I thought the world was telling me this was the time. But it is not.
Truth is I’m not ready. Money, the timing with the making of the record
and also the hope that I can come next year with what I hope will be a brilliant new
creation to open new doors, new songs that matter and the kind of support one needs (business speak)
to come do it right….

This is a tough letter to write. I have lost a lot of nights sleep
consumed with my guilt and weight of disappointment I have not been able
to make this happen.

I hope you will understand. I hope you will continue to listen and
contribute to the work, to share with your friends and spread the word,
because Europe is in my heart. It always has been.
Did you know I was an exchange student in Denmark when I was 16?
Or that I backpacked the whole of the continent when I was 20 for over three months. Two
defining experiences that literally changed my life. My time there gave me
something in my heart I carry with me every day in the way I see the world and myself in it. I never would have found ART and the unending desire
to accept and figure out the world as we all see it without my travels. Thanks Mom and Dad…thanks drunk driver that almost killed me and my best friend but didn’t and we got 10,000 bucks for it to pay for the trip…

Sometimes I dream too big….don’t you? Sometimes I get ahead of myself
and reach higher than the seeds I have planted have grown…I guess if
you set an idea in motion, if you picture it and put it out there, and
the world begins to conspire and peoples hearts and imaginations are
captured, well, there is no dream too big. This is what we are meant to
think…this is what we deserve to believe and to manifest.

But dreams, like love, like Mothers….they have no destination, they
are concepts and reality all at once; they grow, they nurture your
secret self…they are everything. Some may say you must make specific
your dreams, but I have always believed that dreams are an instinct, a
collection of feelings and thoughts and the intangible “soul” of who you
are speaking a language you can not see, but simply feel…and work
towards. Because the “dream” has to be lived in every moment of chasing
it…its your life…

I’m here, across the sea, living the dream the best I can. With your help
and patience, I’ll get there…I will….in a way I never could have
imagined.

And now I think about myself in that hole in the ground, and the dirt around me and the roots and stones sprinkling the walls of my captive safe place, in the earth….and I wonder…as I often do…
why does that feel like the most truthful thing I have said in a long while? Why have I expressed how I see myself as this man deep within the earth, surrounded by the ground and urging himself to WANT to climb out? I think about what it is to make that climb, how every grab and pull at the walls of your open captive hole both drown you and bury you further and bring you one stop closer to the light. The dirt crumbles…I can feel it in my face. I can taste it.
What is it about the earth for me? Why am I here in this city? This city of so little dirt? Why are my shoes on right now? hmmmmmm…

When I blurted this ” ..yeah, like I’m in a hole in the ground…..” (thankfully I believe I made some truly cohesive and inspired thoughts and impressions)…I think I was climbing in my mind. I think I’m always climbing in my mind. I hope I’m always climbing in my mind. I like the way the dirt feels. I like the light. I like the coolness of being under. I like the smell of it. I like how people could be all around me and if I didn’t make a sound maybe they wouldn’t notice I was down there…and yet if I did, if I shouted and pulled, the earth would move and they would look down and see me….see only me….and like always, the arms, the hands, the faces pressed to the earth to reach as far as they could would come for me.

I could wave…
I could reach…..

Peace, be you,
Jake

Tonight I get on a plane and fly not across the sea.
Tonight barely feels real…
Tonight I go to fly for only an hour, maybe above the California Aqueduct,
or zigzagging along the coast as it becomes more jagged the further north
you push….only long enough to look through my “new album notebook” which
is like my obsessive ever present blanky these days, who’s evolving
content’s smell is so obviously mine; maybe even make a connecting thought
or two…and then, in the dark of the night, I will let it all go, all the
intricacies of my own inner life; I will land and my Mom will pick me up
and once we get to Cotati…it’s real.
My sister is going to get married….
Katie’s wedding to Muiris is here. A week in the forest. A week of all
the people who made her, coming together, in one spot, to simply witness
the dreams and joy of she who no one would dare say is not the most
beautiful person they have ever known. Oh and Muiris…yeah, I approve…a
rare man to fill the role HE creates. He is charming and passionate and
independent thinking. He is a caregiver, a protector, and WANTS BABIES.
Most important, I sense that he is complicated, like all of us…and he is
not afraid to show his light and his dark, though his spirit like hers is
bright…so bright…
That’s all I can say….I’ll leave the rest for them, for my words at
their wedding….
Just wanted to share…wish them luck…time to let go of little “k-fart”
introduce myself to
Mrs. Katie Griffin

And I see the sky my favorite shade of midnight blue, and I hear my friend laugh from behind the door, and I look at those I love, frozen stills on my walls, my constants…my hearts. And I feel guilty…because I can’t be THAT every day.

