Composer Misha Penton on Music, Myth, and Magic

In this engaging conversation, author T. Thorn Coyle speaks with Misha Penton, a multifaceted artist who explores the intersections of music, poetry, and spirituality. They delve into Misha's creative roots, the influence of language and poetry on her work, and the importance of adapting ancient texts into modern music. The discussion also touches on the role of community in music creation, the impact of technology on artistic expression, and the significance of spiritual practices in nurturing creativity. Misha shares her passion for reimagining fairy tales and sacred stories, emphasizing the interconnectedness of music, technology, and the natural world. The conversation concludes with reflections on the sense of wonder that inspires their creative endeavors.

Find out more about Misha at https://mishapenton.com

To support this podcast, please join Thorn's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ThornCoyle

Transcript

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Hello friends, welcome to Magic, Creativity, and Life, interesting conversations with interesting people. My name is T. Thorncoil and I am your host. Thank you for joining me and thank you to my Patreon supporters for paying for the recording and captioning of this series. Let's dive in. Hello everybody, welcome to Magic, Creativity, and Life. My name is T. Thorne Coyle, and today I'm speaking with Misha Penton. Misha is a singer, composer, recording artist, music, video maker, and writer. She creates chamber electronica for mystics and visionaries, exploring new mythologies, reimagining sacred story, and reclaiming fairy tales. She is a big city mystic celebrating the dystopian beauty of Houston, spiraling up super highways and wildflower lined bayous. She is also an expressive arts facilitator, creativity coach, and teaching artist. Her upcoming projects include a set of songs inspired by the Homeric hymn to Apollo and a concept album of 19th century fairy tales. You can connect with her at misha.penton.com. Misha, welcome. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Yeah, I'm glad you're here. So as I said in your bio, and as I know, personally, you are primarily a musician and work in the musical arts in a variety of forms. But the question I ask all my guests to start off with is, what are your creative roots? Was it always music? Was there other stuff that you were attracted to as a child? Other? creative forms. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, so I grew up loving the performing arts. I loved dance, which was probably my first expressive love. And I grew up in a creative family. yeah, it was really about performing poetry. I loved it. wrote poetry at a very early age. I was involved in theater, in the summer and at school and the music programs in my public school were really strong. And, I think there's something about expressing myself vocally, with poetry and through poetry with the voice that I gravitated to over time. And my brother is a musician. My father was a photographer. My sister's a photographer and my mother is a painter. My dad painted, you know, there was a lot of, a lot of that stuff around. and I, I'm also a painter as well. And, and I do photography and video and all that stuff. So very multidisciplinary, there's something I think about, music that, is. where I became focused. That's interesting. know, poetry was where I started too as a tiny child, right? I remember pushing paper and pencil under my nightlight and writing poetry. I also did theater. You know, I also studied music a little bit, not really though, although singing was always a love of mine and dancing too. But My family was not really an artistic family. were very solidly working class and working poor. Although my parents were both great dancers and my dad did love to sing. So I did have it. I did have the arts through that, think. so it's interesting though, poetry, child poetry as a childhood occupation. is very curious to me. And it's interesting to me that both of us loved poetry as children. And I wonder if it's something about playing with language and rhyming that captures a child's imagination. What do you think that is? Yeah, I do. I think that it is a love of language, a love of the sound of language. I think one of the things that I'm really drawn to is the sonority of language. beyond or before any kind of, denotative kind of meaning making. Right. I love the sound of it. My mother read to me a lot. and I loved, nursery rhymes and fairy tales and the fantastical aspect of, what language could do. But I do think there's something definitely to it about the love of the sound and then wanting to put the sounds of the words together. Right. And it's very musical. Yes. Yeah, it really is. And the way I write prose now is very informed by poetry, which is also interesting to me. You know, like I use in a strange way because in poetry, line breaks were breath breaks, right? And some of that translates into prose for me, which is not strictly grammatically correct, but it's a way I communicate feeling. And there's something about the musicality you're talking about that captures our emotional state as well as our imagination. Yeah, I agree with that. And the sense of phrasing in the language that is driven by the length of the breath. Yes. So that really informs, obviously, my singing, but writing as well. I was, I know what you mean, because I'm very familiar with your writing. And I've been reading some of your fiction as well, which is delightful. And And I noticed that it's conversational in a way in which I can kind of hear your voice as if you are telling the story, as opposed to maybe just something I'm reading on the page. Right. so that's, and I think that's the way I write too. I, anything that I write, whether it's poetry or