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(MacGuffin: In a book, play, or movie, something that starts or drives the action of the plot but later turns out to be unimportant. [Coined by Alfred Hitchcock])
March 20, 2005
Last year about this time, we celebrated the completion of “Still She Moves” in Portland, Maine, and took our giddy selves out for fine fresh seafood at the Fore Street restaurant. (Now I’m planning the next vocal recording as I write, since I haven’t had good seafood in over a year now.)
 The celebrations continued with a CD-release concert and party at the Pump House Regional Arts Center in La Crosse, Wisconsin, and ended abruptly with the ocean of work that ensues from launching a new CD into the world. It’s all a bit overwhelming, really, and makes me sometimes mistakenly long for the zen of a noisy factory job I once had out of desperation. It consisted of putting small yogurt containers on molded cardboard trays, six at a time (eight if you’d been there for longer than three weeks).
Imagine 12-hour standing shifts with two 15 min. breaks and one half-hour lunch break sandwiched into each shift. I’ll never forget crying after each shift that first week. Those were the strangest tears I’ve ever shed. Thankfully, those three weeks have never been repeated. But it’s the sheer simplicity of that work that sometimes seems so beautiful.
The thing to do, however, is to make sure I get away from the computer and phone and out of the house, even if that means merely taking a cup of lukewarm coffee for a slipper-footed stroll in our backyard. For example last spring I found myself discovering 42 morel mushrooms that way.
 And this fall I made a point of going out each morning for 3 weeks in October to steal fallen walnuts from territorial squirrels who bury them all over the garden. A person can’t sleep outside on a lumpy lawn. And besides, then I could take bags of nuts and trapped squirrels for rides in the car-car across the Mississippi for a nice change of air. This way they’d quit chewing the shingles off the roof, and live to tell the tale in Iowa. And I’d get out of the house.
Among the immeasurable highlights of last year was my first return to Chile since leaving it as my homeland in 1974. I was invited to join a group of adventuresome women to ride on horseback up the Andes southeast of Santiago and experience the mountains.
 
During this trip I had the almost surreal opportunity to relive some of my childhood there through people, places and events that conspired to remind me of being home.
 I’ll never forget sitting with Ceci shelling beans for my favorite dish, poroto’ grana’o’ and sharing life stories. She reminded me of my favorite empleada, Rosario. And I reminded her of a little girl whose family she worked for who was 10 when she left Chile. No kidding. Nor will I forget dancing the re’ falosa in my hiking boots and skirt at 8000 feet with Antoño, the head vaquero (cowboy) while Tué sang and played his guitar by the fire pit and the women clapped, laughed and raised their camping cups of pisco and fruit juice in mountainous cheer. I’ve tried on several occasions to write about this great expedition, but it’s truly beyond the bounds of possibility for me. I now believe I’m not supposed to. Gracias a la vida, que me ha dado tanto.
 And now I watch from the music room window my son Gaelan throw handfuls of Vernal Equinox snow at some imaginary enemy in a snow fortress, all the while singing to them.
 He is now eleven, and while he still loves his fun with figments, he sadly has turned down an Easter egg hunt this year. I am devastated. Eleven already feels like the beginning of the end. Later he comes over to me and says “I’d like to paint Easter eggs, though, mom. That would be fun.” And suddenly, for a moment, sad endings feel like great beginnings.
Ariane wrote the following piece for On Writing II, a special edition of Critique magazine published in 2002.
On Songwriting
The funny thing is that I am asked to write some words on writing when I feel as dry as an autumn leaf. It is now late summer. Writing, and particularly songwriting, has always had a cyclical rhythm to it, one that I am finally identifying as I push my way through my most ambitious songwriting and recording project to date, Still She Moves.
I remember when I recorded Lady of the Green in early spring of 1997. I felt bouncy and full of a life that was both intense and magical. March and April were the wind behind my sails while I was at the helm of my first Wisconsin winter, the longest and harshest winter I’d ever experienced. I felt a bountiful ease of creativity then. When I look back on all my notes and journals, I understand that the period between late spring and late summer is not a very productive time for me. I don’t necessarily know why, but I’m finally beginning to honour it. I look forward to relaxing into my next dry season rather than forging songs out of an iron will.
I’m understanding that I am not alone in having an on/off creative flow. I asked some of my musical friends whether they felt it too. Not all were aware of a specific time frame, but all agreed there was something timely about the muse's visitations. A few were aware of this timeliness, including my studio engineer whose catharsis usually blows its flower in mid-spring, when mine begins to fade. I don't know why autumn and early winter should be so fruitful. I fancy it may have something to do with growing up in Chile, where July is the dead of winter. Our family succumbed many times to a Christmas in July, when my parents and a few of their friends with children would rent a 4 story mansion by the thrashing Pacific Ocean waves and bring out gifts and seasonal foods and music. But in reality, I think I was born this way. I think we all are born into our own season.
I recently asked my eight-and-a-half-year-old son Gaelan a question. "Gaelan, when you are sitting by yourself and singing a song you've never sung before with words you are making up as you go along, how do you do that?" He and I are so alike in our innate musicality. My answer, though less colourful and endearing than his, would have carried the same message. "Well Mom," he answered without pause, "you know how there are people who've never been to Wisconsin and they don’t know that Wisconsin is all about a project of cheeses. All kinds of different cheeses. That’s what people in Wisconsin do. And then a person who's never been here comes and they see all these cheeses and they say, ‘Wow, look at this cheese! And look at that kind!’ And everywhere they go there’s a different kind of cheese. Well, to us who live here, it’s just cheese! Well, anyhow Mom, if you ask me all these questions, most of it is useless because I really don't know how I do that."
