• Raga Cycle
• Way of the Journey

When Dean Evenson & his outrageous wife, Dudley invited me to visit their lovely refuge on the Nooksak River in northern Washington, magik was afoot. They are a lively couple, activists since the 60's, using audio & visual media to document the transformation of global consciousness. 25 years ago, they started their own record label, Soundings of the Planet, to distribute the stellar flute & synthesizer work Dean creates.

They trooped off to Nepal & recorded Tibetan monks chanting. Dean wove his western bridge of synth & flute into the creation; the Tibetans liked his music so much they commissioned him to compose musical/cultural bridges for a CD of chanting released internationally to benefit Tibetan refugees in India. Just to get an idea of who Dean is. Not to mention the long, white beard in 2 dread spirals down to his waist!

Dean took me into his renovated barn recording studio & introduced me to his Main Man Engineer, Phil Heaven (for real) (who plays cello & violin with drummer, chanter Jason Darling...NW men are treasures.) Phil has this wizard-at-the-board gift for making my voice sound better than I've ever heard...and Dean has this knack of playing music that really moves me to sing.

Then they handed me a CD of 5 Ragas; 7th generation father & son sitars playing holy music, each piece written to a specific time cycle within night/day. "Come back tomorrow", Dean said. "We'll start recording."

Thrown in the deep end! Completely different scale, rhythm & melody sense & purpose....24 hours to get the hang of each wondrously complex, strangely structured piece! Dean likes to get the improv voice...the voice that has surrendered knowing & becomes the music. I grew alot vocally working for Dean...yes, he threw me over the edge, but believing in me the whole time which calmed my fears so I got it together & got to work!

The 1st day I came in & was nervous. This gig was a 1st for me in many ways & I was anxious to please...me & my dog flown all the way from Texas to Washington state to record these VERY bizarre vocals. We recorded the 1st track...I sang improv all the way through without stopping. These ragas are 15 minutes long! That's a long time to riff! Phil came in from the control room & started flapping his long arms, like some Great Crane, kinda hopping from one leg to the other. "You'll do just fine," he said to me, nodding his head. "Gonna be ALL right."

So Dean & Phil recorded a collective of us, culling & editing extremely challenging pieces to the Western ear. Sitar is designed to pierce your consciousness & they managed to weave together an extraordinary album of a melodic raga cycle that stirs deep archtypal presence. I am utterly honored to have been invited to contribute to this project that features world renown musicians, Deobrat & Mishra, Dean Evenson & Gina Sola. I like to listen to The Raga Cycle on endless repeat in the background while I work. It is transcendent music.

In exchange for my vocal beds on the The Raga Cycle, Dean gave me studio time with Phil @ the board. I recorded Raising the Mysts, a 72 minute lecture on Mystery School Basics based on a cosmological blend of Drunvalo & Tom Kenyon/Hathor material as focused thru the Sacred Geometry of a Torus. Its the left brain explanation of all the components of a beautiful meditation I keep seeing/experiencing/teaching that I call Earth's Breathing, cuz it is.

I also recorded the meditation...its 40 minutes long, done on a pine whipping stormy night. Spirit was so present I was weeping by the end.This whole teaching has its own awareness & its a gift to commune with it as I become the portal.

Its a little tough on my ego to listen to the 1st 12 minutes of the lecture CD (Raising the Mysts) cuz I sound pretty uptight. It was the only recording I didn't do a vocal warmup for beforehand. Warm up just to talk? At the beginning of all the other sessions, I warmed up with Call & Response cut from Flight, Rhiannon's 2-disk set of her Vocal Improv Workshop, with some great tunes to sing with & stretchy instruction & way cool fine musicians...all a capello!

Dean went digging in his closet of old, unused tracks that never got developed. On my last day of 3 wonderful weeks up in the Pacific NW, he handed me a practice CD he'd put together with 8 old synth & flute tracks. I listened all morning to these beautiful tracks, finding the curves of the song waves. One song quickly became my favorite, although all the others were right behind.

That last evening, we went into the studio & I sang my heart into Dean's music. I am in awe of what flowed out, track after track, no mistakes, no stopping...every track a 1st & only take. Some music just gets inside of me & it requires effort NOT to sing. Singing with Dean lifts me up...he's an alchemical Master. This became holy music & I am still humbled to think I landed in the middle of it. Its really beautiful. It touches all the chakras...its good medicine to listen to. I use it as background during sessions that I give others or myself, especially my favorite, what became Earth's Breathing. (This link still under construction).

So I put the music with the meditation & released Earth's Breathing, a right brain/dreamer companion to the mystery school teachings of Raising the Mysts.

Finally, Phil passed his hands somehow over my tape masters & made a CD master of Way of the Journey, an audio recording I did years ago in Salt Lake City under the mentorship of Marko Johnson, rounddoor.com. Marko is known for making didj's but he made drums before that & he taught me how to make drums and he knew I was teaching & talking & took me into a recording studio once night to get this shamanic journeying part down...so I could go on to other things. That is what I have discovered in this recording process. It frees me to move on to the synthesis of the next material that;s coming in.

So Way of the Journey became a CD of lecture & guided meditation to meet one's allies in spirit. ............. ......... ... . . . Coupla things about the Journey CD:

1. It works
2. It WILL put you to sleep.
3. Sleeping seems to be part of the process.
4. Its waking up while you're sleeping that's the fun part.

So already the next mediation has come in...the 1st in the Sacred Geometry series of meditation archtypes, Earth's Breathing, was the torus. The next is the Octahedral Gate of Grace. Heard of it 1st thru Joe Crane & his angel Michael. Then visions of the Great Pyramid @ Giza being the top half of a great Octahedron...then word of Robert Gilbert's work came through Nancy Crossthwaite of an octahedron stationed with the ArchAngels & the Divine Feminine & Masculine. There's more about a very simple way to recover & renew our internal structures, the axes (plural, axis) of consciousness, the nodal points of the elements in agreement to hold form for our incantation/incarnation.

I'm excited to be working on this next form which is teaching us how to cultivate shift with grace, coherence & ease.