prose, I'm, I read it out loud. And I, in a lot of ways, I think that's what my writing is, is meant to be heard. It's meant to be heard really. Right. So it's interesting to me. And I want to go back to phrasing in music through notes. So I'm going to put a pin in that, but it's interesting to me that you are now making songs inspired by Homer's hymns, because of course, Homer's storytelling was all through poetry and cadence and capturing the imagination that way because early poets had to memorize, right? And so Homer and the early poets used that sort of the repetition and the cadence of language as mnemonic devices. as well as ways to capture the audience's imagination, because people would have been listening to those poems. They would not have been reading those poems. And of course, we're reading them in translation, which means all of Homer's rhyme schemes, etc. are gone. You know, the only thing we get mostly in translation is some of the repetition. So how is that for you working with Homer and translating that yet again into songs and music. You know, I, when I do adaptations like this, I often gravitate, toward a translation and then choose kind of phrases or, or bits of it or fragments. that appeal to me and then I riff on that. And look back at the source words and the etymology. And usually what happens is another parallel story of my own in a sense emerges that's inspired by these ancient texts, which is how over time, they've been passed down from one artist or writer or teller or dancer or musician to the next in retellings over centuries. And every generation and every culture and every era adds their layers to that. Where they become meaningful for us. So that to me is so powerful. It's so powerful. It's what I think makes Sacred Story, if you will, powerful, is our ability to revisit, reinterpret, be re-inspired by it in new ways that are beyond the imagination of whoever may have been the original author. Yes, I love that. And it also makes it It's not only personal to you, but you're adapting it for our times and the culture you live in, which is also intriguing to me. Yeah. There's this really great last line in the opening of Homer's The Odyssey, and it begins with the hymn to the muse, which I have a, I've created a song also from that snippet of the beginning. And the last line of it from the original is translated to sing as you have always sung, tell it for our time. Wow. So even then Homer or, you know, the poets of the time were saying, I'm retelling this ancient story and tell it so it makes sense to us right now. Right. Which is so huge to me and so incredible that these, you know, these ancient peoples who really, I think, understood poetry in ways that we've lost touch with, understood that kind of power of reimagining meaning, really. Well, and it's interesting that you say you feel we've lost some of that. You know, I was just talking recently about how we don't have work songs anymore. know, people rarely whistle anymore, right? We used to make our own music and make music together. And now it's much more distant, right? We still have an emotional connection to song and to music, but it's less We're less personally involved in it. It's been left up to the professionals, right? Rather than being just it's basic human activity, right? Making music, making rhythm, singing together, that sort of thing. So, I mean, I know part of it is technology. Part of it is we work differently than we used to, or many of us do in many cultures. You know, the advent of, you know, way back, the Walkman, right? We all of a sudden had headphones on and a personal cassette music player, right? And we've only gone on from there. whereas we used to entertain ourselves in each other, we no longer had to. Do you have any thoughts about that progression and how that's affected us as a culture? Yeah, I think that's really huge. And I think collaborative creativity is so powerful. and I think, you know, the professionalization does take that away. And also the way that children are raised to self-censor at very early ages, and not have that sense of play. mean, we call it playing music for a reason. Right, right. It's playful. And it is a birthright. And I think that, you know, there are still cultures that do have pub sings or communal singing or communal creative workmaking of whatever kind. And that's often passed down through the elder generations in community. So I think that what you're getting at is true. The sense of of singularity or isolation from technology. And there's a somewhat of a breakdown, I think, with the way that we share the arts in the West. I think it clearly it still exists. mean, I do a lot of creative work as well. And that's really powerful. And choral singing is really powerful way to connect. And a lot of people do that in church and in other countries in the West, there's stronger traditions of choral singing. yeah, I I agree that it's kind of sad that we have this amazing technology that can do incredible things. But it does seem to have influenced our ability to connect. Yeah, we also we don't, we're not forced to provide entertainment for ourselves and each other anymore. Right? It has to be sought out. Like you have to go to a pub sing or invite a few of your friends over to sit around and play music, you know, what a lot of traditional musicians call the kitchen table sessions, right? But we've got video on demand. We have, you know, I have a million books, you know, in my e-reader or my phone. And we have music on demand also and art every day on the internet for as long as that lasts. So I think that's another part of it too, is we still love all these things, but we no longer have to make them for ourselves. Yeah. Yeah. And I, and I think that is, it's, it makes me sad really, because it's a consuming of, which I think is not all bad. but I think