I'm home after two intense weeks in Northern California with family, where we said goodbye to my wife's father. Amidst the sorrow and grief, there was also laughter and memory, sibling silliness and cousins' in-jokes, and more love than could possibly fit anywhere.
In fact, while it was all very hard to say goodbye and then to help bury my father-in-love, it was also the healthiest experience around death I'd ever had. Tonight, two weeks from the day he died, Roger's body is resting quietly in a tiny Jewish section of the local village cemetery. It's quiet and peaceful there and if you stop and listen, you can hear the waves crash on the rocks less than a mile away.

My wife will stay with her mother for a few more days before returning home herself.
Meanwhile, I am here and beginning to hit the reset button.
Which means not only regrouping to reestablish communication with folks about potential travels for the coming year, but also to figure out how I will reschedule and reboot the release of my physical CD recording of The Watchman's Chair, which had to be canceled so we could get to Mendocino in time to see Roger.
I will speak soon with the owners of Leikam Brewing, to see if we can reschedule the event soon enough for it to make sense (ideally before mid-February).

I'm also participating in more local events at open mics and pubs, hoping it will eventually lead to me booking a few shows here in town during the winter. I've always had a dream of playing my Jewish music in pubs and coffeehouses, and right now seems like a good time to test the waters and see if I can make the dream come true.

I am glad to be home. My cat is also glad; friends and family had been taking turns coming over to feed and medicate her, and to sit with her awhile in the evenings so she'd be a little less lonely. But now that one of us is home, all she wants is to sit on my lap and purr. I don't mind, especially now that the temps are falling here in Portland and we might see a dusting of snow in the West Hills sometime next week. She's warm on my lap and purrs a lot, signaling her enjoyment of our together time.

It's a little weird having celebrated a very muted, low-key Chanukah down south and skipping celebrations here in Portland with the rest of my family. But it all seems to be exactly right. Roger's passing was as good a death as anyone could have hoped for; pain-free and surrounded by family and all the love in the world. And the way we all handled it feels incredibly honest and loving and healthy. My wife told me she hopes that she will die similarly one day.

This week I began the seven-year cycle of Daf Yomi, the daily study of Talmud, one little bit at a time. I'm doing much more of a "Cliff's Notes" approach, since it works better with my ferocious shpilkes (today it would be called ADHD). Today we read in Berakhot 5 that if nothing else sways us from acting on our bad inclination, reminding ourselves that we'll all die someday is a good last resort. Frankly, I don't like this approach. Death is not a punishment, but a part of life and a reason for us to live well and love fully. I am grateful for the reminders of THAT lesson the past two weeks have afforded me.

Please stay tuned at my Facebook Music page and the first page of this web site for updates on my rescheduled CD release party in Portland. It will be live-streamed for out-of-town friends and archived on my FB music page.

Wishing you a good week and offering gratitude for your support.

Dear friends: It is with a heavy heart that I've had to change plans for next week's Portland album release show at Leikam Brewing.
A loved one whose health has been declining for quite some time has now begun hospice care. Sweetie and I will spend quiet time with family over the winter holidays, through the New Year at least.
In order to support Leikam Brewing Company (so they won't lose revenue from the food and drink sold during my show), I've asked J.D. Kleinke if he and few friends would like to step in and fill the slot, and he has graciously agreed.
So there WILL be a show at Leikam on Sunday the 29th, from 4 to 6 pm. The music WILL be awesome (I wouldn't ask an amateur!). And I hope that those of you who'd planned to come and support local music by attending MY show will now show the same support to JD and to Leikam for supporting live local music. Please go and enjoy JD and his friends, who play like monsters; and please go and enjoy fine food and drink (including Kosher beer!) from Leikam Brewing, on Sunday the 29th from 4 to 6 pm.
Thanks for supporting LIVE MUSIC in Portland!

And spend time with your loved ones whenever you can.
Love your people.

Love, Beth

Video: Title track from "The Watchman's Chair", performed as part of the Emerging Artist Showcase at the URJ Biennial in Chicago, 12-11-2019.

This guitar case has carried three different guitars (all various incarnations of the Alvarez Jumbo) on tour and around town since 2010. That's nearly a decade of hard use, and many of the stickers reflect either places I've performed across America, or give hints at my personal values.
This case has flown coast to coast and back again a half dozen times, and has traveled to the middle and southern parts of the country another dozen or so by air, bus and/or train.

My adventures have been rewarding and highly instructive, and I am grateful for having had every single one of them.

