music Library - So, I have my songbooks located in several places around my house that are dedicated to songbooks - I know where they are, but I don't really know what is in them. When I want to find a particular song, I have to search through the most likely of books and then hope that I can find it. I have learned how to search tables of contents to make the process shorter, but I would love a database of all of my music in one place...ah, I dream that I will awaken one morning to find a perfectly indexed list of all the books that I have and all the songs contained within those books. All My Other Stuff - I make...