Warm-up:


Backstage:


Sound Check:


Teaching the kids:


Teaching the kids:

Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it, and to work for it and to fight for it.

- Barack Obama

I’m writing this from 30,000 feet, flying out of a snowstorm into the welcoming climate of the south. Night is taking over and the feeling of change makes its presence known. We just crested the clouds and off in the distance the remaining sun is creating a very subtle orange-blue-gray glow on the horizon that I can only imagine is still warming my west coast friends. I can barely see the cloud cover below but its creating a false sense of untouched landscape, Mother Earth’s seal for the garbage below.

And then, of course, there are the stars. Just a few at the moment but enough to take all my worries and cares and put them in a package that reads “meaningless” on the tag. Jeff Buckley singing in my ears, “she’s a tear that hangs inside my soul forever.” It’s moments like this that could last a very long time in solitude and could last forever with the woman who reads this and understands.

I can see so far into the distance that I can just begin to make out the curvature of the earth. The clouds are thinning, some of them glowing from the cities beneath them.

How is it that the stars seem so damn wise? They look down upon us knowing everything about us and offer that peace and comfort only a mother can give her child in a time of pain.

—-

What the head makes cloudy, the heart makes very clear.
- Don Henley