Boulder & Burt Bacharach

It's been way too long since I sat down to blog. I went to Boulder to meet with Backpacker, one of the magazines I work with, which, I am proud to say, just got nominated for an ASME Award for General Excellence. It's a great magazine.While there, I had a picnic lunch with with Tracy Ross, a Backpacker editor and author of the beautiful piece, "Source of All Things." We were talking about writing, and about how the best stuff is the hardest to write, especially if you write memoir, as we both do. Then it began to snow. "I think it's getting cold," I tell her, my teeth chattering, as we packed up our lunches to go back inside.Today I recorded a voice over for a Yoga Journal Conference tape. I felt like I was in the movie "Groundhog Day". You record the same script, over and over. It's actually exhausting.But this morning was sublime. I had a wonderful piano lesson with the incomparable Max, and I'm learning the Bacharach song, "What the World Needs Now." It's a masterful piece of music -- seemingly simple yet so open to a thousand interpretations. I'm working on my own arrangement, but in my dream world, it  ends with hundreds of people singing "What the World Needs Now, is Love Sweet Love." It's just outrageously moving and beautiful.But what was best about my lesson is that I'm learning how to arrange a piece by just playing with the music, meeting it, and see where it moves me. That process is sublime.