that losing the desire to learn how to do, you know, a creative endeavor or. because it's just, you know, you're just consuming it every day on your phone. And just the breakdown of things like arts education and that kind of thing, it all contributes to it. But you're right. It's this idea that you're just informally sitting around at the kitchen table singing songs or, you know, you're, you know, dying wool with your grandmother. And there are songs that go with that. you know, that activity. So, and I'm not, I don't know how we regain that, you know, or find the threads of where that exists for it to be a nurturing thing, because that's what it is. It's very nurturing. Yeah. And it's community building too. You know, I mean, I think that's part, that may be why. Some people love things like karaoke so much, right? It's a chance to go out and sing with your friends where you wouldn't otherwise. It's an excuse, right? So it turns into a fun event. It's interesting to me too, because, you know, back to Homer, clearly there were professional poets and musicians in that time, professional actors, theater people, right? But there was alongside the professional class of artists, also the ordinary people's arts. And that's the other thing is, know, manufacturing, mass manufacturing has taken over so many of the ordinary arts. It's right. So pottery, basket making, all those things that, of course, people still do. And some cultures are much more heavily supportive of those activities, but most of us don't have to do that. You know, it's only when we're outside of our day to day life that we have the chance to create even I mean, that's the other thing is right, how many people are just working too many hours to put bread on the table. Whereas during the pandemic lockdowns, all of a sudden, all these people were making bread at home. Right? Because they had time. Right. And they needed an activity because they couldn't be around other people and do their usual activities. Yeah. That's so funny about the bread making and, and, and I, I did it. I had my sourdough starter. I'll have, you know, and, and, know, there was something really kind of exciting about it and important to keep the starter going and, share the starter with other people and, that whole thing, you know, And when you say that about you, you're talking about pottery, you know, think ceramics have a great love of ceramics and I'm not a ceramicist, but you know, I have some pieces of pottery that I just cherish. And it's sort of funny in the context of what you're saying that something that might have been an ordinary cup or bowl is now a cherished artwork. I mean, it is an artwork, but, but it's not, it's not as mundane in, the sense of, of when you needed cups and plates and bowls, you either made them or you went to the potter and, and, you know, it became part of your household's necessities. Right. so yeah, I, I don't, I don't know the There is that separation that you're talking about between life in 21st century America and making things, creating things, having a creative life, being a writer or a painter or a musician, dancer, and how that supports or doesn't support, you know, your life, contemporary life. and how that's woven in. Yeah. Art is and craft. They're living things, right? So that sourdough starter is literally a living thing that needs to be fed and needs to be passed along. But it becomes a metaphor for other arts and crafts, which are also living things. And they are part of how humanity we've weave ourselves together, right? And share information, share culture, share values and beauty. So I don't really know where I'm going with that. It just feels, it feels interesting and important to me that art and creativity are living things and how many of us allow ourselves to partake and participate in that activity. Yeah. And I think that, I think that one of the things about internet culture and the advent of AI is this idea that everything can be, you know, all the artistic work can be created by a computer in an imitative sort of way. I am intrigued in many ways by the technology and I've used some of it in some video work. But I'm very troubled by it and for many, many reasons. But one of the things that you're talking about is so important, this connectivity of how we communicate through our creative acts, however that might be defined, and having something like a computer structure that then sings the songs, makes the paintings. makes the video of the AI dancer, you know, like all of that is really, that's a big thing that's really intense to think about. The dancer and musician Twiggs was just talking about that, you know, that yes, she might use these technologies as a tool. Like she might clone herself and play with that and banned her artistry in that way. But no one else is allowed to do that. Right. Right. To do that is stealing twigs is creativity. Yeah. Right. It's kind of like, you know, people used to think that a camera stole your soul. Well, here we are. Right. Is generative AI, you know, when it's doing things like cloning people and the deep fakes, right. Deep fakes are theft of person. Yeah, sure. So that's an interesting ethical conundrum, let alone all the environmental impact. mean, the environmental impact of generative AI is pretty horrific. Yeah, it's massive. It's really, really massive. And yeah. I don't know where, I don't know this. I feel like all the science fiction writers have told us all these stories. So it's not like we don't know where it's going. So, yeah, yeah. I, I used, for, I, I did a, a video for the winter solstice, last year called earth shine that I filmed of me in part and. Then I used AI, I ran my videos through an AI and then used it like as a filter. And it created kind of this cool subtle animated effect. But like you say, it's like the environmental footprint of it. The fact that, okay, I'm the one who's creating the material and as an artist, it's my work. is a lot different than, you know, these weird voice cloning things where, you know, you can sound like any singer. You know, it's stealing somebody's identity, essentially. Yes. Yeah. It's identity theft. