Kristina Stykos: Blog

He emailed me again.

“Hey k, Lou here. I’d really like to help you set up those speakers. Give me a call when you get a chance. All the best, l”

My elbows on the console, I twirled a long tendril of hair around my finger and while continuing to stare blankly at the screen considered pulling it and for that matter all my hair out in one smooth, well defined motion. That would be the truest expression of how I was feeling on this bleak day in February, sitting alone in my studio, surrounded by knobs and wires. How had I gotten into this technological nightmare of always needing to know more than I did and having to be smarter than my clients at every turn? Had I strapped on my skis even once this winter or tuned into nature? The answer was clearly “No” because I’d been too busy trying to convince myself of my qualifications to be the professional that I am and tormenting myself to keep way ahead of myself as if running a marathon. I was about to crack.

Lou’s speakers in [...]

After the rock and roll spectacle was over, a caravan of cars headed single file out of town and turned right up Braintree Hill Road, red taillights disappearing and reappearing in the blowing snow. Not far from here in the craggy hawk haunted hills my old music partner was probably burning the midnight oil with her chocolate brown fiddle, flying through the night on ancient Cape Breton tunes. How many winter nights like this one had I had joined her, settling in next to the wood stove with my guitar, her big old dog at my feet and her husband quietly clanking pots and pans in the kitchen stirring up some dinner for us. Warm memories but life has a way of driving wedges between friends in the oddest way. Here tonight, positioned between the life saving blow of my hard-working car’s right and left heater vents I was again a refugee following new friends to an unknown destination.

The show had included a smoke machine and an army of technicians, ghostly men lit by glowing dials surrounded [...]

He was having a rain stick malfunction and finally sixth take I got out my rain stick. “Longer isn’t always better”, I said, as his expert hands took hold of it and turned it towards gravity. If life could be so simple, I thought to myself. The flow of brittle seeds cascading filled my headphones perfectly proportioned to three final drumbeats on goatskin. The image on the screen of the sound wave bloomed and slowly receded in pink. “That’s the last thing I’ll record”, he said. I looked up at him somehow stunned at this revelation. After six months of meticulous tracking and retakes, we had finally reached the finish line.

A rosier pink on the edge of the cold blue sky this morning as I wake and rejoin the cog wheel of winter whiteness. Gone is my “summer-colored skin” as Joni Mitchell so aptly put it. I’m layered and hidden in flannel and wool and my introspective tendencies need tending like the woodstove fires I build and feed. The wide oak floor of the downstairs [...]

The tree is full of morning doves. I open the French doors to throw a mangy Pointsetta into the snow, and they are looking at me. Do they know how far I have traveled to get here? And now in the swirl of winter’s blustery white, we are holed up together, a wonder to each other. Just as if it were always so.

The jays pretend not to see me because they own the place. They believe the feeders strung all around this huge wooden house are their right, not their privilege. My husband plays into this by chastising himself should any of the stations be forgotten, even for a day, and the seed receptacles gone empty. He tells me no one likes blue jays, and so my secret love of them must go unnamed as I watch them move with the determination of kings from branch to sky, seemingly impervious to the gusts of intoxicating mountain wind. Not like the little chickadees my husband favors, their reliable songs coming from everywhere, unseen and delicate, like clockwork, their small bodies working with. [...]

Long empty road, clear night, the river’s a thousand gems dripping moonlight. I’m slipping through the dark. With the road and river come memory; threads of dream-like water rising towards an ephemeral spring or rolling slip shod falling to an ocean. The road and river not listening needless to say - to the chatter, the dramas commuting their course - just side by side, rhythmic, constant and expanding into a galaxy of midnight. Same road, same river, but the steep mountain ravines barely whisper now of the situation. No less enticing the thrill and possibility of folly, but the curtains dividing reality from performance, invested with power like the robes of clergy, look finally now in middle age to be mere pieces of cloth. Yes, I followed him from stage to stage for many decades… but he followed me also. It was an exchange of mysteries.

How keenly overdue my freedom to find love exactly in the hearts center and a welcome within. Half creature, half spirit, on a flight across no-man's [...]