#fiddling grasshopper

Glenda, my favorite dive savior & woman-of-the-world yacht and water taxi traveler; Cindy, my favorite dive instructor & champion Dragon Boat racer; and Robin, my favorite producer & a fellow ‪Grasshopper‬ who knows exactly what it's like to live, work & play everyday no matter where he is in the world; and I captured this pic last night.

We had just finished an amazing sushi and self-grilled beef carpaccio-style dinner at ‪The Catch‬ on top of the Thompson Hotel. After finishing off this amazingly decadent chocolate dessert called 'Hit Me!", we did this pic in front of a roof top pool.

La Luna Llena was blazing down on the clouds above Playa, casting streams of light on the surface of El Caribe.

There are times when people post things on social media about their wonderful lives. Maybe intended to show how happy they are. Maybe intended to make people jealous, zealous, inspired & even intimately & vicariously involved with that moment. Maybe to capture their lives in a kind of digital journal. Or maybe to remind themselves that they're happy on times when they are not. On this night, I was all of those things.

It is a beautiful life. I intend to make you jealous & zealous & inspired & impassioned to go out and find your own Catch. To return home to walk under the next full moon on some beach all by yourself. Hearing the waves. Stopping to speak Spanish to a fisherman who knows it's hard to catch fish when the fish can see everything from the light of the full moon, but he's fishing anyway.

That big, succulent, bodacious, curvaceous moon. Naked and unsheathed. Like a Goth song, a bootlegging hussy or a Waterhouse painting. Up there. Gleaming down on my body. The Mayan Rabbit inside her looking off to the left for eternity. The air so warm inside the womb of Quintana Roo.

GRASSHOPPERISM #21 - “Release The Push”

“Sometimes you gotta take a left and put on a new suit of clothes.” - Grandpa Bronson

“When I allow it to be, there’s no control over me.  I have my fears but they do not have me.” - Peter Gabriel from his song Darkness

This quote from my Grandpa LB and these lyrics from Peter Gabriel go through my head all the time.

Have you ever wanted something so much that you push and push for it?  Do you want your music and your art and your writing and your ideas and your business to reach people so badly that you feel like you’re pounding your head into a brick wall over and over again?  Do you ever feel like you want your pain and suffering to end so badly that you are constantly on the search for a cure?

If the answer is “yes”, then stop.  Right here.  Right now.  Stop.  Stop the push.  Release The Push. 

We Grasshoppers are many times fueled by passionate desire.  We are fueled by a desire to create, to change the world, to show people something they’ve never seen and to experience something they’ve never felt before.  We want this so badly that sometimes it hurts.  And sometimes we hurt so badly we want to push for the hurt to stop.

But what if we just stop?  What if we release the desire?  It seems simple.  And it seems impossible at the same time. 

I want to tell you about years of wanting.  And then realizing that when the wanting is released, you can achieve so much.  Doors open.  What you want can happen.  It’s amazing.

I just did a workshop with Elle Cosimano this past Saturday.  Elle is a brilliant author of Young Adult fiction.  About five years ago she decided to write a book.  She had wanted to write a book for years.  She had no previous experience, no MFA and was working a job as a very successful real estate professional.  But she was unhappy, dissatisfied.  She spent several months in Mexico during one summer writing her first book.  Then, she amazingly did all the research and work required to find and land a good publishing deal.  A two-book deal.  She’s now releasing her fourth book – with another big publisher - and she relocated to Mexico a few years ago with her husband and children.  She worked hard to make that happen.  She was tired of The Push.  Tired of The United States and her profession.  So, she “took a left and put on a new suit of clothes.”

Elle is one of the many Grasshoppers in the world.  And she is one of my many inspirations.  She “Found A New Fiddle”.  She wanted something and she made it happen.  It took time and it took patience.  And she was gracious enough to share her experience and knowledge with us this past Saturday.

What’s amazing about this for me is that I met Elle 2 years ago in Mexico.  I was burned out on being burned out on being burned out with my music career.  I had just released my HUMAN album and I was soon to be touring The Netherlands and Belgium, but I knew I needed to be done after that.  I knew that I needed a new suit of clothes.  I had this idea – this incredibly preposterous idea – to write a book about The Fiddling Grasshopper – and then to help people make their visions and dreams for living a creative and passionate life come true.  I was passionate about making others passionate.  But how to do it?

