I'm sad to hear this, I always notice when someone's not around much anymore, and now we also know how it feels when someone is gone, when that life energy is gone. Hoping you still have your special and beautiful friend in your time of need. You're a lucky man.
There is always hope, even if it's just to be at peace.
We take so much for granted, everyday, losing sight of what's really important, that is showing the people we love that we love them.
Most of us here are in our twilight years, by my reckoning I've got 10 years left, and you start realizing more and more "I don't have time for this" for things that get in the way of happiness, people that don't care about you.
My personal endeavor with the guitar - I've never made a dime playing - is
only to get better as a person, to learn, to apply, to unlock the mystery that's mostly in your head because the fingerboard really isn't that complicated.
It's a brain tease for me, the best kind of mental exercise there is, and the rewards are profound, having great tone is as important to me as food and clothes, and mastering my own fingers an accomplishment in itself. I have serious dyslexia that makes me play simple notes in scales in the wrong order over and over and over. Every day it's like I'm trying to learn how to play the guitar. I can improvise very well, but playing known melodies I will always make mistakes, I'm still trying to accept that and overcome it at the same time.
Having lost a lot of family and friends, when I play, I think they can hear me, that's my fantasy and it works for me, the unseen audience, maybe its not that farfetched. Santana, an idol mine, more genuinely spiritual than many pretenders, said "When you play, you play for the whole world" as if it could hear you and why not believe that, whether on a stage or not.
Be all you can be and try to leave this place better than you found it.
I went to a gig last night, and as usual people aren't listening, including wife in audience so it was a perfect time to launch into some of my favorite tunes - she calls em Chrismas songs but they are massively healing for me and the melodies transcend any notion of religion - all in dropped D with luthier neighbor following wildly on his F5 Mandolin, Noel, Carol of the Bells, Amazing Grace, seguing into Dust in the Wind and closing with Brain Damage by the Floyd.
I played Simple Man C/G/Am on a few guitars before going to the gig after practicing for about an hour, and decided my D5CE sounded far above the others, so that's what I took and I sounded like magic all night, at one point someone saying they had thought the sound was coming through a Bose speaker that had an iPhone connected to it that had been playing some classic Alan Parsons project earlier.
I probably wouldn't have that guitar if it wasn't for this forum, and for that I am grateful, as well as the forum is a refuge from a world I often don't care to to know about and understand anymore.
This spring has been amazing. Feeling lucky to be part of the creation, the solace nature can provide when not trying to get rid of us is beyond compare, every part of nature in striking contrast to our destructive ways. Sunlight on water, the feel of wind, rain and sunshine, fruit trees blooming, hearing woodpeckers and seeing baby snakes, ducks quacking, smells of hot pine needles and the silence of a mountain top, crickets chirping, or is that just my tinnitus?
Cat got me up at 4:10 this morning, her intellect is ahead mine, of course I needed to get up and enjoy that special time that is dawn, but it wasn't long before I heard an awful meow and saw her bolting from the porch and running for her life around the back side of the house. Something was hiding there and tried to get her, and eventually something will.
Don't take life for granted, any life, that's the lesson for me, and maybe do a better job of not "sweating the small stuff", remember what's really important, not to lose sight of that, it's so easy to do.
A lifetime trying to matter, only to return to matter.
Just around our house, disappearing parts of our creation are already protected, soon to be endangered or just flat out gone like our deer - all died of Blue Tongue during the pandemic/drought 2 years ago - and the source of meat for survival if needed, gone. Appreciation of loss is all around us.
Western Gray Squirrel making an incredibly noisy show of eating our walnuts, appreciation I think.
The blessing of night, to sip whiskey and cry by the light of the moon.
Morning, a new day
And back on thread track, a [real] rattler at the barn.
Same Timber rattler smelling me with his tongue, picking up chemicals that transfer to their super smell Jacobson's organ directly above the roof of their mouth.