It feels like this could be my last attempt; my last go at being an artiste in this sort of way. I realize I could be wrong. It could be that I’m just reading the signs and believing the odds. I might be thinking this way because of a sense of how things traditionally play out. With Zachary’s arrival (again, do I know or am I going with my gut?) drawing closer I’m anticipating the kind of change that will remain for many years. I don’t know what the future will look like. I don’t know what God will engineer. My life so far has been a story of Him doing things that haven’t been likely so it wouldn’t surprise me too much if He continued to defy the standard expectations.

What I do know is that (almost all of a sudden) I feel the energy rising to give this another go. Not however, the slow, careful, methodical building that I would have tried 10 years ago. I feel like I could sprint for a bit. I think it’s time to do as much as I can, as fast as I can and as well as I can.  And there’s something very liberating about how I see it working. I’m not trying to build a band, with the right blend of personalities and the type of synergy and shared vision that would keep us together during trying times. I’m throwing something together – with attention to detail, love and expertise of course – and I want to see how far it will fly. I’m not hoping it will last. In fact I’m expecting that it won’t. I just want to see what it can do right now.

It’s actually wonderful to contemplate investing in something where won’t have to focus a lot of my energy on the vehicle (i.e. the band) because I’m not trying to build a vehicle that I plan to drive around in for the next many years. It’s more of a push cart or soapbox car than a proper vehicle. It’s meant to be disposable. If, for some reason, it lasts longer than I expect it to, we’ll figure out how to cross that bridge. The best part is that I, and really everyone involved, can focus our energy on the process and the product and that becomes the common object of interest. In other words people can commit to this thing not some much because they could see themselves working with each other for a long time, but because they want to work on this thing.

For the part of those who would participate in this project, I don’t think that they need to feel like this is who they are or are becoming artistically. This is who I am right now. Even for me that will change over the next few months to years. It’s like taking a picture. It will show what you looked like at that point in time and may foreshadow what you’re becoming, but it won’t represent you and in fact will represent you less and less well as time passes.

And it needs a name. I have “paper playing” in mind. It’s going to be interesting to see how people react to the name. I didn’t conceive it as any deep and meaningful metaphor. I actually though of “paper plane” first and then though it would be nice to play with word sounds by replacing “plane” with “playing” (at the risk or nobody being able to find the website), with the wonderful coincidence of introducing some musicality to the name. And that’s really hope it will be – songs that I sketch out, we assemble and we throw out there and see how far they fly. Songs unburdened by dreams and expectations and carried by our joy in seeing them go anywhere at all. And when we throw one out and watch it for a bit, we build another and see what it does.

We can’t wait ‘till the wind is right…