Letting Go

 

Source: Poetry for the Soul on Facebook

PINK FLOYD - A Pillow Of Winds - Meddle

 

A Pillow of Winds

A cloud of eiderdown draws around me
Softening the sound
Sleepy time when I lie with my love by my side
And she's breathing low
And the candle dies

When night comes down, you lock the door
The book falls to the floor

As darkness falls and waves roll by
The seasons change, the wind is warm

Now wakes the owl, now sleeps the swan
Behold a dream, the dream is gone

Green fields, a cold rain is falling in a golden dawn

And deep beneath the ground
The early morning sounds and I go down

Sleepy time when I lie with my love by my side
And she's breathing low
And I rise like a bird in the haze
When the first rays touch the sky
And the night wings die

If God Didn't Say It...

 

Some of you didn’t just hear a lie…

you agreed with it.

You’ve been calling yourself

what God never called you.

Rejected.

Too much.

Not enough.

Unworthy.

And now you’re carrying it like it’s truth.

But it’s not.

God doesn’t contradict Himself.

And His Word is clear about you.

1 Peter 2:9

“You are a chosen people…”

So if what you’re believing

doesn’t line up with what He said…

it’s not your identity.

It’s something you need to tear down.

2 Corinthians 10:5

“Take every thought captive…”

Not every thought is yours to keep.

Source: Coffee with Starla on Facebook

Carol Kaye

She played the bassline on the most-played song of the 20th century. Her name wasn't on the record.

The 1966 album cover shows five young men on a California beach. The woman who actually played bass on half the tracks is nowhere in the photograph.

This wasn't an accident. It was industrial policy.

The Illusion

You bought the record. You read the sleeve. You saw the band holding their instruments on television. You assumed they were playing what you heard.

That assumption built a billion-dollar industry.

The Beach Boys. The Monkees. Sonny and Cher. The Righteous Brothers.

The story we were sold was simple: talented teenagers walk into a studio, plug in, and magic happens. They press the vinyl. The songs hit radio. The band goes on tour.

That story is fiction.

The Factory

Los Angeles in the 1960s wasn't about art. It was about manufacturing.

Radio stations demanded constant rotation. Labels couldn't wait six months for a band to rehearse an album.

Behind soundproof studio doors, a rotating group of session players handled the instruments. They were called The Wrecking Crew.

They arrived at Western Recorders at 8 AM. They drank stale coffee from paper cups. They recorded three complete albums for three different artists before sunset.

At the center of this machine sat Carol Kaye — a thirty-something mother of three holding a Fender Precision bass.

From 1957 to 1973, she played on an estimated 10,000 recording sessions.

Being invisible wasn't unusual for her. It was Tuesday.

The Sound of Everything

When you hear Nancy Sinatra's "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'," you're hearing Carol Kaye's fingers.

The descending bassline on the Beach Boys' "Wouldn't It Be Nice"? Carol Kaye.

The acoustic guitar intro to "La Bamba"? Her.

Mission: Impossible theme? Her.

"You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" — the most-played song of the 20th century? Her bassline.

The records sold tens of millions of copies. They defined the decade.

Record companies paid her a flat union rate: $55 for three hours.

The erasure wasn't a conspiracy. It was standard operating procedure.

She grew up poor in Everett, Washington. Her parents were struggling musicians. At 14, she played jazz guitar in smoky clubs to keep the lights on at home.

She wasn't romantic about music. She viewed sessions as factory shifts.

If the producer wanted a specific sound, she delivered. Then she packed her gear and drove to the next studio.

The men in the session bands respected her because they had no choice.

She was faster. She corrected their chord charts with a pencil during takes.

She wasn't always polite. During a 1968 session, she told a famous producer his horn arrangement sounded like "a dying dog." She played it her way instead. They kept her version.

She carried her own amplifier. She wore practical cardigans. She chain-smoked through takes.

