Stuff speaks to us. Sometimes it says nice things; sometimes it fills subconscious ears with tired, limiting tunes about your own worth or prospects, hindering evolution towards higher versions of yourself.

I’m back in clutter-clearing mode. Having moved three times in four years, I’ve had no choice but to radically pare down my possessions. Yet, somehow, this still doesn’t feel like enough. The process has made me hyper-aware of how inner and outer worlds mirror each other. This year, I’m letting go because I feel like it, not because I have to.
 

I’ve begun my spring cleaning, parting with those objects which no longer reflect my new goals and visions. Making space for fresh music, ideas, and art projects. Celebrating by smudging freshly cleaned corners with sage, heightening the ritual and speeding up the spell. Switching my focus forward. Choosing consciously who I want to become, rather than letting “who I’ve been” shape my every heartbeat. It’s amazing how getting rid of even one object, or cleaning out a single drawer, can shift the rhythm of a room—and by extension, your life. 

Feeling a little lighter already. Younger even. This is me. Loving today.

Performance pushes me right up to the ledge. Hanging off a cliff invokes an incomparably heightened kind of focus. Time slows down, yet passes in a flash while I scale skyscraper songs. Gamblers’ Heaven. It’s on. 



 

 

It’s that quiet moment after rehearsal, when the energy of the last song still hangs in the air like stardust, and I’m falling back in love with the mystical ritual we call music.

Sometimes, while caught up in the logistics of producing shows, it’s easy to lose sight of this love. The million and one details and emails, the self-promotion predicament, the budgets that don’t balance—these can blur my heart’s eye. Yet, it’s always the music that wipes the lens clean, winning me over again with crystal-ship visions and verse. 

It’s that mysterious telepathy that transpires between players, that collective croon that breathes coherence into sound (and, for a few minutes, seemingly the whole universe), colouring a moment this way or that, tainting the ephemeral with a new memory—it seduces me every time, luring me back into the game. It’s in these moments that I must pinch myself. I can hardly believe my luck. This, Kimberly, is your life. Could you have planned it any better? This beauty, this drop-dead gorgeous mixed blessing of a life, is undeniably yours. For better or for worse.

And in this quiet moment after rehearsal, still soaked in the last song’s stardust, I am so in love I cannot imagine not being in love, and, once again, find myself wanting to share this bliss with the world.

 

I am reinventing myself again. It’s time to forge fresh circuits in my brain. A change of sonic scenery is helping as I get back to the basics of guitar. Starting over is at once humbling and liberating. I’m surrendering to meditative motions, feeling the sweet simplicity of single notes swell into a scale or pattern. My fingers mindfully stretch across frets, as though reaching for the next bead on a rosary. Musical mantras quiet the intellect, crack open spirit in tones and semi-tones. Neural networks are fortified. I’m hearing new colours, a persuasive palette of poems forming in the mouth of an electric guitar, strings of imagination waking, a swirl of serendipity singing.
 

 BLUEPRINTS

There is just so much of it. Songs written, released, performed. Poems, essays, articles published. Paintings and photographs fading in the sun. So many works still cowering in boxes, bundled up in stage fright. Their ribbons have come loose.

I am moving in less than a month. Beginning to sift through closets, drawers. My windows are open. I’m letting my skeletons out for a dance. Looking back at older work, I can now map out my obsessions. They’ve all led me here. And they will lead me “here” again (and again and again). In retrospect, I can see that my younger self already knew exactly who I was becoming. Those early essays and poems were the blueprints.

I am slightly bewildered as I look around. Where does one put it all? Retiring would seem like the practical choice. Stop producing stuff I have no room for. And yet, somehow, I feel like I’ve barely begun. I can’t help it / C’est plus fort que moi. I am praying the world will stretch. 

   

“Dancing is not just getting up painlessly, like a leaf blown on the wind; dancing is when you tear your heart out and rise out of your body to hang suspended between the worlds.”  - Rumi

 

TRUE STORY

       by Kimberly Bourgeois


2:05 A.M.

Montreal trees

think no one

is watching

 

dance stark naked,

get drunk on spirits

 

2013 kisses

shook loose

on new year’s day

 

true story

I was there

 

Dionysus too.