About a month after I met Elle, I flew from Mexico to San Francisco.  Gathered some music gear and clothes from my storage unit in Petaluma and drove to Minnesota.  There, I intended to write.  But I did not.  I prepared for my HUMAN Summer Tour, then flew to Amsterdam and performed the tour.  I was on my game for the most part on stage – but for much of the tour I was miserable.  Depressed and in pain.  Drinking like a fish and taking pills to sleep.  When I returned to Minnesota, I was determined to write.  I began to write very, very slowly.  Then, I met a girl and got lost in that for a while.  I continued to write, a little faster now – releasing some of my work and philosophies to the world on social media.  Then, I decided I would try to embrace music again – against my gut feeling – and I flew back to San Francisco to perform.  It was terrible.  Atrocious.  Everything fell apart.  I went back to Minnesota again.  Broken in the winter.  Living through what I called my Shining winter – as in The Shining – Stanley Kubrick’s horror film based on Stephen King’s novel.

When I emerged from The Shining, I began to write again.  To think again.  Without any knowledge of what it would my ideas and words would become, but with the drive and the knowledge that it would come to fruition.  The belief that I was on to something.  Again, like I had when I restarted my music career back in 1999, I felt the world’s eyes on me saying, “What the fuck are you doing?  You’re a musician.  Do that.  That’s what you’re good at.  That’s who you are.  When are you going to do that again?”  The pressure to be the person I knew I wasn;pt anymore was ominous.  But I stuck to my guns.  I knew how to say “no”, even though I felt like people were looking at me and thinking, “What is Gentry doing?”  “What’s he building in there?” as Tom Waits sings.

I knew I had to do what I had to do.  This drive is what Grasshoppers into Grasshoppers.  While the Ants work, we fiddle.  We look like crazy people.  Fiddling away while the Ants store up for winter.  They look at us and think we have no idea what we’re doing.  Or they wonder why we’re doing what we’re doing?  We are not “normal”.  We are like Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.  We do because we know it is what we must do.

This time though, as opposed to the many years I pushed and pushed and pushed for my music to reach the ears and hearts of my audience, I made Releasing The Push part of my work.  I knew that I had to do this differently.  That my life was also my work.  And my work was my life.  When your work and your life are intertwined, it puts a lot more pressure on what your work is and what it stands for.  I knew this already from being a musician and a songwriter.  I knew that when you put out raw, honest, uncensored emotion to the world there is great risk.  That the stakes are higher when your soul is involved, and failure and rejection can literally destroy you.  I knew that I should be dead.  My years of rampant self-medicating use of booze and pills and danger should have killed me 100 times.  A thousand times.  And maybe also, that years of deep rejection could have also killed me, as it did Nick Drake or Vincent van Gogh.  And then this very fact became part of my work.

Death.  And the knowledge that death exists.  Looming over absolutely everything.  But it is forgotten, swept under the rug.  That seemingly dark void.  The winter we never return from – floating down the River Styx – maybe floating in a haze of white clouds – forever gone.  That thing we try not to think about.  Maybe I’m different in that I had thought about Death for most of my life.  I had lived my life with the knowledge that I might die tomorrow.  But in a very dark and gothic sense.  Out of pain and not out of wonder.  Now, Death became the reason to Live.

I knew by resisting death all those years, that I was pushing against it.  Pushing against the natural changes that will inevitably lead us all there.  To Death.  The other side.  Losing my Uncle Jim in 2010 was the first chance to look at Death.  Then, in 2015 I lost my Uncle Eric, and then my childhood piano teacher Marilyn Kiffmeyer to cancer, and then my Cousin Pat to suicide all within three months.  Three funerals on the heels of my Shining winter.  Now, here I was reshaping what Death is, and that maybe I had not lost them, maybe I suddenly had found me. 

By not pushing against the natural river of life, I was just floating down it.  What a fucking relief!  I didn’t have to push anymore.  I could just…be.  So many have written about this and this philosophy of just “being”.  It almost seems cliché.  But what if you just let your creation, your art, your project, and your career “be”.  That it will come when it comes.  By gently directing your boat, your surf board, your SUP, your walking legs and swimming arms toward what you want, you will reach it.  Not by pushing, but by being in and with your work until you and it are ready.

Well, this is where Elle comes back in to the story.  Elle is a published author in the big leagues.  I knew that when I met her.  I knew that she may have some knowledge to impart, and I knew that having one beacon of light can move us all toward the shore, up the mountain and then call everyone else up there with us.  So, after 2 years, Elle offered this workshop.  A staggering six and a half hours about publishing.  My push to get published was not a push, I need to “allow it to be” as Peter Gabriel sings.  “I have my fear so it doesn’t own me.” 

Now, maybe, this was the time.  To not Push for it was to find the right time.  The right tools.  The right reason for writing.  Now, Elle had imparted on a small few of us, her own Grasshopperistic means to be successful with your creativity as a writer.  It was up to us to do the work.  Scary?  Of course!

Are we all scared of our work not reaching people?  Yes, I think most of us are.  Because we work to create it and if no one hears it, then it truly is like a tree falling the forest.  What does that tree sound like? If a songwriter writes one thousand songs, but no one hears them, are they songs at all?