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, yeah, I don't know. We're just in an interesting juncture with all this. I mean, clearly I use... computer tools. hate calling anything AI because it's not actually artificial intelligence. Unfortunately, that's the shorthand we use. You know, when I edit these podcasts, the program I use, it's out 30 second clips for me, it finds, it tracks our conversation, finds what seems like we have the most energy. And it'll spit out 30 second clips for me. Now in the past I could have hired someone to do that or done it myself. I'd rather use a machine for that activity. So, you know, in that way, well, that's part of my creative process, right? I design book covers and I format books using computer programs, right? And so it's not that I'm against technology. Right. I just have questions about how we're using it. and what the impact is and who it's actually empowering and whose pockets it's lining. Yeah. Yeah. And it's rarely the artist, right? Right. Right. And it, you know, I mean, I think that has, I've seen that with, the way that I share my music, whether I have it on my website or band camp, I have a lot of music up on the streaming services and you know, it, I think of that in a sense as having a business card to have my work on the streaming services. Right. But everybody knows who's making money off of that. Yes. It's not you. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. As usual, getting paid in exposure. Right. Like I like to say exposure to the elements. So moving on from that, what practices do you do? that ground you in your life, in your work, help expand your creativity? Do you have spiritual practices you do? What else? What do you want to say about that? Yeah, I do. have, you know, I feel like my work is a spiritual practice in many ways. And then I have foundational practices through movement and yoga-based work, breath work, meditation. I have an expressive painting practice that I do every day with watercolors that is a very flow, of quite literally flow. and metaphorically, a flow practice that keeps me rooted in the sense of creativity as play. And so that's really important. do work with Tarot and Oracle kinds of deck kind of things that speak to me through the power of of poetry and inspiration. So I have sort of my background is in, you know, solitary pagan practice and drawn to Eastern mysticism and occult practices. My mother was Catholic, Roman Catholic. there's a a mysticism to my upbringing that I really related to, if not to the religious aspect of it. Organized. and ritual. Yeah, exactly. Ritual has always been really powerful for me. I love the theater of it. I love that idea that the symbols are speaking to a part of me. that doesn't communicate in words. So I find that to be very powerful. So yeah, I do. have a lot of those kind of foundational spiritual practices that I incorporate very organically in my day. I rarely do sort of formal ritual anymore. But I love the tools of magical practice and I have those around my studio space. I, yeah, so that's kind of where I'm coming from. Sort of spiritually, it feels like the creative work itself is a spiritual practice in part. That makes sense to me. I mean, I definitely am in a similar flow when I'm writing or composing. songs, or even designing book covers as I am when doing ritual practice, right? Or, you know, my meditative practices. It connects to a similar part of my brain, which is why I think these meditative or spiritual practices are so helpful to me as a creative person. And in your work, I'm particularly interested in you talking about tarot cards and your water color practice and symbols, you know, the importance of symbols connecting us, right? Symbols speak to our subconscious. And I wonder then if that work of looking at tarot cards, doing your flow state, water colors, and working with symbols that must then inform your writing and composing of music. Yeah, I'm not really sure exactly how it does, but I there is definitely a connection or just kind of feels like all one thing in a way. It feels like it comes all from the same ground. I have been doing a lot of work with kind of symbols, sigil, almost like a created alphabet, but not an alphabet that I use a masking fluid with my watercolors, which means that it's a kind of fluid that you can make a design with that will stop the watercolor from getting on the paper. So you let that dry and then you can put watercolor down and peel it away and you end up with a design as well. All that is to say is that I've been working a lot with the sigil idea for quite some time. and sometimes I work with the sigils. don't know what they represent. Right. In fact, right now I have an ongoing, visual journal of watercolors and I'm, I'm creating these mostly with these sort of symbol alphabet characters. that I don't really know what they are. That's cool. But they have come from somewhere and they're telling me something which feels like the information is stay with the flow, stay with the breath, pay attention to what your work is teaching you. I think that's the thing. What wants to be created? music or poetry wants to come through, I got to get out of the way to let that happen. I love that because so often with the commercialization of everything, and for good reason, it can become easy to try to think we can plan what's going to be marketable, right? Rather than what wants to come through me. Right. And you know, I write a variety of things, including commercial fiction, but it's always whatever I