 

 

The Violinist - by Kimberly Bourgeois

Based on a musical performance I saw in a Montreal bar, this painting dates back many years.

 

My art teacher at the time had parallel artistic pursuits as the singer of a band that shared her passion for improvisation. One night, she invited her students to attend a show. She encouraged us to bring along our sketchbooks, as she had a particular exercise in mind. There were only a couple of us who showed up for this extra-curricular activity, so I was glad for the semi-private instruction. I sat near the stage, and accepted her assignment: Remaining true to the experimental spirit of the band’s performance, I was to draw what I saw/heard/experienced without ever looking down at the pages of my book.

 

I remember how my teacher’s vocals chirped and fluttered playfully like birds in a bath. Flaunting their freedom, they flew off in previously undreamed directions, weaving their way through colourful guitar and violin expressions. Suddenly the stage was a windfall of bright plumage rubbing up against rainbows of sound.

 

The results of that drawing session were unexpectedly fun, and opened me up to a new way of working. I held on to a sketch of the band’s violinist, later incorporating it in a painting that now hangs in my parents’ home.

 

In retrospect, I think those sketches were my favourites made within the context of that course. Interestingly, they were among the few born outside the studio-classroom. I love that this series took root in a gritty bar on the Plateau Mont-Royal, thanks to the visceral immediacy of live music.

 

At that time, I didn’t know yet that I’d one day be crafting my own melodies, sharing them on stages much like the one my teacher’s band lit up. I was still taking notes—my future songs like sketches in my heart. Something was taking shape, but I had yet to look down at the page.

Got up early this morning. It’s Saturday. A day off. My body is adjusting to the schedule of a new full-time job, to buttering the margins of morning with music and poetry.

 

This morning’s dreams were full of travel: a taxi cab, a stormy highway, a hotel. I'm in transition.

 

I picked up my guitar and found that a line from a song I’ve been working on wasn’t quite right. I’m seeing things in a new light. The morning light.

 

Dug up dictionaries, pen and journal. Pushed deeper into the day, willing my hand across a white page—that wintry highway in my dreams.

 

This song will outlive the storm.

This song will travel.

 

I am an explorer.

 

I take pleasure in many modes of travel, including music, writing, painting, dancing…  Each avenue offers a unique opportunity for expression.

 

What I particularly love about painting—perhaps because it’s non-verbal—is that it’s easier for me to get beyond intellect and resist all temptation to plan ahead. I just let instinct follow emotions’ lead. Don’t worry where you’ll wind up, just go. You’ll see when you get there. Trust.

 

Mindfulness tags along, but she is light on her feet—the perfect dance partner for the unconscious. They are complicit in their naked improvisations, making up the rules as they go. It’s back and forth, skip, twirl, dip, repeat in whichever order you like, and follow that yellow brick road…

 

On the rare occasions that intellect tries to barge in, the unconscious reasserts itself: coffee gets spilled; the wind upsets a dirty paintbrush carelessly left teetering on the edge of the page; India ink splatters in my rush to open the container… Happy accidents call me back to the unknown, and I can see once again with a child’s eyes. Everything is new and unpredictable.

 

I delight in dipping my fingers into cool creamy pots of acrylics, and sometimes I enjoy cutting up cardboard, magazines, bubble wrap, the netting that oranges are sold in—anything that feels interesting—and gluing texture to my canvas. I like that the word relief in French is spelled the same as the English “relief.”

 

My paintings may not always be pretty, but I can guarantee you that they are honest—which may be why they come to me as such sweet relief. It feels good to tell the truth, especially when truth only reveals itself as you are telling it.

 

This painting, I made several years ago, right after I got home from the movie theatre. I had just seen Denys Arcand’s Les Invasions Barbares. The film offers many poignant scenes in which the protagonist, Rémy, a terminally ill patient, spends his dying days surrounded by family, past lovers, and friends.

 

In my own life, it was my hopes for lasting romance that were dying.  Summer was slipping into fall, and my lover had just moved to the other side of the country. It was clearly over, but I wanted one last dance before the burial.

 

As the sun leaked into dusk, I picked up my paintbrushes and let them cry all over the canvas in a liberating, funereal dance.

On that autumn afternoon, many years ago, this was my truth: