Sharpen The Sword

When I was in Grad School getting my Masters from the best University in Miss.......USM (Go Eagles), one of the first books that I was required to read was Dr. Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Of course, I wouldn't want my blog to be a book review but I will at least say that his writing dramatically influenced the following years of my life. One of Dr. Covey's chapters in his book talked about keeping the sword sharp. In his writing, he described the importance of taking time to retreat from the everyday race to find time to keep yourself sharp mentally, physically and spiritually. According to Covey, when we go too long without devoting time to keeping our swords sharp, we become dull and average in everything that we do.

For me, one of the perfect ways that I have learned to sharpen my sword is to retreat to a quiet place outside and to write music. Thankfully, this weekend gave me a couple of days to do just that. On Friday, I was able to bring my guitars out to my place and I was able to spend some nice quality time writing and enjoying the incredible weather. On Saturday, I played a gig at noon and made it back out before sunset to enjoy some additional quiet time. On both occasions, I stayed until the sun was completely down and it was just awesome. Because of the new album, the promotions, the gigs and all of the webstuff that I have to do, I have not had any time to spend out writing. It was so good to be back in my element and I hope that I can find a few more of those days soon.

On Saturday, I played a solo acoustic gig for the Tangi Book Fest and it was very nice. I met a lot of nice people and enjoyed my time there. I got to play my new Manuel Patterson and that was a treat as I don't usually bring it to our normal gigs. Playing solo was a really cool experience and I enjoyed it. Congrats to all of the organizers of the Book Fest on putting a nice event together.

This week will be very busy as we have to prepare for Ponchatoula's Party In The Pits which will be held this coming Saturday, Oct 16th in downtown Ponchatoula. My Band is the featured entertainment. Prior to Saturday, I have to rework my entire sound setup to re-format our settings. Gonna be a busy week. I hope to get some promotional work done with Louisiana as well. There is just not enough time in the day.

Have a great week!!!!

Gregory