I have been out to music every night of the week since I got home from touring. One night it's Irish, the next Old Time, another night there are songs going around in a circle at somebody's house, then there's a workshop to attend. Tonight I hear there's a step dance session at Ira Bernstein's house where John Doyle will help provide the music, and in a couple of weeks Martin Hayes & Dennis Cahill will be teaching in Black Mountain. Then Monday rolls around again and it's Contra Dance night at the Grey Eagle - swing dance on Wednesdays. There are sessions in Brevard and Hot Springs, too. Sheer abundance. Somewhere in the flow I get to my gigs, one after the other, after the other. Somewhere in the flow I write more songs.

Next week in England I anticipate changing continents yet doing something very similar: there infused with the joyous appreciation of souls meeting and exchanging lovely sounds, unaware of the next time we'll meet, so the time is now and by golly we're living it to the fullest and in the present moment so as not to let any gorgeous note of rhythm or harmony escape uncelebrated. Even the uneven tunes -- off kilter with warming up or made slack by no lack of drink -- celebrated all the same because it's simply good to be here, and what else would we be doing anyhow!

In my studio I work alone, I dig and hone, the same tunes over again. A painter will surround himself with studies and half-baked pallets - but mine, my pallets and studies vanish in the air - each note and utterance invisible as if it never existed. The residue lies only in muscle memory. A sound pleased me so I played it again and again until I knew it and could call it mine. At a later date someone may notice that peculiar riff that I stumbled upon. That somebody will harbor that sound in the back of their brain until a time of lucidity when they play it themselves and think it good.

An unfolding occurs with the rote of endless sessions. The same faces and the same hands upon the same instruments week after week create a culture. Babies are born to fathers and mothers that met at these sessions. Mere days old they are brought to their first session: their first outing. Quilts are sewn and gifted in the babe's honor by the musicians who played at the sessions where many pleasant glances, many pints of beer and many tunes vanish in the air. Applause will linger as it's casually taken in. The unfolding is that the music inhabits and becomes us.

Weeks of sessions flow in and out like the tides and wear a space in the air saying, "this is where the music is". Vibrations of instruments resonate, creating a space that is safe and sacred. With dances, many steps of feet on wood upon the earth send the energy down. So above as below, the earth reciprocates. Those feet are connected to happy faces of men and women courting, and musicians playing in the overheated hall. And voices - reedy pipes of emotion take us back and back into the resonant night, then return to us a sense of knowing saying, "this is who we are, these are our stories".

Times like this, there is little need for worries or care about the state of the world. Has there ever been a time when wars were not fought, or politicians and corporations not corrupt? The earth shakes and houses fall and after we weep we dance on the rubble, healing the space. Though my heart is in a place of caring, I would make a lousy activist. Instead I invest in a subtle direction of energy. I sing. I go to sessions where I find my kin. To not participate would be to weaken the cloth; to worry is to worry, to sing is to sing. One cannot worry when one sings. So take me out tonight to another session.