In the waning summer of 2011, I left.

I left a home, a band, a love.

- Mother’s cancer was miraculously defeated with Chaga, Reishi, Bone Broth, Raw Vegetables, Chemotherapy, and Radiation. I felt like I could go.
- Life on stage was draining me, in spite of the community's ravenous and unfathomable love, and I looked to the forests for solace more and more often. I thought I deserved to go.
- We were both unwilling to jump into the other’s dream. I got dumped when I decided to go.

Overwhelmed and undernourished, I sought grounding in skills of living, of connecting: with fire, with plants, with birds, with tracks, with story.

In a gauze of righteous adventure, of reclaiming my feral humanity, with guilt and regret and entirely theoretical self-sufficiency, I left.

I crawled in the wet moss under cedar trees, turned wood into fire, followed robins to raccoons, spoke for my people, and learned something of being a protector.

I missed, I loved again, and I wrote music. This was confusing and grief-filled. For years, I had written music with a partner, with a band of mutual care-carriers who shared a mandate from god-as-sara-balz to speak and create and spread love and connection and we were saving the world one show, one song, at a time.

I wrote now for myself, and my ears tuned themselves to something below and around and through. A someone. An enchanted land rising with the act of enchantment. I wasn’t there yet, I’m not there now, but I was beginning to listen.

This group of songs was recorded with one exception in the fall of 2011 through the fall of 2012. The exception was written then and recorded in 2014.

These were home recordings, made in a bathroom while dirty, roadkill-processing roommates were in the kitchen; or late at night, played quietly in the bedroom, whispered into the microphone. They were songs of loss and of longing for what was past, for what was ahead, and for a growing awareness of what was all around.

Recordings were made in the program Audacity with a shure 57 microphone through a scarlet 2i interface. They were originally released piecemeal over soundcloud.com and generally sounded okay. They were too loud and too quiet, distorted and compelling. The original multitrack files have, through computer migrations, become scattered or corrupted. They have now been “remastered” for this release. With only master files to work with, I have spent much time automating EQ and Compression parameters to help these songs play through as painlessly as possible. Never have I chased frequencies or squished waveforms like this. There is a reason they say to do it right the first time.

These songs represent a patchwork of a time and place and person: A portrait of someone on their way from who they knew to somewhere else. For the green land that caught me, I say thank you again and again and again.