And my body, so weak as my brain never settles and somehow, every time, I search for one single understanding to miraculously pull my brain and spirit and body as it never eventually fails to find me. I look for it though I tell myself, “maybe this time the light will not find you again” And I am ugly inside.

So I go to that place. This place where my peace of mind will find me and my body can heal itslef again as the tunnel doors crack. I write it down. I put it out here just thinking…if I feel like this? If I am living every day..must everyone else too?

You can find your dreams. You can find and share true love. You can be a giving person with purpose. You can be rich…and yet there is something within we all must face alone I guess….just sometimes.

Maybe it’s the universes mysterious way of balance. Maybe we just get lost sometimes.
Maybe it doesn’t have to mean we’re crazy, or that we can’t give and have what we yearn for, what we deserve…maybe it’s kind of what makes it all worth it.

For now, Josh plays me this country song…I don’t know the name…or wait, maybe it’s Christian Rock (which I not so secretly love sometimes) and the line says…
:” And they say the road to heaven might leads us back through hell,
but we’re holding on for more than stories to tell.
Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow,
we will win this fight and bury this sorrow.”

It’s called Google Jake, and the band is Wide Awake
Ok, I’m waiting now…come on ME! Get up!…..GET UP!

Peace, be you, Jake

…and I think back to that time composing the songs that would become Alive and Screaming, with the window open and my bare feet sliding on the floor, and the hazy gaze of the midnight black around me. And it hurt so beautifully.

I sit here now in my little house with my little family and I wonder how I got here. I remember the day of my “L.A. freedom party” when I gave up my waiter job, apartment, city, sanity…and I was a traveling poet and a student of life like I always told my Mom I wanted to be, for over a year…a gypsy, singing my way from edge to edge of the country, from peoples floors to a movie star’s home…I learned a lot. About myself, about people…about struggle and how to live with no ground, no comfort, nothing but my raw exposed self.

I think of all the dreamers I met. I think about how cool it is that people invite me into their homes, into your darkest secrets and greatest joys.

There are days now when the prophet feels as if it IS mine. And the purpose has grown so much deeper than the music, but instead has given me an ability to find and speak my heart as it evolves every day. It has given me YOU.

The “Jake Walden Dreamers family”, as eclectic and sometimes dramatic and weird as we are….we love each other. I have learned so much about love and the power of believing in others….hoping for them…hoping for you as you hope for me…every day, in every way, as love should be.

So here I am, at the moment where after 2 years of touring the album, two years of too many hours a day on the computer, of every day trying to create something, traveling the country and meeting, as my dream has always been, the strangest of the strangers…

It’s time I found THAT place again. It takes everything. And for this season, for the creation of something truly of value and depth and uniqueness and honesty and purity and love and LIGHT, for this season I have to go…
I have to make this album, to write it, arrange it, fund it, envision every layer of it, record it, LIVE IT!!

I wrote a song once called “For Someone”. I didn’t know why or for whom it was given to me for at the time. Today I do. I know love, in all its raw, in all its glory, as I always hoped for.

Listen carefully to “Alive and Screaming”, tell your friends as so many have graciously done before. Spread the word and explore the website, download the album or give it to a friend as a gift…it all makes a difference, it adds up…you plant a thousand seeds and eventually one will grow…and once that one does, somehow as life works so too will the rest. No one wants to be first and yet no one wants to be last to the proverbial party.

Know that somewhere as the wind is blowing this summer on an L.A. evening, your friend Jake is putting his everything, including the piece of you that YOU let him see into a new record of THIS time…. and after all the waiting, the wondering and worry and hope, “A and S’s little brother will be born… and I’ll come home again, to this place we have all created. This little world I have gotten to be a part of… and then with your help I will come to your part of the world, face to face, and sing for you, with you…for you…and hopefully we will all look at each other with wonder…and smile.

It all matters… and it all hurts… and it all, every piece of what it is to BE, blows my mind every day…. Maybe, sometimes it’s not supposed to make sense, or maybe it is.

Beyond the success of what may come my way, all that has come so far…. in the end it is about the music, the unexpected connection, the occasional fumbling moments of clarity, the longing and the ache, the raw and the glory…. and most of all, the comfort in daring to question the questions that speak to us.

Come to a concert. Let me see your eyes as I sing, and maybe I’ll let you see mine…and for a moment, well, you just never know….you just never know… the only thing I know…. you know?? There is so much more to come…

See you soon…

Thanks for listening.

Peace, be you,
Jake

www.facebook.com/jakewaldenofficial
www.myspace.com/jakewalden

Anyhow, I found some time yesterday to finally sit still for a few hours. The house was empty and the door open, and my swollen throat and stuffy nose reminded me of how beautiful it is to have this time of year. Everything in L.A. happens so fast, even the weather, and most of all the seasons. We bake and bake and then “freeze and freeze” (quiet non west coasters, to US it gets cold!)…and to our surprises each and every time it rains or gets to be 100 degrees, it’s as if it were happening for the first time EVER.
And yet somewhere between and on either side there are a few weeks where the air and the sky and the sounds are so perfect, you hardly believe its real.
And you wonder if you haven’t gone crazy ( well, I do this often without this phenomenon) and found yourself on one giant Hollywood location movie shoot.

So the door is open, I’m alone, the windows and the air and even my skin tells me it’s OK to just let go, to just BE and escape my mind, escape the constant of original thought and pursued meaning…

I’ve been waiting to marathon ‘The United States of Tara’ on Showtime…
Unlike every other show I visit as my weekly friend, this one is special to me. And I’ve waited for just the right time to watch it.

It fascinates me…it comforts me…it makes me laugh and care and in its low key way. It keeps me RIVITED!!

I can’t explain it, but I find it so beautiful, like when I catch a glimpse of my Josh reading his book when he doesn’t realize I’m watching…and I smile and everything goes away…everything makes sense.

U.S. of Tara is a brilliant show in my opinion and I’m sharing it with you today in case you don’t know about it. I rewinded this one part 5 times to see how many different interpretations I could find in each line of what SHE says to the MAN in the basement…its the kind of truth in writing that stays with you…makes you better…makes you awake…and for me, thankful.

“…of course the pitfall of choosing someone for safety is that we come to resent them…over time…a little.
But Love loves it all.
But Love has to see it.
Love can’t be left in the dark…”

http://www.sho.com/site/tara/home.do

Peace,
be you,
Jake

I woke up to learn and SEE that “For Someone” is being used in a T.V. and internet promo campaign for the show One Tree Hill…uhhhh….yeah….not a bad way to wake up…I have always believed in that song as a perfect piece for film and t.v. and as I rise today after a late night of composing a NEW song for the NEW album, and waking with visions of what is to come, I have to look at the sky, smile and simply be thankful. So much to come….thank you CW network, whomever you are…and Bevin Prince for making the video to that song with me…you laugh and cry so beautifully…I remember that weekend we shot it….I remember that halloween costume and not sleeping for 48 hours and building that fire and finding “the dress. I remember watching the scene where you exit the house with the thought on your mind and the look in your eye that captured something I never even allowed myself to see in the song….it changed everything….Peace, Jake

Here it is….if you see it on T.V. LET ME KNOW!!!! I have to admit that the CW network isn’t playing very often on my boob tube…..

Spread the word, check out the song on Itunes, post post post away for me and keep on dreaming…at least I know I will….

Peace, be you, Jake

http://www.cwtv.com/shows/one-tree-hill

hmmmmm…..

Every time I sing “alive and screaming”,
I wait for the moment where I get to howl to the moon, “I believe when we
love we lose nothing at all…”….because its true…and yet, when you
find it, though it may be human instinct to test it, to run from it and do
all we can to destroy that which gives us life, my wisdom is to see
through the madness, the fear, the expectations and the freedom of
HAPPINESS, and just hold it….fight for it….because believe me, it
takes a lot, every day, in every way….

and nobody, nothing is perfect…
even the most beautiful of life’s creations has its flaws.
In some way I think the flaws are what we end up loving most of all. Love is
blind…ok, yes….but love is also blinding…and its easy to let
yourself get caught up in the minor bullshit, the false disappointments of
the reality that you aren’t in love with YOURSELF but ANOTHER PERSON…and
thank God for that…
If we aren’t careful we can miss our moments, the “magic moments” an
eighteen year old me read about and yearned for in the philosophical
bible of my youth “the alchemist”. If it were easy, if ANYTHING is easy,
well, it’s probably worthless. Paulo Cohelo ended “The Alchemist” with
these words….
“DREAMS MEAN WORK”

Dream on dreamers…the dream is today…Jake

Yes, it’s strange to share this confession…it’s strange to share the struggles, especially when you know the whole story, from personal time with her…it’s strange to wonder if someone would judge…but, in the end, as only she could articulate, I believe this to be universally important to immerse ourselves in for a moment…I believe in her…I accept her as she has accepted me…I root for her and look up to her….
We all have pieces of this story within ours, as with most stories extreme and OTHERS, like a tapestry…like everything…
Peace, be you, Jake
_____________________________________________________________________

for the moment, I’ll keep my friends name anonymous…
“I’m not entirely sure why I’m broadcasting this. Maybe because it feels sort of anonymous, or maybe because I don’t have to look into your faces as I explain. Cowardly as that may seem. This could be fleeting, so I need to get it out, chances are pretty high I’ll delete it out of regret tomorrow anyway.
If I tagged you in this note its because you’ve been witness to me in the throws of my disorder, whether you knew it or not. I know those experiences must be frustrating and confusing at the least, so I guess I’m hoping this will serve as a little insight into what its been like for me to live this way.

