A week in creative rest

Sunshine between the showers

I'm very impressed by young writers these days - whether that's on blogs, songwriters, authors - they have a great sense of honesty, openness, authenticity.  Perhaps it's our growing up in a society where it wasn't ok to speak your mind - you didn't know who was listening - but I find it very difficult to be that open.   This week we saw the restart of our Stormont Assembly, after 3 years of not working.   Doubtless our health and education services were used as pawns by the powers that be to coerse our idiots to get beyond school yard politics and start behaving like politicians - I wonder how much honesty will be evident there. 

My view from our studio this week

We've come away for our annual visit to Tyrone Guthrie House in Co. Monaghan. - hopefully I"ll get some nice photos from here for next week's Scavenger Hunt. 

It's a great place to re-focus priorities - move back into my own realm - after such a busy couple of months with choirs and an impending tour of the Emigrant Woman's Tale, it's hard to find space to hear your own thoughts and tunes and see where you want to move to next - to find your own honesty. 

So we've both been going through hundreds of voice notes and memos on our phones, dumping, editing, rearranging and getting into a rhythm of work that's exciting us both and setting a way of working for the coming months.

We've use of a studio although mostly we're working in our cottage but I absolutely love having access to a beautiful piano to work through chord progressions when I get stuck in a riff on the guitar.  And looking out across green fields through rainy windows is better than being stuck in front of the tv or computer screen at home.  

As always, there's an international group here this week - several writers, a couple of painters, a pianist rehearsing for an upcoming concert in Paris, a young German guitarist writing music for a new album and a couple of people editing scripts for films and tv shows.   That mix is so inspiritng and makes for very interesting converstaion at dinner.