want to write. You know, I might think, I think people will enjoy a story about a bookshop, a witch and a cat. Right. But I'm writing that series because it's enjoyable to me and I want to find out what the characters are doing and I want to relate some of my cultural values and community values and my sense of magic and wonder in the world through those words. Right? I'm not going out and saying, what are the ingredients I can put together that will be more saleable? Right? Yeah. That's, it's tough. The thing that I think is a really cool thing about sharing work online is that you can almost share the most outrageous avant-garde things because you can give someone 10 seconds of it. Yes. And so it's a catch-22, right? Like it's a paradox because of course I want you to listen to my 15-minute or my 50 minute piece. But the response that I'll often get from my music, which is fairly esoteric in construction and theme, is really supportive and a really positive response. But I frame it in such a way that it's a fragment. It's a small micro work. I've made a number of micro works for the internet and I create video for it. And it's a way to share work that maybe would be overlooked or to kind of maybe out there. So I think that's one of the things about the internet that is really cool is that you can share these bits and pieces. And I think we're also living at a time where like, there's a lot of weird avant-garde stuff out there that's much more mainstream than maybe not mainstream. I'm probably going a little too far with that. is your I see more of that than maybe in other time periods where, you know, only certain music was listened to or only certain things were viewed. Now there's just so much. Well, and that's the beauty of our current moment, which I say all the time. I think this is a really fertile time for creative people because everyone's not watching the same movie. Everyone's not listening to the same song. And so there's more room. for all the weird stuff and the stuff that around the edges, I think. You know, including people who have been very commercially successful. Like I've recently been in the fallen down the rabbit hole of Andre 3000's New Blue Sun, which is, you know, atmospheric, ambient, avant-garde, beautiful meditative music that's completely different from the music he did. 1520 years ago, right? And he can do that. And people are listening to it. I'm loving it. I loved his earlier more commercial music. I'm also loving this ambient, strange meditative music, know, Yeah, it's it is a really cool thing that that there's kind of like an audience for everything. Yeah. Yeah, and we can find it and the internet for all of its downfalls makes that possible. Right. Yeah. It makes the, you know, thousand true fans more possible too. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I think so. Yeah. So talk to me about fairy tales. Why fairy tales? Is it the magic in them? Is it? What is it? Why are you working with fairy tales? Yeah, I think it is the magic. It's a early exposure to fairy tales, I think. And fairies. And so, you know, like many people who've been drawn to magic and mysticism, you know, Lord of the Rings was part of my youth, Miss of Avalon, you know, all that sort of thing. As well as as as just poems about fairies and fairy, you know, traditional fairy tales. And so as I, you know, looked at wanting to work with them, and then looked at wanting to reinterpret them, of course, you come across work like Angela Carter and all those kinds of really cool, the real sort of the beginning of that complete reinterpretation. so, so that's kind of where I'm coming from with it is that I usually, again, adapt them in a way that I might be taking a scene or taking a few phrases and creating, you know, something new or a new window into the work. So I just, really like that idea of taking a story that I know, or maybe that everybody knows and reinventing it or looking at it differently. there's something inspiring to me about it. don't, I'm not really sure why that is, but, but that's kind of where I'm coming from. And there's a, a book, by George McDonald called at the back of the North wind and, That's one of the bigger pieces that I'm working on right now. And it's this really fantastic, sadly, it ends sadly, story about a personified North Wind is a woman who takes this little boy on these adventures at night. it's, there's so many incredible scenes from it. And what's cool about music, because it's this time based art, and you can stretch time is you can just take a phrase or two, and it can become an entire five minutes on. Right. So so that's kind of the way I've been working with that kind of material. And I've got some songs that I worked with a composer with a fellow composer a number of years ago, on that was a set of fairy tales. So I revisit the material. And these are predominantly fairy tales from the Western European tradition. Right. are they individual songs? Are they cycles? So the pieces that I'm working on now, I think will be individual songs, but kind of function as a cycle and a concept album. sort of overarching, somewhat of an overarching theme. I've always loved loved concept albums. And there's so so I and I like this idea of have of working in a long form because I have done so many micro works and shorter pieces. I think there's something to learn from a longer sustained piece, working on a longer piece over a longer period of time. I keep thinking of various points in this conversation of Kate Bush's work, right? Yeah. She loves song cycles. And she also loves taking a kernel of a story and reinterpreting it into an entire song. Yeah. She was a huge influence. Huge influence for me. I can imagine. yeah, yeah. So fairy tales and Homeric hymns, do they feel similar? Are there threads between them? Do they feel like very separate? You