It's a very quiet and slow morning, and I laid in the bed just a few seconds longer, just to see the day the way I wish for it to be, and plant some seats for some sweet things to happen.
This is finally a show about a Southern Black country singer and songwriter hailing from Tennessee. Valerie June's music combines gospel, soul, and country and she has one of those voices that just stays with you. We met up with her on one of her many tour stops.
It's a little bit like it could be warmer to me. Maybe, Thank you.
I got a good seven.
I had black tea with cream, and then I will jog to the sign to the gym and got a day passed and I jogged am all outside.
And looked at the trees. They were beautiful colors.
And when I'm doing the physical movement, I'm also doing like mantras and meditations and mental alignment. So as I jog, I don't just jog. I jog and breathing in, bring my awareness to my breath, breathing out, and then start to call in like words, breathing in, I am now peaceful, breathing out, I am now peaceful and not just calling it in and looking at what's around me, but what
does peace look like? And starting to see each word like what that looks like to me that day, because it's like tuning myself for the day.
And then all that's just getting me ready for.
Being around people and being able to go on stage and have enough energy and concentration and focus on light in times where we might read what's happening in the world and feel like, how am I supposed to get up and share some joy or like with somebody today?
I haven't found it.
Myself yet, and that's okay, But I do these practices so that I could at least come close.
To finding a little bit of its great.
Well that was part of me.
In backstage you're experiencing is one of our members is very sick.
So she she is not at the chef tonight, Okay, So I said, you just do think great good.
I was raised like in the middle of nowhere, in the country in Tennessee, and in nature, and I listened to trees, and I listened to nature and plants and birds and the.
Pond and the wind. And they give me the practices too. They talk to me. You know, on this.
Tour, I met the oldest tree in Buffalo, New York. It's two hundred and forty nine years old. I was just walking because it was a beautiful day, and we'd just gotten off the road and I was about to turn around, but I saw.
This gorgeous tree.
It was huge on the sidewalk and it was lifting up the sidewalk concrete because it was breaking it up. I walked down to the tree and I looked up and there was a plaque on the tree that said oldest tree in Buffalo. And I was like, oh my god, I cannot believe I'm finding this tree today, just in the middle of the city. And I held the tree. You cannot get your arms all the way around it, and I like talked to the tree and it was telling me. Earlier that day, in my meditation in the sauna,
I was invited into this garden. It was called the Hidden Garden. And I went in there and I sat and I was surrounded by all these plants, and you know things in Palestine and Israel, they were just weighing on me so heavy, and I just was in tears in there, and I was doing my breath work, and that's when I was invited by whatever spirit round to enter the Hidden Garden, and they said, you can enter this garden whenever you want to. You can stay here
all day if you want to. It just it's this world inside of us that we have that is very much like where everything comes from. And so I had stayed in that garden. As we travel that day, I needed to ask the tree, is it okay.
For me to like stay in the hidden Garden? For real?
You're older than me, You're like two hundred and forty nine years old, you see, so much like, is it okay with all this going on in the world for me to stay in the Hidden Garden? And the tree said, you can stay in both worlds. You don't have to choose one or the other. You can stay with us as long as you want to. And that doesn't mean that you're leaving the reality of what's happening in the world, but you do need to have to lean on us. The songs come for they come to me while I'm
doing things. So it's important to me for my work to have other things that I'm doing, not to like sit down to write a song or a poem. Because I need it's many. It's much like the ancestors. Unfortunately, they were enslaved and they worked in the fields, and while they worked in the fields, they sang, and they had these songs that came to them while they were working,
and they sang work songs. I do better creating when I'm watering the plants, when I'm cleaning the toilet, when I'm washing dishes, when I'm folding clothes, when I'm sleeping. I do better creating when I'm not intending to create. If I stop what I'm doing and I sit down and I really try to create, then it's not like
it's very fri frustrating like it needs to be. That I'm cooking dinner and I just hear this voice, and the voice is singing me a song, and I sing you the song the way the song is sung to me. So it's like I turn like when you turn on a radio and you hear a song, That's how it is. When I hear a song, it's just like there it is today. And because they come to me, that's why I do that.
