Today we celebrate a woman who could paint a picture with six strings and a notebook and which records spun around pretty much everyday at home when growing up. Her name, Joni Mitchell.

Born in the cold wind of Saskatchewan, Canada. She started out as Roberta Joan Anderson, had polio when she was a kid, couldn’t walk for a while. Maybe that’s where the music started, sitting still, dreaming of movement.

She came up in those folk clubs, playing for dimes and smoke. A voice like a silver knife; soft, but it’ll cut right through you. She didn’t just write songs; she painted them. “Chelsea Morning,” “Both Sides Now,” “River”, that ain’t just poetry. That’s architecture for the heart. Joni said she wrote “Blue” when she felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes, transparent and torn. Most folks hide their pain; Joni tuned her guitar to it. She made sadness sound like church bells.

Mitchell was sharp. She could take anyone apart with a look, or a line. They say she told Bob Dylan that he was a “hypocrite plagiarist” — heh. Maybe she was right. She called out phoniness wherever she saw it, even in herself. That’s rare. She wasn’t chasing fame. She was chasing truth. She said, “I’m a painter first, and a musician second.” And if you look close, you can see it, the way her chords bend like brushstrokes, the way her lyrics mix colors no one else had seen yet.

Joni Mitchell wandered from folk to jazz, from Laurel Canyon to London, from love to loneliness and back again. Didn’t like labels. Said, “Don’t fence me in.” You can’t box her up, she’s too wild for that. One moment she’s sitting with James Taylor in a cabin by the sea; the next, she’s riffing with Mingus about the shape of sound.

Some folks say she’s cold. I don’t buy that. She’s clear. There’s a difference. She looked at the world like it was a mirror that needed cleaning. And she kept polishing till it shone.

Joni once said, “I sing my sorrow, and I paint my joy.”

So here’s to Joni Mitchell, the woman who turned heartbreak into harmony, who made honesty sound holy. She taught us that blue ain’t just a color. It’s a language.

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Let’s take a little detour through the alleyways of time and tune in to the poets, the dreamers, and the outlaws of the soul. We’re heading way back, down to seventeenth century Mexico, where the ink ran like blood and the words burned brighter than the candles that lit the monasteries.

Today we celebrate Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the ‘Tenth Muse,’ they called her. You know, it’s not easy being a woman who can out-think the men in the room, especially when those men wear long robes and carry crosses bigger than your bookshelf.

Sor Juana was born illegitimate, which was kind of like being born out of the tune in a world that only wanted major chords. But she had an ear for language, a heart for music, and a mind sharp enough to cut through dogma like a hot knife through butter. She joined a convent not because she wanted to pray all day, no, what she wanted was a library. Thousands of books. Her kind of heaven.

She wrote poetry, plays, even love songs to reason itself. The church didn’t like that too much. They told her to hush up, stop writing, stop thinking so loud. But you can’t silence that kind of thunder. You see, in Mexico you can still hear her in the wind, whispering that knowledge is no sin, and curiosity’s the holiest prayer there is.

She said, ‘I don’t study to know more, I study so I don’t know less.’ That’s Sor Juana, talking across centuries, reminding us that freedom of the mind is the first rebellion.

The great mexican writer Octavio Paz saw Sor Juana as a symbol of intellectual resistance, a woman who used her mind as her weapon in a world that tried to limit her because of her gender and her faith. He called her “una figura de rebeldía intelectual en un mundo de obediencia religiosa” - an intellectual rebel in an age of obedience. Paz argued that Sor Juana’s mind was caught in a double bind between the freedom of reason and the constraints of religion. She tried to reconcile faith with intellect, but the two worlds crushed her. Her silence at the end of her life, when she stopped writing under pressure from the Church, became, in Paz’s words, “her final act of resistance.”

So here’s to her, a nun who was a poet, a scholar, and a revolution all rolled into one. The quill was her guitar, the page her stage.

—-

Esta tarde, mi bien, cuando te hablaba

Esta tarde, mi bien, cuando te hablaba,

como en tu rostro y en tus acciones vía

que con palabras no te persuadía,

que el corazón me vieses deseaba;

y Amor, que mis intentos ayudaba,

venció lo que imposible parecía,

pues entre el llanto que el dolor vertía,

el corazón deshecho destilaba.

Baste ya de rigores, mi bien, baste,

no te atormenten más celos tiranos,

ni el vil recelo tu quietud contraste

con sombras necias, con indicios vanos:

pues ya en líquido humor viste y tocaste

mi corazón deshecho entre tus manos.

/ Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

——

This afternoon, my love, when I spoke to you

This afternoon, my love, when I spoke to you, seeing in your face and actions that words could not persuade you, I longed for you to see my heart;

and Love, aiding my attempts, conquered what seemed impossible, for amidst the tears that sorrow shed, my broken heart distilled.

Enough of harshness, my love, enough, let no more tyrannical jealousy torment you, nor let vile suspicion disturb your peace

with foolish shadows, with vain signs: for now you have seen and touched my broken heart in your hands.

/ Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

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