It’s my first week back to my online songwriting group. There was a break between semesters, and this week there was no prompt, because the new professor wanted to make things easy on us. What he doesn’t know is that I need a prompt. Without a prompt, it’s just like every day for me, in that I don’t know what I should say. Luckily, I shared my songwriting frustration with my dear Nora, and she gave me a prompt: the word “island.” I wonder when she suggested it, if she knew that I feel like an island most of the time.
I was thinking about Darwin’s finches when I wrote this song. When he went to the Galapagos Islands in the 1830’s, he noticed that the finches from island to island had specially evolved beaks depending on the food available on each particular island. I wonder if living alone, my beak keeps getting more specific. I wonder if I will be able to feed off my own island, or if I have to keep my beak sharp for the wider world. The older I get, the harder it is, but being an artist there has to be some kind of beak specialization. My economy is shrinking. I don’t know if anyone else can live here.