But if they stop coming to me, then I won't do that anymore.
And I've talked to other creators, like I've talked to filmmakers or other songwriters even, and different people get them, get things different ways. Like some filmmakers see the entire film and all they have to do, and it's hard. It's just write what they see. But it's hard to write it because they see it, you know, and it's in a different realm, and they have to get the words, the actual words that someone else is gonna understand. But
for me, I hear and I hear the voice. The voice sings to me, and I say to you what the voice sings to me. Other songwriters hear like instruments, and they hear a whole symphony or an orchestra in their head and they write it down.
I don't hear that so much.
I work in a way where I hear many voices. They exist in this.
World for me because I have to.
Be doing something like driving or walking to a train or something physically in this world for them to come. They don't just come. They come while I'm doing other things. Like That's why I like to have other things going on, even in business that I'm like, you know, I'm doing books, but I'm also doing songs and I'm doing poems, and you know, I'm just like trying to.
Leave the space open, the creative space. Just let it come.
Don't sit down and try to force something.
You know.
I know, I'm busy.
I'm on the I'm on a conference skylland oh I'm hearing a voice. Okay. As soon as I get off, keep that on refeet on the back of my mind. Since I get off that, that's when I'm gonna start focusing on it.
And get it down in my journal or wherever it is.
They pretty much come like as they want to be, and they're very bossy because if I start to try to make.
Them something else, which I try to.
Do a lot, then they pull back, They pull back the other way, back.
To where what they want it to be.
And I'm like, okay, okay, I hear you.
They boss me around. Songs know what they want. They are living.
They have dreams and hopes just like I do or anybody else does. They have ways they want to be in the world, and so job of songwriters, the job is just to get out the way and let the song do what it wants to do.
And that's hard because they're.
Kind of like babies and you want to just like, oh, this is my new song, my new song, and this is what I'm gonna do with it. But when you put it out into the world and someone covers it, then you see just how little control you have over what the song's gonna do, because everybody sounds different when they cover a song. Then the other person it's the same song, but it sounds different. You know, the songs they are definitely teachers, and I think they.
I think they might.
You know, sometimes I ask myself, like did they ever live? And maybe they did, I don't know, like or maybe they've never been on a body, and they live through people who come and have voices to sing their song for them.
They say, everybody has a good story in them.
And it seems like when a show or a play or a song captures a person's story, then you're like, yeah.
That's my sound, even though you don't write it. What makes it yours is because that story.
Is something that's yours too, you can I find yourself in it and identify yourself in it. So I wonder where that commonality really comes from. Does it come from beyond just us? Does it come from beyond even the ancestors? Is there like something beyond that where all of the sounds and visions and beautiful things are just swirling waiting.
To come into this existence. I'm dark. I just need to be dark.
I need to bawl my ass off and enter the Eden garden and staying there crying, you know, all day long, just like I don't understand why what helped miss.
Somebody come home?
And then you know, work with that energy because always knowing See, I used to go dark and I would not come out, But now I know that you can't have one without the other in this realm. And so because of that, like any time I go dark now, I can stay dark for a week, a year, or however long because I've grieved hard for so.
Long, so many things, and.
You know, whenever that happens now, because I understand darkness, I'm okay because I know that I can't have that without some light in there. Because like as I go through a day, I'm happy, I'm sad, I'm happy, I'm sad.
You know this affects me. That affects me. Oh da da da, and everyone.
Everyone's like that, and that's why the day is a practice for me.
My parents would like for things they wanted.
They would give visions, but it wasn't as whimsical as the language I use for it. It was more concrete and it was more like, you know, I'm doing what I gotta do to make what I need to make happen, and this is the way to make it happen in the physical world. These are the laws and the rules, and this is how I have to like maneuver.
And they would go and like say.
For example, if my dad needed a new dump truck for his construction company, he.
Would go through the ads and he.
Would just start clipping out pictures of dump trucks that he liked, and he would put together like just a little kind of I would call it like a visionary board. He didn't have any New Age hippies telling him what to do on that.
