Kelly astrally projects

When a concert bassoonist is canceled for her refusal to get vaccinated, a whole new universe opens, her father’s star burning brightest.

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this episode about vaccines, medical care, and esotericism do not represent those on the TAPIT team.

Transcript

Todd  0:00  
What Kelly has learned from her dad is a lot.

For example, He taught her how to turn everything into a game.

Kelly  0:12  
Even if we were going to Home Depot and the grocery store, he'd say, let's go on an adventure today.

Todd  0:19  
Six foot two, handsome, playful, curious...

Kelly  0:22  
...very charming, very outgoing, very loving personality, brilliant mind...

Todd  0:29  
An electrical engineer, always tinkering on new inventions... 

Kelly  0:33  
...too smart for his own good at times. Definitely was one of these people that questioned everything, and so my mom would say, like, he didn't believe the rules were for him all the time, you know, didn't want to follow the rules. Had a bit of a rebellious spirit, but it wasn't in rebellion. It was more like, at times, these rules don't make sense. 

Todd  0:55  
But neither Kelly nor her dad could have known that not following the rules would eventually cost Kelly astronomically. 

Kelly  1:04  
In one sweep, I lost my dad, my home, and my career. 

Todd  1:08  
There's a poem in that. I'm Todd Boss. Hey.

Kelly  1:12  
Hello. 

Todd  1:14  
Hey, how are you? 

Kelly  1:15

I am great. It's a great day... 


Todd  1:17 
On this podcast, I help strangers discover the poetry in their most intimate stories.

Todd  1:23  
I'm a clinical poet lending my MFA training and 30 year literary career to serve those in need of a custom poem. The podcast is gaining traction. More and more people are leaving messages on my listener line, seeking a poetic take on the most profound themes in their lives. If you're a regular listener, you've heard me work with a diverse range of people, wanting me to write them through trauma, celebration, grief or joy. If I can't write the poem my client needs, I use my credibility in the field to find a poet who can. You may not think your life is poetic, but I assure you that it is, whether you're a poetry reader or not, no matter your level of education or your background, no matter what you do for a living, your custom poem is just a phone call away. 808-300-0449

Todd  2:18  
On my last episode I wrote for a ballet dancer. Before that, a law student. On this truly astral episode, my guest is a classical bassoonist. 

Kelly  2:32  
I'm currently based in Dallas, Texas, which is where I grew up. I was born and raised there. 

Todd  2:38  
Kelly previously lived in LA, where she did well, playing professionally with orchestras and ensembles. By 2020, she was making a good living at it. 

Kelly  2:48  
And then, of course, COVID hit. Overnight, I like to say, March 15, the day that the world fell. All of the things I had lined up for the rest of 2020, early 2021 were just gone. 

Todd  3:00  
And then she got a call from her father...

Kelly  3:03  
Kind of out of the blue. It was a five minute, very quick phone call saying, hey, something's really wrong. I need you to come home, like, tomorrow. We're sending you a plane ticket. 

Todd  3:15  
Her father was dying, so Kelly flew home to Dallas. Ten years earlier, Kelly's dad had been diagnosed with multiple myeloma: cancer in the bone marrow. 

Kelly  3:28  
I think it was at least three oncologists who all said you're basically at stage four. You're, like, teetering on the edge. 

Todd  3:38  
Originally, all three doctors had recommended radiation and an immediate bone marrow transplant, but he decided not to follow those rules and followed the advice of a holistic cancer doctor instead. He changed his lifestyle and diet. He beat the odds and got 10 more years of life, but by now... 

Kelly  3:59  
The treatment was not responding well to his body, and over the course of six months, basically his body deteriorated just to nothing, and he passed away in September of 2020. He was a really bright light, really fun. He was really, really special person in my life.

Todd  4:40  
The new year came, and things were beginning to normalize. There was talk of COVID vaccines being rolled out. People started seeing live music again. Musicians were rehearsing, orchestras hiring. 

Kelly  4:52  
But all of the jobs, even recording jobs, all had the stipulation of needing the vaccine to work, and because of what I had learned about the medical industry from my dad's journey and being in the holistic world, I just knew this was not something that I was gonna take personally. It was not right for my body.

Todd  5:18  
Like her father, Kelly didn't totally trust the pharmaceutical industry. 

Kelly  5:22  
When the vaccine started rolling out and organizations started putting their mandates down, I sent out letters to several of these, these people, heads of organizations, very lovingly, saying, Hey, this is why I am reconsidering this. I really hope you take a good look at this too, and got no response back ever. It felt a lot like ghosting or gaslighting. 

Todd  5:55  
Remember that Kelly's beliefs are bound up in 10 years of her father's treatment decisions.

Kelly  6:01  
This was affecting my ability to work and my livelihood. This was not something I was willing to stay silent about. 