know, I feel like all of these are sacred stories to me. I did also a set of of micro works that explored fragments of sacred cosmogony. I did a Norse one. did a New Old Testament Genesis one. I did a sort of a Greek one. And so I don't know, there's just something about these, these tales that belong to all of us. That is really powerful. And there's something, it doesn't feel that different. The Homeric hymn doesn't feel that different from the fairy tale worlds to me. But one thing about the hymn to Apollo and the piece I did, the invocation to the muse, is that those feel very close to my spiritual practice as work that I kind of feel directed to do in a sense, in devotion, in celebration. of those kinds of creative forces that I feel in my life. Yeah. so, but everything kind of flows from that. It doesn't, it doesn't necessarily feel separated because the music itself is somewhat similar stylistically to. Interesting. Yeah. It's interesting to me that. they, the style would be similar because they, could see how they could be very divergent. Yeah. I, there's a way that I, have been creating music using in part using my computer, my voice, synthesizers, a place, there's keyboards in it, some guitar, sometimes there's flute, but it's voice. synthesizers predominantly and there's a way that I compose actually with the recording process that has evolved over time and and so there's this technical part that's woven into the very expressive creative part and I know that you've written about that as well in your work with you know writing technically and exploring the technique, the craft. Yes. And, and fusing that with the sort of expressive, explosive, flowing creative part. Right. So part of what I explore is that marriage of the technology and embodied expression. And it seems very at odds, but it, It's something that's woven together in a way that uses the technology. And so there's a kind of style of what I'm doing that has emerged over time. and I pour the themes sort of into that style. Very cool. Yeah. I love that. Thank you. And I love that you are part of a long tradition of that, right? You know, again, I'm to harken back to another composer who's also still with us, know, Wendy Carlos, right? Sure. The pioneer of synthesizers who had to build her work note by note because the technology was so limited when she started. Right. And I can't even fathom that. So here you are doing an extension of that work in 2024. Right. Yeah. And, and, you know, I know people actually who work with analog synthesizer systems, because that's like a really big, has had a real big resurgence also. the, the synthesis that I work with is software, so it's in my computer, but yeah. So it, goes back to, to that. And then, to the early, people who are working, with synthesizers, like Carlos, like you said, and then. and also my voice work is in a lineage that, you know, dates back to the 17th century, probably in some form, in the West. So, so there's all of these threads and I have a lot of different musical influences. you know, I love progressive rock and I love jazz and I, you know, I love, Americana folk music. folk rock, all that kind of thing. And there's a lot of international musicians that have really been inspiring, sparked my interest. yeah, so in the work that I do, I do have a sense of like a lineage that's coming from different, it's different rivers that feed. And I think that's one of the things that that we can all say to with our contemporary culture is is access, you know, to so much of of this incredible work like on YouTube. I mean, just the the things that that you can find. it's astounding. It's really like a window, you know, being able to look back in time to a lot of these iconic artists from all over the world. Right. So that's beautiful. And it's, you know, to me, that's another form of magic, right? It's just, it fills my world with wonder that these things exist and we're able to share them in the ways that we do. Yeah. Yeah. Wonder is such a, you know, I am I live in a large city and there's some beautiful green spaces here and I revel in the wonder of the persistence of nature in this metropolis. And when I'm not in a city, you know, I wonder at it. It's wonderful, literally, and fills me with wonder and awe. You know, there is a part, a nature, poetry figures really prominently in some of my work, a lot of my work. I just released a song called Prairie Song that's inspired by a reclaimed prairie land here in the city. And, you know, there's just something about being filled with the power of, you know, I don't know, being alive, really. and, and that's another thing that we can get disconnected from pretty easily, unfortunately, in, city indoor life or town indoor life. So, you think as a creative person, that sense of wonder is, is that part of your why is that part of why you create? Yeah, I think that might be, I might, I think that might be it. The wonder and then. You know, I often say inspiration, but what it is is it's inspired by the wonder. Yes. It's like, my God, I can't believe I'm looking at this bird. Yes, it's incredible. I'm in the presence of this bird or this flower. So that to me is just, I don't know. I just, just talking about it fills me up. Yeah. and that's the big magic, I think. That's beautiful. And I think that's a great place to close our conversation. Thank you so much again for joining us today. Thank you. And once again, I've been talking with Misha Penton and you can find her work online at mishapenton.com. And as always, you can find me at thorncoil.com. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for joining me. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. And if you would like to support this series and future podcasts, please join me at patreon.com slash thorn coil. That's T H O R N C O Y L E. Have a creative and magical day.