"Song writing" comes to me in exactly that order: first the song, then the writing. I remember the first song I ever wrote which I believed was worthy enough to record. It was called "Winter's Run." It tumbled out of me like laughter while I was in West Virginia at a music festival with my partner at the time. I was inspired by our imminent departure from the Northeast, and I was high on music and people. We lived in a school bus then.
Summer is spreading rumours
Of coats of many colours
But the dew is holding,
While the sky is folding
I'm making my migration
Down to Arizona
Where the days are longer
And the days are warmer
Summer is dropping shadows
And harvesting its secrets
Wrapping them in paper
To present them to winter
The mist has closed its curtain
On flowers in the meadow
But the stars grow bolder
As the night burns colder
The melody and the words came out simultaneously as I picked out a rhythmical pattern on my 6-string. It was all immediately sensuous and poetic while I was caught in the midst of experiencing a sort of creative “falling in love.” This falling-in-love feeling is the high most artists I know seek. For me it is an exalted state of being where I sense peace, joy, fullfillment and a sort of oneness with everything around me. Or it could also be an emotional state where I find myself releasing, for example, sorrow or grief or even laughter all the while that words are flowing out of my pen to mark the moment. There is something beautiful in those tragic moments. The songs “Loved in Your Arms” and “Breathless Dancer” on the album “Still She Moves” are examples of this state of creative being.
Wordsworth once said: “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of emotion recollected in tranquility.” Yet not all songs present themselves to me like kings bearing gifts. I polish my share of floors and dwell on stubborn scrubsome stains. In fact I have reams of unfinished songs or works in progress, half-full or half-empty. I don’t really know how to categorize them (after all, I'm an artist), but many of them are words that came without music. And many of them are ones that were born of music but which aborted themselves mysteriously. Or maybe not so mysteriously. Perhaps I was in the throes of creativity when I came to and sheepishly tended to the bills I was supposed to write checks for. Procrastinatus interruptus. And the moment is gone, stamped in invisible ink with the face of a chiding sheep and kicked quietly under the rug.
I sit down occasionally with one of these unfinished things and see if I can activate my imagination and tap into that creative "falling in love" feeling. Leo Kottke’s advice a few years ago was to just write without thinking about what you’re writing. And then to go back and make sense of it. I use this method sometimes. It works occasionally, but I’m often left with an aftertaste which is never quite as gratifying as a song that tumbles out. Of course, I’m the only one who detects any. I know this because of the feedback I get from varied audiences for various songs I write, tumbled or scrubbed.
One song, "Stranger Stranger," is about a relationship that I walked away from because it was too topsy-turvy and painful. I laboured over the song because I didn’t want to place blame, although I was drawn to doing so like a kid to peanut butter. I wrestled with it as if I were pulling a team of horses, so that I could get to the lessons that were in it for me. Songwriting can be much like journaling, where ideas and statements suddenly galloping onto paper take on whole new meaning and can be very helpful to understanding situations with other people and patterns with myself. I enjoy seeking lessons from my writings which I believe bring me closer to a higher state of spiritual being. Funnily enough, “Stranger Stranger” is one of Gaelan's favorite songs.
Don’t brush my tears before they fall
Nor bless my eyes with shameful kisses
Why won’t you softly close the door
My love, my love before you go
I won’t take your storms upon my soul
I raise my shield against your defenses
And roll your thunder out my door
My love, my love before you go
I don’t know that I have any advice for anyone. I often feel as though I could benefit from some writing class, since I have benefited tremendously from teaching songwriting classes and presenting workshops at festivals. But to be honest it’s the music that draws me in, really. I love the music of “Dead Can Dance” and yet I don’t understand a word of their wanton warblings. I also limit the amount of music that I listen to in order to fully realize that which is within me. And I rarely read books on the subject of creativity. I feel rewarded by the challenge of weaving my own webs with whatever materials I already have, without getting into the trap of waiting for mystical tools to fly into my creative space. I’d rather go for a walk with my friend Asparagus Joe among the udder-laden hills and swallow-filled bluffs of Wisconsin.
I believe each of us has our own walk to the beat of our creative expression, a walk that goes hand in hand with the people we surround ourselves with, the environment we live in, and the life-adventures we choose. But these are all choices we are always making. Sitting here, I choose the life-adventure of writing.
Then there are the other aspects of living on this planet earth that we have no saying over: the moon’s influence over all things watery, the sun, wind, rain, seasons. There are so many variables. Sitting here, writing now in autumn, I am moved in this moment by the way the silver maple leaves on the tree in the backyard are just windlessly plopping to the tangled grassy floor and catching light on their way down. It’s impossible for me not to link that thought to my own life and death. To the life and Dutch-death of the neighbouring elm tree. And, today, to the decisions being made regarding, for instance, our forceful involvement with Iraq’s business. Questions arise all by themselves. Sometimes answers arise from the questions; sometimes answers beckon to be sought. It’s all part and parcel of the life adventure of the song writer caught between his own will and the incessant forces of the muse.
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