And yet, the more I've traveled, the more I've wondered about how much damage my travels have helped do to the planet.
This is not a new set of worries at all. When I made the decision to phase myself out from the bicycle industry and to make touring and recording Jewish music my primary goal, I did so from the hard reality of living in Portland, Oregon -- one of the most UN-Jewish cities in the country. I would HAVE to travel to find and take work, since the synagogues in town generally paid little or nothing to non-clergy musicians.

So I upgraded to a travel-grade case that could take the beating regular travel would dish out. (I don't check my guitar -- I refuse to -- but this hard shell case DID save my guitar once back in the bad old days when United required me to hand-check it and then sent it all the way through to my destination before I saw it again. The case took a beating, and my guitar was dinged up a little but still playable. I eventually sold that guitar. And I don't fly United anymore.)
I began to actively hustle for out-of-town gigs in cities with larger Jewish populations where there was enough of a base for someone to pay me to come and teach and perform.

I've been doing this for several years now, and it remains demanding and highly rewarding work.

From the very beginning, I fretted about my carbon footprint. Prior to making a career from music, I worked full-time in a bike shop and taught religious school two nights a week. I got everywhere I needed to go by bicycle, public transit, or a multi-modal combination of the two. I still largely get around town that way today. I have not owned a car since 1990. It was a choice, deliberately and thoughtfully made, in a city with better than merely decent public transit. And it has been a good choice for me. Not owning or working to maintain a car has allowed me to work fewer hours outside the house, and to have more time to rest, create and share time with loved ones. As I've gotten older, this time-based lifestyle has become more important than ever. I need and value the downtime between big trips, and I'm grateful to have a partner in life who supports my music-making and my creativity so that I can live this way.

That said, fretted about my carbon footprint when I began working out of town more, especially because I had to fly everywhere. (My first year of camp, I took the bus to save on transpo costs, so more of the budget for bringing me to Kansas City would land in my pocket. It worked out as planned, but it took almost a week for the swelling in my legs to go down. Subsequent trips to and from camp were made by air, at the director's insistence.)
As a lifelong bicycle commuter, my carbon footprint was pretty darned low. Now that I was flying everywhere for work, I became stressed about how my carbon footprint had blown up in a short time. I've never stopped fretting about it. But the truth is that bus and train travel are harder during the winter months, especially now that climate change has given us earlier and harder winter storms. (Also, train travel is being bled to death by a Congress that is being pressured by Big Oil and Big Auto to dismantle passenger rail travel in favor of cars. But I digress.)

Today, at the start of the Christmas Shopping Season (because if Christmas never existed, no one would be calling this the Chanukah Shopping Season -- think about it), the government released a National Climate Assessment, which lays out in cold, hard scientific fact, the harsh reality of human-caused climate change, and where we are headed if we don't do something about it NOW. Read about it here.

Here's the clincher: Air travel is destroying our ozone layer and atmosphere faster than any other form of transportation currently in use. Driving is also bad, but one cross-country car trip isn't nearly as bad as one cross-country flight in a private jet. (And before you get all smug about your brand-new E-cars and E-bikes, you should know that the lithium batteries both depend upon are also causing a huge environmental problem.)

Later this week, I'm flying down to California for a Shabbaton. The community is looking forward to my visit, and so am I. I just wish I didn't have to fly to get there and back. But timing-wise, I have to this time, because when I return, I have one full day at home to do laundry, re-pack my bag and fly to Chicago for the URJ Biennial, where I am getting something like a big break by performing in front of hundreds of people at a time, at a conference where 5,000 people are flying in from around the world. So I need this trip in order to make myself known to more communities, in the hopes that a few of them might find that what I offer is what they're looking for in a visiting educator/artist -- and invite me to visit.

And here's where things get weird.

Assuming that at least one or three communities show interest in hiring me to come out next yer, what would they say if I tell them that my preference is to take the bus or the train instead of flying?
Sure, the trip will take longer, but it will use far fewer resources than flying will and it will do a bit less damage to our atmosphere. I'm sure I'll get some funny looks. But I also know that I might convince a few people -- I hope I will. The nature of my time-based lifestyle means that I actually have more time to travel on the ground. And so asking for an alternate transportation stipend doesn't seem as far-fetched. Especially if I tell folks why.

Obviously, this won't make overseas travel easy or convenient; but I've never traveled overseas and can't afford to anyway, so I don't see it as a huge loss. At this point in both global climate history and my lifespan, it feels far more important for me to figure out how to live a smaller life that leaves less junk behind. And if that means not flying as much, or at all, I'm actually okay with that.

