The Road Less Traveled

A blog for mindfulness...and various items. This just goes to show that even old farts can blog and go active in cyberspace. I have a 92 year old grandmother who does e-mail ! That's the kind of stock I come from !
I've had an inclination to write for as long as I can remember. I was Sports editor on my high school paper but left that post to enroll in literature courses where I got turned on to poetry. I was also into guitar and long-distance running. These have been life-long endeavors.
In college I briefly considered church ministry before setting my sights on becoming an educator. Then I got into psychology, transcendentalism, spiritualism, and existential philosophy. These have all had an impact on my work.
Not until well after marrying and establishing a family and career did I return to the pen with any regularity. In the mid 90's I experienced a creative outflow which produced hundreds of poems and lead to my first musical compositions. An avid rock guitarist I use the instrument to sonically parallel the lyrics I've written.
The creative flow is cycling again after a dormant period. Will it lead to Shangri-La or to Mordor ? I've reached that "fork in the road". I'll take "the road less traveled."
Wed Dec 28
Adventures on the six-string:  Jimmy Page has claimed that he was embarassed to show what he did on guitar because it was so simple.  The fact is, a canopener is simple.  However, the person who first thought of it was gifted.  I’ve discovered in my own adventures playing guitar that sometimes one little adjustment can give a song a whole new tone.  Although Page made use of various tunings, sometimes they were very simple.  For example, on Moby Dick he simply dropped the low (6th string - the thickest one with the most basal tone) from the conventional E down to D.  It’s called a “dropped-D tuning”.  There is another song that uses this tuning in the Zeppelin catalogue that can make for some fun moments transitioning from a hard rocker like Moby Dick to something more in the style of a ballad.  No, it’s not Stairway To Heaven.  The song is part of the band’s 1975 release, Physical Grafitti.  The title?  Ten Years Gone.  The cool thing is it only takes a good ear and a quick turn of one tuning peg to segue in and out of conventional tuning and play a larger volume of pieces in a live set.                                                                      Shrivedog

Adventures on the six-string:  Jimmy Page has claimed that he was embarassed to show what he did on guitar because it was so simple.  The fact is, a canopener is simple.  However, the person who first thought of it was gifted.  I’ve discovered in my own adventures playing guitar that sometimes one little adjustment can give a song a whole new tone.  Although Page made use of various tunings, sometimes they were very simple.  For example, on Moby Dick he simply dropped the low (6th string - the thickest one with the most basal tone) from the conventional E down to D.  It’s called a “dropped-D tuning”.  There is another song that uses this tuning in the Zeppelin catalogue that can make for some fun moments transitioning from a hard rocker like Moby Dick to something more in the style of a ballad.  No, it’s not Stairway To Heaven.  The song is part of the band’s 1975 release, Physical Grafitti.  The title?  Ten Years Gone.  The cool thing is it only takes a good ear and a quick turn of one tuning peg to segue in and out of conventional tuning and play a larger volume of pieces in a live set.
                                                                      Shrivedog