I used to sit and write songs for hours, polishing them, reshaping them, driving my girlfriends and neighbors insane, and then I’d try them out solo or with the band at rehearsal, and about half would fall flat on their face.  My little child – Gentry’s Song #987 – would be beaten up by bullies on the playground.  And sometimes I wanted to push little Song #987 back out into the sandbox to show those bullies.  And then show the studio.  And then show the music labels.  And then show the audience.  But when I pushed those little frightened songs, they sometimes got beaten up even more.  Sometimes beaten to death, and they never appeared on any record ever.

After all the time I had pushed my music career, in my Releasing The Push and in writing about it, the doors were opening to do what you are reading.  I am living in Mexico in the Caribbean.  The sea is off my left right now.  I’m sitting in nothing but board shorts, I’ve worn underwear about 4 times in the last 2 months, and I’m writing what you are reading.  It’s all a part of the creative process, and I’m not pushing it.  I’ve Released The Push.  I am “living the dream” as we joke about here.  But living the dream is what it’s all about.  You can’t push the dream though.  Just gently nudge it, and it will happen. 

When you burn out on burning out on burning out, then that’s what my Grandpa LB meant when he said “take a left”.  I imagine a brick wall.  A long endless brick wall.  The Great Wall of China.  The Berlin Wall.  And me, standing there, beating my head against it, over and over and over.  Pleading for a booking agent to let me play their venue or a radio station to play me.  Begging labels to sign me to a contract.  Knocking on the digital doors of music supervisors to get my songs into a film or television show or podcast.  And then, beyond that, wanting audiences to “get me”.  And even further, to want women to love me.  To want people I looked up to to want my friendship.  To be accepted.  To be loved.  To not feel like a Misfit or a Reject.  Yet, I felt I was continuously mis-fit by people like a block in a round hole misshapen hole.  Rejected like an opera singer in a barber shop quartet.  No’s and not’s and holes and darknesses, until I finally stopped.

I just stopped.

My head, bleeding down my face from beating my head over and over into the wall.  My eyes barely able to see through all the blood.  Dizzy, reeling.  I turned my head and looked to the left.  Down the wall.  There, in front of me, was nothing but space.  Long, effortless space.  And I could walk down it.  Toward whatever waited for me.  Yes, the wall was still beside me as I began to walk in a new direction, reminding me of all the rejection and all the pain and all the suffering, but I could walk and continue to walk.  Into space.  Into the infinite.  Toward fresh, new, opportunities and challenges and adventures I never expected to find. Suddenly I was writing This is what I mean when I write the Grasshopperisms about Finding A New Fiddle.  I had taken a left and found a new fiddle to play.

At some point, I believe the wall disappeared, or I forgot it about altogether.  I didn’t care that the wall was there because I wasn’t pushing anymore.  It wasn’t apathy, it was acceptance.  I wasn’t as scared because there isn’t a wall to beat my head into anymore.  I just needed to keep moving, gently pushing myself toward the direction I wanted to go.  Do the Work.  I still need to write the words and find the publishers, but now, just a little differently.  I have created my own opportunities by not pushing anymore.

Releasing The Push is not just for creativity.  It’s for life.  If you love someone but they don’t know how to love, let them learn.  You can take a left and walk away from their walls.  The walls that Lovers have can be high and hard, and your head and hands will bleed for years if you don’t turn away from them.  If you want someone to like you, a group of friends, a neighbor, but they just don’t, then stop wanting.  It doesn’t matter.  You will die and so will they.  That is not a bad thing.  That is change.  And being loved or liked does not matter in the great, infinite universe we live in.  And if you don’t like where or who you are, then go into your symbolic closet and put on a new suit of clothes.  You have the ability to change anytime you want.  It’s fucking fantastic.

If you are experiencing something that you feel you have no control over – something like chronic pain, bad health, a disability – then stop pushing to be something you are not.  This is a part of you.  This unpleasantness is part of the great balance that makes you into you.  Don’t push to try to get rid of it.  It’s cool, it’s you.  What a magnificent thing to experience both pain and pleasure.  Don’t push either one away.  Feel them.  Feel your feelings.  Release The Push.  Discover in both the pain and pleasure of your life, that the great creative fountain, the effervescent, phosphorescent glow of you, is made greater by your suffering and by your sweet delicious delight.

Release The Push and just be.  You never know what might happen.  Today.  Tomorrow.  This moment.  Be remarkable because you already are, Grasshopper.  We are all Grasshoppers, if we want to be.

Buy Elle Cosimano’s books at this Amazon link!

For more information about Elle, click to visit her web site.

For more Grasshopperisms and writing, and to speak to me about Artistic and Media Consulting, please email me at [email protected].