Todd  6:11  
Kelly took to social media to try and articulate her perspective. 

Kelly  6:15  
It was amazing the response from long time friends and colleagues and how quickly people became, like, almost violent in a way, and all of a sudden, like, the amount of shame and comments like, "I hope you and your family die," and "You shouldn't be allowed to walk into a hospital anymore," and this was at a time when I'm going through the grief of losing my dad so unexpectedly, and music--and especially the music community--had always been a place of safety and community for me.

Todd  7:01  
Canceled probably isn't the right word. It's the easy one that comes to mind. But did it feel to you like you had been canceled, or did it feel is there a better word? 

Kelly  7:10  
No, I think that's a very appropriate word. I mean, I wasn't allowed to work for two and a half years. For two and a half years, I was rejected from jobs that I had previously had long term relationships. You know, I was shamed by former colleagues on social media. That broke friendships, and it just got to the point that I didn't want to be in Los Angeles anymore. Like, there kind of wasn't anything left. 

Todd  7:40  
Emotions were running high during those Trump years on both sides of the vaccine debate. If you stuck your neck out about it, you may well have paid the price. 

Kelly  7:49  
You know, people were starting to reach out about jobs again. But as soon as I said, you know, sorry, I don't have a vaccine, they just moved on, you know, and put me on the Not Available list. And so this was the first time in my life I had to face the reality that if I were not allowed to do music, if I couldn't do music, what else was I going to do with myself?

Todd  8:40  
Kelly had always considered herself a spiritual person: sound baths, Kundalini yoga, meditation. Eventually, she found her way to astrology, 

Kelly  8:50  
And I started practicing with friends for fun, doing little readings for them. And I found out that I had a very natural talent for it. 

Todd  9:00  
A meditation retreat inspired Kelly to launch an astrology business. It gave her a new purpose and a new community. 

Kelly  9:07  
It was a huge blessing in a time when so much of my life had been cleared out.

Todd  9:16  
On remote viewing....what do you mean? 

Kelly  9:17  
So the practice of remote viewing is being able to intuitively, I'll use that word, intuitively, astral project yourself somewhere at some specific point in time and view what is happening in a scene. 

Todd  9:35  
If you've seen the Marvel movies featuring Doctor Strange, you know that astral projection is the idea that a person's consciousness can leave their physical body and travel through the astral plane, where, after death, souls work out their karma, sometimes by returning to Earth. Wow, so, and this is something you are aspiring to practice, or this is something you practice? 

Kelly  9:58  
I'm learning the formal technique. 

Todd  10:00  
Now, through all of this, Kelly's relationship to her bassoon suffered.

Kelly  10:06  
Every time I picked up my instrument and started to play like just tears would would roll down my face, and I almost couldn't play because I had so much like grief and anger and disappointment, and for me, the love of playing music is actually playing with people, especially the bassoon. It's not a solo instrument. 

Todd  10:28  
Her estrangement from her own instrument was difficult, because Kelly feels a real kinship with the bassoon, 

Kelly  10:34  
So me and the bassoon are the same personality. The sound of the instrument even mirrors my own voice and character, how it gets used in the orchestra. You know, it's the one that you don't know it's there until it's gone.

When I first heard it, I fell in love with the sound. It is low, which, I love low instruments. It's rich. The two main characters that it's, it plays is either the very silly, goofy character, which I'm sure everyone has heard in a cartoon or a commercial, the like, stuff like that. So, in a way, it kind of plays the jester, but then it also plays these super lyrical, sappy, tenor solos. I just love playing with both of those characters. My favorite music to play is actually the super sad, sappy music. 

Todd  11:49  
Kelly's love for this instrument and its music makes more sense to me when she tells me about her childhood. 

Kelly  11:56  
I wasn't necessarily allowed to express my sad emotions in day to day life. So then I got to go and express it in music, like, just, fully. 

Todd  12:06  
Kelly's parents went through a nasty divorce when she was just five years old. 

Kelly  12:10  
I was like a sponge, and I just soaked up all of my parents' emotions, their negative emotions, and I primarily lived with my mom, though I saw both of my parents pretty equally, and they were both very present in my whole childhood and life. But my mom, being a single working mom, she was just on the go all the time and wasn't necessarily there for me emotionally. I split my time between my parents, but they were always using me between them to make the other parent do something. So there was always a lot of anger and fighting, and I was just the pawn in between.

I discovered so early on that I was so good at music, I just went for it full force. And so it was a place to put my energy in a positive way and transmute all of the negative feelings I was experiencing: the anxiety, the depression, the guilt or shame or whatever kind of being in the middle of my parents. 

Todd  13:36  
Kelly's dad was supportive of her music, but only to a point. He was proud of her for going to music school, but ultimately, he made no secret about wanting her to take over his business. 

