Listening to Joni

by Lisa Talesnick
Vernon Morning Star
January 12, 2010

I've been waiting all week for Joni Mitchell to call. Every time the phone rings, every time I check my e-mail, it might be Joni. Only, I don't know what I would say when she actually calls and says: "Hello Lisa."

I sent her a letter via Alberta Ballet asking for an interview, since the company will be at the Performing Arts Centre Tuesday to present The Fiddle and the Drum, the ballet to her music.

She's said so much to us through the years and through our lives. She's already said more in her music than I could ever process in several lifetimes. But have I been listening?

This morning, the call came. A gentle cascade of warmth and intelligence. She called in a way that woke me up again to the conversations between us from the first time I heard the words: "Help me, I think I'm falling in love again."

I've been talking with her for the past 40 years about everything significant in my life, about everything that ever made me really feel.

In Hebrew Joni's name means: a place where grace flows. In Arabic, it's a phrase "Ya yuni." It means: look into these eyes and see my truth.

Wherever I have traveled in the world, Joni has been with me. I am Canadian, and everyone knows Canada and Joni Mitchell.

I remember sitting around camp fires when I was a teenager and when it came to Joni, we all stopped and sang, or just listened with awe to the inspired person who could play and sing her.

My university roommate was a Joni woman. I would listen to her and her guitar for hours. Those notes and chord progressions and her sweet singing got me through exams and lab reports and physics problems my head couldn't get around. I could get around Joni.

Then I met songwriters later in my life, really good ones, who loved folk music especially, always with a tip of their hat to Joni. I started writing my own songs, and there she was, with me, guiding me to that place where truth would ring through my music. Maybe my songs would land on someone's heart and put them to sleep gently, or wake them with a smile in the morning, and maybe lend some help getting through the day.

I don't remember ever dancing to Joni. I just remember listening, so deeply, I could hear myself feel.

There were years when I stopped listening to Joni. I couldn't hear, because I couldn't feel, even when I tried to listen. But when I think of those years, and the decades of songs and thoughts and ideas and purpose in the world and in my life, I can't separate myself from Joni's songs. I don't know if it's because I'm a woman, or a Canadian woman, or a Canadian woman born in the '60s, but here it is:

I want end to war. I want to love and be loved. I want to be accepted as I am.

I don't know how to put those feelings into dance. I know how to move and play, but I mean to dance the dance that reflects the meaning in me, and the deep feeling that sings in Joni's songs. The dance that whizzes the electrons in my cells and moves the planets about the sun.

Yet Joni's still singing, and she's still calling. And this time she's here, at home, outside our door. She's calling with a dance. I can't imagine how the ballet is going to dance to Joni.

She called me this morning.

She called me the way she used to call me. In a song.

I listened to her on YouTube again and again and again. That was the way I used to listen to her. I listened again with all of my heart and realized she calls me every time I listen. And that's when I figured out what I would ask her when she calls: How do we listen with the added dimension of dance? I mean really listen.

She had to listen too - - to the unsung song and the unwritten lyric. When she amplified it for us, it rang the song of the heart. And now, dance.

A wise man once said the listener is more important than the player. Without a listener, life is not heard, though, it is playing the most exquisite compositions everywhere, at all times.

Joni's music already elicits deep listening. I think the dance might propel us to a more magnified way of hearing. Maybe because of the trust we've built with her over the years, she can dance us to a deeper listening, one we've never heard before.

Just like the first time we heard when we felt her words: "I really don't know love, at all."

In essence, she'll be there to answer us on Tuesday, the way she always has, with all of us, gathered together, seeing, feeling, and listening.

The Vernon Performing Arts Centre Society and the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad present Joni Mitchell's The Fiddle and the Drum Tuesday, Jan. 19 at 8 p.m. Tickets are $30 for adults, $27 for seniors and $25 for students at the Ticket Seller box office, 549-7469, www.ticketseller.ca.

Lisa Talesnick is the dance outreach coordinator at the Performing Arts Centre.