Brute Honesty.

Brute honesty is a fine art. A fine art like smashing your mother's heirloom vase with a sledgehammer.

But seriously, it's important. I have a mentor who speaks into my life periodically and the thing I love about it is the sledgehammer of cold, hard truth. I tell her what I hope to accomplish. We plan, we reason out. And then she sledgehammers me when she talks to me a month later and I haven't really done anything.

We all need people with sledgehammers in our lives, but they also should be A) invited to do so and B) sensitive and sympathetic to the confusion of constructive deconstruction (that is to say, willing to help you pick up the pieces). Thank God that mine is.

Essentially, I grow a little (actually get students! play at a few places!), get complacent, convince myself that I'm tired and then stop. The tiredness is inevitable. The complacency is the problem. You can work through being tired if you are convinced that you must do something.

My stonewall always ends up being this notion that what I do as a musician is not important. It's rooted in one or two insensitive things that folks said to me a long time ago (and probably do not remember ever having said). But really, despite my confusion, despite not knowing why I do it -- music comes out of me. So lately, I just pray to be healed of that stuff. Life will go a lot smoother if a crazy music lady can just allow herself to believe that there is meaning in the crazy music she makes, though she may never know the full extent of that meaning.

And that's the truth. SLEDGEHAMMER'D