Kelly  13:48  
He had a really successful company that made manufactured relays, which are a little electronic part that's in a lot of stuff, and that was always his dream. I wasn't willing to do that. 

Todd  14:01  
When Kelly moved to LA, he questioned her career. For him, there were never enough gigs. The paychecks were never big enough. 

Kelly  14:08  
And it really got to the point where we had a very surface level relationship for those years. And I always knew, okay, once I get to the point that I feel really successful in my career, things are going well. He's kind of gotten through the hardest part of his treatment. In my heart, I just knew we would come back together eventually, and we'd be able to restore that relationship at some point. And so it was that one of the one of the hardest parts of this whole experience was, like, never fully getting that.

Todd  14:58  
Kelly still feels the ripple effects of that last separation to this day,

Kelly  15:05  
For me, there is still so much emotion wrapped up in it and words that I have never gotten to speak directly with a lot of people that have never been acknowledged. It was so hard to see what many of my long time friends and colleagues were saying in these public spaces. I knew it was coming from a place of fear and hurt and pain and wanting also to do the best thing for their families, for themselves, for the communities. I have a lot of compassion for people that felt that way, and I can understand it logically from that lens, but now there is still a divide, and all I really wanted was an acknowledgement of...I see you, I understand your perspective, and respectfully we're gonna take this route for now.

Todd  16:26  
Kelly's list of grievances is rather long, and it makes me wish she could find... 

Kelly  16:31  
I haven't received a single apology...

Todd  16:35  
...some way... 

Kelly  16:36  
...from anyone...

Todd  16:37  
...to move on... 

Kelly  16:38  
...just simply saying, you know, I'm so sorry that I said these things during these years. I was really afraid of what was going on, and now I see that we're moving forward, and we hope you'll join us again.

Todd  17:01  
I'm not trained as a therapist, and I can't claim to believe in astral projection, either, but I am trained to pay attention and to make connections. In three hours of interview with Kelly, I can empathize with the difficulty of being canceled, with the complexity of fathe-daughter relationships, and with the weird dissociation of ambiguous loss. So I bet you're eager to see what I've written. I've got something for you. 

Kelly  17:28  
I am. I'm so excited. 

Todd  17:31  
I'm really excited about it. I took some liberties, some poetic license, and... Weeks went by after our last interview, and as I puzzled over how to approach Kelly's poem, I found myself wishing I could consult with Kelly's dad, the fun loving inventor. I wondered what advice he would give her, now that he himself has moved on.

I gave this a lot of thought. I'm a father and an inventor myself. Pretty soon I was writing, dare I say, channeling a poem in the form of a letter. The poem is called Gratitude Re-circulator (An Invention). I'm going to forward you PDF. 

Kelly  18:16  
Okay.

Todd  18:17  
And let me know when you see it, and then I'll read it to you. 

Kelly  18:23  
Here we go. Okay, exciting. I'm gonna open this. I pulled it up. Are we ready? 

Todd  18:32  
Okay, are you ready? 

Kelly  18:33  
I'm ready. 

Todd  18:35  
Okay, let's do it. It's called "Gratitude Re-circulator (An Invention)."

Hey, Kelly, just wanted/ to say I miss you, miss/ your smile. Four years/ is an awful long while/ to be away from/ a daughter no matter/ where you go, or how,/ or how far./ As you can see, I got/ your call. Sorry it took/ awhile to reply. You/ die and you think That’s/ it, it’s done, but then/ a little light gets in,/ and there’s joy. Y’know?/ You’ve forgiven and/ moved on, and I’m no/ engineer anymore,/ but I co-designed this/ gratitude re-circulator./ Guess that’s what poets/ and musicians are for./ I hear you have new/ instruments, too, new/ schematics, anyway./ We take what work/ a lifetime will allow,/ and it doesn’t really/ matter how, but a father/ loves to hear a daughter/ play. So, play!/ That’s all I’ve got to/ say, for now. Glad/ you’re home. Kiss/ your mom. Nobody/ stays long mad./ Love, Dad. 

Kelly  20:39  
You really know how to make people cry.

I've noticed that's a theme on your show.

Todd  20:52  
You can read and hear this poem again and find Kelly's response to it, plus a link to her astrology business, on our website, poeminthat.com Is your life poetic? Let's find out. Tell me why you think so by leaving a voicemail on our Haiku, Hawaii listener line:808-300-0449.

This episode was produced by me, Todd Boss and co-producer, Hila Plitmann.

Kelly  21:20  
I feel like you literally channeled my dad. 

Todd  21:25  
It was edited by Claire Wiley. Ben O'Brien did the final mix. Our theme music was written and performed by Esh Whitacre. Special thanks to Kelly Castle on bassoon.

I'm Todd Boss, reminding you that there's a poem in everything, if you're paying attention, 

Kelly  21:52  
I'm so grateful. And what a gift. Thank you. Thank you so much.