When she couldn't find childcare, she brought her kids to the studio. They sat quietly in the control room while their mother cut platinum records.

When "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" hit number one, she was already recording jingles in a different building.

The Work

1964: Gold Star Studios. She recorded the bassline for "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'."

It became the most-played track of the 20th century.

Her name: not on the record.

She invented techniques out of necessity. When standard bass sounded too muddy for AM radio, she taped felt over the strings to dampen overtones. She used a hard pick on heavy flatwound strings.

The sound snapped. It cut through static. It became the sound of the decade.

Bass players spent years trying to figure out what equipment famous bands used to get that tone.

They were studying the wrong people.

The Beach Boys. Ray Charles. Frank Sinatra. Simon and Garfunkel. Stevie Wonder. The Supremes.

The faded sleeves still list the wrong names.

The needle drops. The bassline starts.

The woman playing it is still invisible on the cover.

Carol Kaye: the woman who played the soundtrack of a generation from behind soundproof glass while the world looked elsewhere.

Original source unknown.

Daphne du Maurier

 

Do you have a particular memory that this quote makes you think of?

If only there could be an invention that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again.

― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

That line from Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca really does linger, doesn’t it?

What makes it so powerful is how sensory it is—memory not as something abstract, but something you could hold, uncork, breathe in. She doesn’t just talk about remembering; she imagines reliving. That quiet longing in the quote taps into something almost universal: the wish to preserve moments exactly as they were, untouched by time or change.

And there’s a subtle melancholy tucked inside it too. If such a bottle existed, would we ever move forward? Or would we keep returning to the same perfect moments, like walking through a house we can never truly live in again?

It’s a beautiful paradox—wanting memory to stay vivid, while knowing its fading is part of what gives it meaning.

Daphne du Maurier frequently explored themes of time, memory, and the blending of past and present, notably in Rebecca and her personal writings. Famous quotes include reflections on time's inability to destroy memory and the concept of time as "all-dimensional". 

Here are key Daphne du Maurier quotes regarding time:

"Could time be all-dimensional – yesterday, today, tomorrow running concurrently in ceaseless repetition? Perhaps."

"Time could not wreck the perfect symmetry of those walls, nor the site itself, a jewel in the hollow of a hand." (From Rebecca)

"It was hopeless the way time did not stand still, not for a fraction of a second, that there was never an occasion when I could grasp..."

"Time will mellow it, make it a moment for laughter. But now it was not funny, now I did not laugh. It was not the future, it was the present. It was too vivid and too real." (From Rebecca)

"As an eavesdropper in time my role was passive, without commitment or responsibility."

"We are all ghosts of yesterday, and the phantom of tomorrow awaits us alike in sunshine or in shadow, dimly perceived at times, never entirely lost." (From Myself When Young) 

According to this collection on the Daphne du Maurier website, she also wrote about the rapid, fantastical shift of time: "I have seen the white sea-mists of early summer turn the hill to fantasy, so that it becomes, in a single second, a ghost land of enchantment..." (From The King's General).

and another of my favorites...

Time will mellow it, make it a moment for laughter. But now it was not funny, now I did not laugh. It was not the future, it was the present. It was too vivid and too real.

― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

Larry Fleet - Where I Find God

 

How lovely it was to be alone again.

 

I wondered why it was that places are so much lovelier when one is alone. How commonplace and stupid it would be if I had a friend now, sitting beside me, someone I had known at school, who would say: “By-the-way, I saw old Hilda the other day. You remember her, the one who was so good at tennis. She’s married, with two children.” And the bluebells beside us unnoticed, and the pigeons overhead unheard. I did not want anyone with me. Not even Maxim. If Maxim had been there I should not be lying as I was now, chewing a piece of grass, my eyes shut. I should have been watching him, watching his eyes, his expression. Wondering if he liked it, if he was bored. Wondering what he was thinking. Now I could relax, none of these things mattered. Maxim was in London. How lovely it was to be alone again.

― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca