3rd Single "Start With A Stone" Streams Today!

Take a first listen and check out the YouTube Lyric Video by Carrie Newcomer

Hi Everyone,

I’m so excited to let everyone know the third single, “Start With A Stone” from my new album A Great Wild Mercy is NOW available to hear on all streaming platforms. The full album will be released on October 13th!

“Start with a Stone” was co-written with my friend John McCutcheon, and features the wonderful talents of Jim Brock, Brittany Haas, Paul Kowert, Jordan Tice, Gary Walters and harmony vocals with Siri Undlin. It was such an incredibly fun track to record. I think you can hear all of us grinning out loud during the session.

More about the song….. John is a master songwriter and story teller and its been wonderful to explore fun and meaningful topics together in song. John and I are both students of contemplative practice and this song explores the wisdom that can be found in the natural things and natural places. (Here’s a link to John’s Website (with tour info and online concerts), Spotify Page)

A Few Thoughts and Experiences about starting with stones…

Sometimes when my head or heart feels too full, I go out into the woods behind my home and literally lay down on the ground and let the good earth support me. I love the smell of the loamy soil, the foot of humus it takes a forest years and years to make. Somehow when I feel the shale, limestone and bedrock beneath my back the world makes a more sense.

At this time of year I usually begin an annual mediation of creating stacks of stones and geodes in a dry creek bed. I don’t create them all at once, but a stack or two a day. Although the creek is dry at this time of year, I know that that this same creek will flood will in the springtime, and when that happens the stones will be washed back into the fast moving water. It has become an annual meditation on permanence and impermanence. I remember watching a ritual performed by a group of Tibetan monks. Over three days the monks created an intricate sand mandala by tapping individual grains of colored sand (very tiny stones) onto a large wooden board. At the end of the three days the monks perform a ceremony where they tip the board and all those carefully placed grains of sand into a wide river. I like to think of my autumn stone stacking as my own muddy Hoosier creek version of that ancient Tibetian practice.

So we start with a stone, with what is humble and small, what is mysterious and true, what is large enough to hold up a forest and can rest easily in the palm of my open hand.

Geodes and stones and fossils in the creek bed near my home.

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New YouTube Lyric Video

If you’d like to see a fun lyric video for the song you can see it on my YouTube page Here’s the Link

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Photo by John Salzarulo on Unsplash

Question and Practice

Practice

Go outside and find a stone somewhere on the ground. Put it in the palm of your hand and feel the weight of it, notice the shape and color, tap on it and get a sense of its solidity. Now think of this small stone as being a part of the larger mystery of the earth, a piece of the ground you stand on, a small piece of an ancient and enduring story. Consider how history and future meet right there in the palm of your hand.

Put the stone in your pocket or somewhere you’ll bump into it in the next day or so and when you do….remember how you are connected to this continuing story. D

Question

What was it like to consider a common stone as part of a continuing and enduring story? What is it like to consider your moment in history, right here in the eternal now as part of that unfolding story?

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Great Wild Mercy Fall Tour

Here’s a couple of shows happening in the next week. For my full fall/winter tour visit www.carrienewcomer.com/tour

One Inch Photos

One inch photos from my walk yesterday.