The British band Coldplay has just announced that they will suspending touring until they can figure out a way to make it "completely sustainable" -- which may mean no longer flying to tour stops.
Other artists are calling attention to climate change and many have pondered putting major tours on hold while they ponder the same issues of sustainability and reducing environmental harm.
If Greta Thunberg's mother can stop flying and still work as a professional singer in Europe (she did and she can), then I can take Amtrak with my guitar in its battered travel case. And so my goal in 2020 is to book trips that don't require air travel, but instead will allow me to utilize graound-based transportation so that I can do less environmental harm, at least on my smaller scale.
Because my legacy shouldn't be limited to the stuff I leave behind, but should also include the things I chose not to leave behind for the sake of generations to come.

Happy trails.

I've just been advised that there are NO more physical copies of Ten Miles left at the CDBaby warehouse.
If I want CDBaby to continue to sell physical CDs I need to send them more.
The thing is, there are no more to send.
I've now run out of physical copies of my first and second albums.
They are officially POP -- Permanently Out of Print.
And I am just fine with that.
If you are really desperate to have a physical copy of City Of Love or Ten Miles, you can find some on eBay.
They are quite expensive, coming from places as far away as Germany and Australia.
If you buy a physical CD from these sources, I will not get a dime; these copies were snapped up cheaply by overseas resellers and are now being sold at a premium price.
If you buy one of these physical copies, you will also expand the size of your carbon footprint by contributing to petroleum use, for the fuel needed to ship these items across the globe.

Not to guilt-trip anyone here, okay?
But as long as folks are shopping -- and they are, especially today -- it makes sense for us to think about the environmental reach of our purchases.
This is the primary reason I chose NOT to make my latest album available in CD form except at live shows.
If you want to buy a download you can go directly to CDBaby or any of the other outlets where my music is sold, and pay for a download which you can put directly onto your computer or smartphone.
And there's no additional plastic production involved in that!

I will be selling download cards of The Watchman's Chair at my California Shabbaton next week and at the URJ Biennial. The download card will cost a dollar less than buying an actual CD, another benefit of putting less plastic into the world.
Thanks for hanging in there with me on this. It's very important to me to find ways to reduce my footprint where I can, and I appreciate your understanding and support.

Happy Friday and Shabbat Shalom.

(photo at right: Shabbat candles, in candlesticks made from recycled bicycle parts.)

As of today, The Watchman's Chair is in the can, approved for digital distribution. I've obtained download codes which will become download CARDS next week (available at URJ Biennial). Physical CDs are in the process of being duplicated (for sale at live shows only); they should be ready in time for my PDX release Party on December 29.

So now what?

Well, it's back to some kind of normalcy, which this week includes time with family in Northern California for the Thanksgiving holiday. Along with that comes many reminders that we are all getting older -- especially my partner's parents who are now both in their 80s and dealing with the physical declines that come with old age. We are all trying to honor these with as much humor and gentle kindness as we can. We are all being especially gentle and patient with my father-in-law, who just turned 88 and is, well, really feeling it in his bones these days. He needs more time and much more help, and we are all trying to sort out what that will look like going forward. I am not new to the need of adult children caring for elderly or ill parents, having been through this with first my Mom and later with my Dad. It's a new thing for my partner, and I'm trying to be supportive for her and for my mother-in-law while we're here. It's a very different holiday than the ones we've shared before, one that's less active and quieter; but a time together that's filled with compassion, gentleness, a new wisdom and so much love. And so, even though parts of this experience are really hard, I'm grateful for our time together.

I played the album for everyone last night and got very positive feedback -- and interesting questions about the creative and production processes, which I greatly appreciated. Lots of folks just like it when I make music, but only a few want to talk about what it takes to create and produce recorded music and I always appreciate that level of curiosity and interest.

I also obtained download codes from Bandcamp, so I'll be able to produce download cards for sale at URJ Biennial. If you're attending Biennial, come find me Wednesday afternoon Dec 12 in the Music Lab and hit me up.

Wishing all of you time with loved ones, perspective on the gifts of this all-too-short thing we call life, and some moments to sit with gratitude for all your blessings.
Peace.

This thermos has powered every recording session since Ten Miles. Yes, really. Almost two decades of mojo.

DAMN, I love this guitar. It's the same consistent, reliable, gorgeous sound and feel. Every time. #Alvarez