some more thoughts about music...

...so you can skip this if you're tired of them.

My junior recital is in a week.  (December 2!  7:30!  Martin Chapel!  You should come!)  So today when I was practicing I decided to play through everything straight, the way it will be next week, without stopping to fix mistakes, so I can tell what I want to work on between now and then.  And it wasn't perfect, but it was exactly what I hoped for.  Because after I was done I knew I got it.
Music isn't about perfection, it's about passion and joy and expression.  I can't expect every note to be in tune and clear and the way I want it, but today I knew the right feelings were there.  And that made me completely happy, because what more could I ask for?  I just want to give the music what it deserves, and I just want to make people feel something, and I just want to lose myself in the emotion of it.

In String Pedagogy on Tuesday, Joan told us horror stories about people who play for professional orchestras, and let me tell you, if I had ever been thinking seriously about auditioning for one, I'm not planning on it anymore.  I don't want to be part of anything where people can lose their job for one mistake or slash each other's tires from the pressure of it.  To me, professional orchestras like that have lost the essence of what music means to me.
Anyway, the moral of the story is, I'm learning to find pure, simple joy in my music.  After years of striving for perfection, it's nice.

colors

Last night I sat in the front seat of a car reading a wonderful book about love and beauty, and when I looked up, I saw that the entire sky was consumed in a glorious sunset.  The horizon from the far left to the far right was awash in brilliant color, as if God had drawn his fingers across the sky from the south to the north.  And in the center, right in front of my spellbound eyes, was the brightest, hugest, most incredible blending of orange and pink fading into purple and gray and blue.  It shone through our car windows and into my heart like the culmination of everything, and in that moment, it seemed to me that there was nothing more I could possibly want.

enriching the earth

The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry has become my occasional breakfast companion, and I love this one especially.  Make sure you read all the way to the end.

To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass

to grow and die.  I have plowed in the seeds

of winter grains and of various legumes,

their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth.

I have stirred into the ground the offal

and the decay of the growth of past seasons

and so mended the earth and made its yield increase.

All this serves the dark.  I am slowly falling

into the fund of things.  And yet to serve the earth,

not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness

and a delight to the air, and my days

do not wholly pass.  It is the mind's service,

for when the will fails so do the hands

and one lives at the expense of life.

After death, willing or not, the body serves,

entering the earth.  And so what was heaviest

and most mute is at last raised up into song.

our stories matter

Last night was the coffeehouse for Take Back the Night week, the time when everyone is invited to share stories, poems, and songs from their experiences with sexual violence.  As always, these stories brought both pain and healing to those of us who heard them.

I heard a girl tell the story of a family member raping her thirteen-year-old sister, and all I could think was what if that had been my sister.  I cried until my eyes were sore at hearing all the stories of abuse (so many, many stories) and felt bewildered at my own reaction.  A small part of me was asking, what right do I have to cry?

I don't have a story, but I feel like I do.  A wise friend of mine said, "We are the stories we've heard."  I feel like a victim because I know far too many people who have experienced sexual abuse, and because I have carried their stories with me, and because I feel other people's pain when they share their words like this.  Another friend told me that secondhand trauma is real and justified, and maybe that's me.

But I know that I'm glad I feel these things -- I don't ever want to cease to empathize with another's pain, because that is when we cease to embrace our shared humanity.  We are human together, and we walk with each other through darkness and light.

No-buy November

Who wants to do this with me?  :)

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=269469573077264&ref=ts