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Spirit Guide
Return to Xanadu
Do you ever find this life journey so tedious that you would like it to just be done? I have visited that thought a lot. I take it back to about age 6. There were quiet moments, too, for sure. I would stare up at the ceiling from a bed, studying the landscape pretending it was the moon. I would map out territories, mountains and valleys. Did they use glitter on ceilings back then? There were little pin pricks of light scattered across this alien land and I would dream of going there. Were these the lights of spirit guides reminding me I wasn’t alone?
1980, Xanadu. It’s one of my own. I acknowledge the script wasn’t so hot, and it didn’t do well. The music was everything. The magic of it all. I am not sure my folks like it, and I remember mom laughing at the man who roller skated at full speed into a mural of muses on a brick wall. She didn’t see the abstract. She read the book Illusions because I recommended it, and she didn’t get that either.
Perhaps it was a ghost in the background. The muse. Music and muses helped me persist in a land I found too hard to navigate most of the time. Xanadu echoed a story I had been telling myself earlier, invisible friends. It became a story I retold in adulthood, and only in my surrender to it did I find life. In some ways, Xanadu in the 1980s was the hope of the younger me, wanting to be Sonny, played by Michael Beck. I had little sympathy for the old me to come, Danny McGuire, played by Gene Kelley.
Now that I am as old as Gene Kelley was then, I am a little more appreciative of loves lost, but the dream and connection goes on.
Sounds like rainbows…
There was a time I wanted to be a musician. I lacked confidence. Family encouraged me, but I didn’t trust that. I figured they had to say that. Well, there were probably other reasons to distrust, but I also didn’t trust the friends and folks around me also participating in music. Quite frankly, I was afraid. I didn’t want to be seen or heard.
I was a closet musician!
My last piano teacher lived in a mansion in San Antonio. I was allowed to come and go. I would lean…