Nor would he ever follow anything like that.
He would probably say that magic and all of that is focus and like against God, and that I'm going to hell for believing in it.
But they worked it. They did.
They wanted a house, they had a vision of a house they wanted. They would drive around and look at different houses and they would pull like I want this window, I want that doorway, I want that driveway, and they would go to an architect and get the plans made for it, and they would call to them the things
that they wanted, you know. And I saw them work in magic like that in the sense that the world would say, through redlining and a lot of limitations upon southern Black families that they can ain't have, that the world will tell them who they were. But they always worked magic, and they decided who they wanted to be and they made that shit happen. So to me, that's like the greatest magic. Magic is real. It's hard. Dreams are hard because you fail, you know, you fail. I fail every fucking day.
I fail.
But you got to learn how to fail and be okay with that, you know, like it's a part of the process. So becoming a successful failure is kind of part of the nature of dreaming. In some ways, people could say that doctor King failed because in his time he you know, even to today, we still are pushing to see his dream come true across the whole continent for all people, no matter what you believe to you know, be judged by the content of your character and not by.
Your race or your beliefs.
Well, it's been a long time since Doctor King was assassinated in Memphis, and we're still having a hard time with that one. So dreams take time, and you could say the man failed, but.
I don't believe that. So it's okay for me to fail because I know.
I'm not gonna fail. I know I'm not and I know Doctor King's not. I believe in the dream, you know. I believe in all goodness.
I believe in dreams. I believe in magic, and I believe.
It's hard though, you know, there's just so many things to distract from our power and joy, positivity.
Beauty is never taken. We give it, but because we let it. You know.
I always wonder what could be possible if we didn't, and what does it look like if we don't. These are always just questions I have. I have no answers. I just like guess questions.
I think the biggest thing for me.
Is really connecting with other beings who understand community and collective dreaming and collective consciousness and the power of imagination, wonder and.
The currency of it.
Everything is currency, and everything's for sale right now, everything being a woman, being black, whatever it is, you know, and if it is for sale, then are we consciously using it to grow and to heal, or are we using it to line our own pockets?
You know, what does it look like.
To work with the community of people who are really interested in true healing?
You know?
I want to meet my tribe like that.
That's what I want to do.
And I don't even have to know them, but I want to know that they're working in this world in the same way in their small sphere. We ain't got to catch up be running buddies, but I need to know that there are other people out there that.
Are working that type of what we would use the word magic.
You know, I need to know it.
I know that there's a lot of people out there causing all kinds of crazy things to happen and stirring up a lot of things that will create discomfort. I know that, but I need the reflection of those who are.
Trying to align with a shine.
You know.
JT just texted me the only fifty percent of the tickets have been scanned so far, and he wants to push till eight tests.
I got twenty minutes to get myself together. Valerie, how do you decide what you're gonna wear.
The room?
I go in there, and I'm like, what does this room want me to wear?
Sometimes I'll want online and see what the room was like, and then I'll be like, here's a couple of possibilities for this particular room.
But you know, and then whatever, you know, we are wearing kind of fits, you know, temperatures.
Last night she was wearing striped sorrow or stripe.
And there's a lot of fabrics tool and lots of neon.
Throw up. That's kind of the thing.
This is a I got this in the kittie department of Target, and it's extra large and it fit me and I really like it.
I'm gonna walk out and play a song. Let's go, We're going. We're walking, okay.
Because of that way that people before ancestors have paid, now we have like more freedoms in a sense, in certain parts of the world than we've ever had. So we have a window of opportunity to make some deep choices of change.
We actually have a chance. I believe in humanity and I believe in us.
It's a very quiet night. I took a bath, I covered myself in lavender roll from head to toe, and then scrubs with the brush and put a ton of ebs and salt in the water as tight as I could stand and got in there relaxed, and then I got out and made myself some camerameal tea and I Shregonda and now I'm laying in the bed and I'm just taking it easy and I'm about to go to sleep. It's been a beautiful day.