I’ve had the symptoms of bi-polar disorder since puberty, it started out as mild depression and disassociation, it was chalked up to “low self-esteem” and dramatics. But through high school/into college it split more into recognizable depression vs. mania. I was officially diagnosed with Bipolar type 2 just out of high school. I’ve been on every medication out there, the ones that stabilized my moods were usually not worth the side effects. And thereapy was effective when I was able to get myself to go.
Living with bi-polar means always living in extremes: extreme energy, “joy” and speed. vs. extreme sadness, debilitating fear, loss of appetite, and pain.

At my worst extremes I suffer from hypomania to severe mania (I call them up-swings). sometimes for weeks at a time. I won’t eat or sleep for days. I’ll make impulsive decisions (like transferring from school in LA to Orange County only to transfer back six months later) I’m incredibly productive at work, a great salesperson, though self involved and often obnoxiously controlling. (because I’m convinced I’m always right) I talk faster and louder, I move quicker from thing to thing and I lose my hold on certain realities. For me, extreme manic episodes do not end until my body physically gives out (from hunger and sleep deprivation)

My depressive episodes (or down-swings) are more frequent, though typically shorter. Again I stop eating, but I will sleep for days if I’m able. I cry without notice and am so overcome with guilt that I convince myself I’m a burden on everyone in my life. (though to be honest, this symptom is prevalent with me 24/7 and even when I’m not depressed I find I have to remind myself that people actually DO want me around) my social anxiety disorder often keeps me from leaving my house, and under stress i suffer from Dermatillomania (compulsive skin picking) until my arms and legs are bleeding from tons of tiny little holes. I cry so much it becomes physically painful. Its harder for me to breath and my muscles and joints ache. my heart feels broken and I become so sad it hurts.

Some of these symptoms, like the self mutilation, have lessened for me over the years (mostly through self therapies like meditation) but some, like the social anxiety, have grown worse. For someone who used to be a performer and almost every aspect of the word I can’t even sing in front of my boyfriend and while I used to go to Disneyland every week now I have anxiety attacks in grocery stores.

The hardest thing for me is the guilt. At my lowest lows I cry praying someone will just hold me and rock me and protect me but the thought of burdening someone like that keeps me alone in those moments. (hell I’m crying now just sharing this because I know so many of you are going to respond with “you can call me anytime”s and I feel bad making you worry) Its a constant vicious cycle that I cannot seem to escape.

I fill my life with structure and work (sometime with work that makes me miserable) because it keeps me out of my head. I had the day off today and did (almost) nothing. Because of this I got lost in my own thoughts and I slipped into a downswing. I feel so horribly alone but the thought of someone else seeing me this way is mortifying. I’ll come out of it in a day or two, I’ve learned to live this way, I just wish it wasn’t so hard on others.

The whole reason I’m writing this is because I’m neglecting you. I haven’t talked to my best friends in months, yes I’m busy, but its more because I’m so full of shame and when you ask me how I am I don’t want to lie to you. I’ve been an absentee friend, and I know it frustrates you. You don’t deserve this, I love you and I’m sorry for it. I’m working on getting better about it, but please know I don’t do it on purpose.
I’m also writing this because I know a few of you are going through some really tough times. I want nothing more then to help you feel better but lately I’ve had to struggle to get out of bed every day. please know that I’m sending you my love and as soon as i am able I will give you the support you deserve.

Despite everything I am hopeful. I want what everyone wants; love and happiness and I’m willing to fight for it. I’m a lot more controlled than I used to be, I can recognize (usually) when I begin to swing one way or another and I can usually warn people ahead of time. I’m careful about what I eat and i still meditate regularly.Someday I’ll defeat this thing. I want to thank you all for your support, your love, and your patience. I hope this helped (at least a little bit) explain where I’m coming from or how I process. I’m so grateful that you are all in my life, though I am often awful about expressing it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

H
2010

“Night has always pushed up day
You must know life to see decay
But I won’t rot, I won’t rot
Not this mind and not this heart,
I won’t rot.

And there will come a time, you’ll see, with no more tears.
And love will not break your heart, or dismiss your fears.
Get over your hill and see what you find there,
With grace in your heart and flowers in your hair.”

“After the Storm”- Mumford and Sons

For more info on Bipolar disorder visit: http://sharingbipolar.com/ ”