The Puget Sound is an exceptionally beautiful area around Seattle.
Viewing it with the naked eye, or in this case, viewing it with my eyes “clothes’d” (meaning covered by my eyelids…not naked….”clothes’d”) for lack of a better picture 😩, hyper activates my senses.
I can See the Sound, Smell the Sound, Hear the Sound, and Hear the See…..well, the Sea. 😁
Fall in South Korea, around 1978.
The other day I was filtering through some old photographs and I came across these pictures:
This is Half Dome in Yosemite National Park.
At the time, three friends and I were attending an intensive language course at the Defense Language Institute (DLI) in Monterey, California. Two were studying Arabic. One, Russian. I was studying Korean.
If you’ve been reading my posts, you’ll know that I’ve been traveling frequently to see and hear Lizz Wright sing.
It is one great joy of mine. When I listen to her, it sparks ideas and emotions within me and influences my creativity. Her voice, words, music, style of singing, songwriting, artistry, and her very essence continue to inspire me in various ways.
We have known about each other for nearly four years now, ever since I went to Madison, Wisconsin, to see and hear her sing for the first time, to give her a song (Lizz Wright: The Sweet Honey In The Rock) I wrote about her, and to give her a digital frame with some songs and a “Seattle Bouquet” (macro shots of flowers I had taken around the Seattle area) on it. Those things were tokens of my appreciation and affection for her. I was so taken by her then and I still am. I told her about my website, the first post that I had just written about her (Lizz Wright: Doing One Thing Really Well), and how to contact me if she ever needed to.
That day in Madison, she and Rachel (a talented piano player) were walking North toward that triangular building on the corner (in the picture above), and I was walking West, away from the Capitol, toward that same corner. I was walking back to my hotel to get ready to go to the show. I assume she and Rachel were doing the same thing.
When I was about 10 steps from the corner, I suddenly saw Lizz walking across the street, about 10 steps from the same corner I was headed for. We would have met right at the corner had not that group of 5-7 people rushed right in front of me to get across the street before the light changed. I then had to go around them and catch up to Lizz from behind, which I did.
MORNING GLORY
Lizz wrote a song called “Blue Rose“, with Kenny Banks. It’s on her first CD, titled, “Salt”.
The lyrics are poetic and the song is beautiful and it got my attention right away. One time I heard Lizz mention, in an interview, that “morning glory” was her baby name that her parents called her. Also she added a photo of a blue morning glory on her Facebook page a couple of times.
I was curious about the song so I studied the words to figure out what it means but I had as many questions as I had answers. So I google-ized (I know that’s not a word!!) anything related to blue rose and (blue) morning glory.
Officially, Spring started March 20th, and I see the daffodils and the camellias already leading the charge, as they pop up everywhere each Spring here in Seattle.
And there are at least several hundred other unique and beautiful flowers, just within a 10-mile radius of Seattle, that will soon reappear and present an encore of last year’s performance, to those who eagerly await their arrival, as well as to some who noticed them before but didn’t REALLY SEE them.