Humility Haiku

while I was walking:
your skirt's caught in your backpack,
some girl informed me

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2 scenes from a bikeride

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netting

Ah!

I didn't expect a blue sky this morning. My favourite surprise in all the world. Bike and I will be heading out shortly.

I wanted to say a few things about music. For the 3rd year running, I was snubbed by the Jazzfest. And as this is now Jazzfest time and nearly all of my musical friends and acquaintances seem to be playing in the festival, I feel the usual sense of exclusion. I'm familiar with this feeling. I've been put to one side many times in my life because, (and I think I can say this with an analytical detachment) I've been too unorthodox. I don't seem to fit into a category. I have a feeling that Vancouver will need some bigger, better festivals to endorse me first. And then suddenly I'll have support from my hometown in spades, when I no longer want or need it. That's okay - I think I can avoid feeling bitter about it. When it comes to art appreciation, it's a pretty conservative city.

Does this sound arrogant? I hope not. The way I see it, there are two ways of responding to this exclusion:

1. Feel dejected, not-good-enough, and discouraged.
2. Feel good-enough but hard to embrace for reasons unknown, and have faith that my path is still my path.
(Either way, I still have to answer people over and over again when they ask, "Are you playing in the festival this year?")

...
I've heard it said that 'you should only be a musician if there's absolutely nothing else that you can do.' It's not an easy life. I long for the day when I won't have to work a job in the city and can support myself with my music. But there's no point longing for it too much, because it may be a long ways off. And actually, I'm extremely grateful that I don't need to support myself with my music, because it would mean that I'd be making music for money.... and guaranteed, that music would not be the kind of music I want to be making. (I guess this is my old refrain.) It does have to be my goal though, or I run the risk of thinking that my music is not worth money, and that I can just make it at my own leisurely pace, for myself, forever. A balance need to be struck. Deadlines and goals force me forward and too much time and freedom slows me down and causes me to lose motivation and ambition. I need to be clear that music is both my passion and my work, that I should be getting paid for it and eventually need to, but that I'm not going to accept musical work that forces me off my path and onto someone else's.

[Man, how it lifts me to look out the window at the glowing grass and the water sparkling under the mountains. I meant to write in my blog last night about the rich harmony of birdsong that accompanied my walk that evening. I haven't heard such dense orchestration since I was in the tropics. Total jubilance.]

History is such a comfort. A pretty large majority of my favourite artists and musicians were overlooked or scorned or ignored during their lifetimes. What's important here, I ask myself? To be loved here and now, or to make something that will outlast me? I have to go with the latter. (Although, if I can do that and also be a little liked, a little loved, so much the better... I can be honest - I want and need validation still. Maybe by the time I'm an old lady I'll have let go of that.) So much more to write about this topic, but I'll leave it for now.

Sometimes I sit at my keyboard and amuse myself by making up simple catchy songs, improvise with Good Ol' iii-vi-ii-V-I or Blues progressions. They sound great, those progressions. They never fail, and can be riffed off infinitely. I know without a doubt that if I wrote and played in that style, I could win over most audiences instantly. Some smoky vocals, sultry lyrics, a short skirt and a pair of stilettos and I'd be half-way to the Junos. (Now I really do sound arrogant. Oh well.) I smile sardonically to myself. Too bad, but the temptation to please others doesn't hold a candle to my fascination with that which pleases me alone.

What it's taken me a long time to get around to is this: I'm excited about music! Musicmusicmusic!

The joy of writing something new and feeling that I've hit on something! The joy of having an idea flutter, flap, soar and careen through my mind, and to chase it with a butterfly net, breathlessly, and get it down on paper! The joy of that sensation of newness and where-did-it-come-from?-ness! The vague and ticklish sense of honour that it came into my mind and not someone else's! The great, great reward for patiently waiting with the net at hand, even after hours and days or sometimes weeks and months, of nothing coming along to catch.

And now, as the sun is roasting my face and arms through the window, I've got to get out there so that I can come back and have plenty more time to pace around with my net.

..

an audience

Behold this lovely doe, taking her ease. I've never seen deer lie about in the manner
of cats. I didn't think those long bony stilts could bend that way.

...
Now, I will tell you something strange but true:

I sat down at my keyboard today, in front of the window, and saw this dozing doe. I started to play, with my headphones on, and I swear she heard it. Twitched a bit, looked in my direction, right at the moment that I first pressed down the keys. I thought I might have disturbed her repose. But she settled again, smiling sleepily. So I played, and watched her through the window. Soon she had one ear cocked in the air. Cross my heart and hope to die. It was too beautiful for words, a peculiar honour, even to imagine that perhaps she was listening to me.

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mosquito bell

Tonight I'm tired of thinking, or trying to think, big thoughts. I want my mind to pipe down or pester some other guy for a while. I'd like to live for grass alone for just a day. Or maybe not grass... tree bark, or huckleberries. Earthworms. Turn my conscious mind to a singular purpose, keep it there, undistracted, unhurried, unharried, unharassed, for hours at a stretch.

An old mug,
too heavy to
hold comfortably
until it's empty -
and then
who wants to
hold it?

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Maestro, Digitalis, Hellfire Inferno

I am always pleased by the sight of foxgloves. For I always imagine elegant foxes adorning their paws with Digitalis Purpurea, gingerly trying the silky bells on for size...

[Warning: I'm letting myself go to town on adjectives and extravagant descriptions today. Prepare yourself.]

A dull-looking day. Nonetheless, beautiful to be out in. I am guilty of complaining about cloudy blah-days. The thing is, once I push myself out the door, I realize that the essence of a day is about much more than the colour of sky. I just came in from a long, sweet walk. The ocean air comes into the lungs like a tonic, expunging staleness, evicting sourness, eradicating boredom, exfoliating the senses!

Esther agrees.

The tide was low, so I was able to explore around the corners of beaches, scuttle over rocks and seaweed, revel in the naked barnacles and slippery ocean life. And then I entered the forest, a green tunnel of damp earthiness, vast verdant swaths of foliage, and chortling birdsong. There is so much to love about the BC coast - the view from my window does not touch it. Inside, it is quiet and pleasant. But there's a certain deception in this little shell. There's warmth and safety, but also isolation from the breezes and the sounds and smells and shifting moods of the trees and sky. I need to get outside every day or I forget this.

may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young...

Yesterday I watched a film about Maestro Valery Gergiev. I am still feeling the effects of it. Awe and longing. I think in my heart of hearts, I yearn to conduct an orchestra. Or to play in one. (More to the point, to play in an orchestra conducted by Gergiev.) Or... the Ultimate Dream: to compose for orchestras.

I am glad that I am a pianist - perhaps I would never have taken to any other instrument. But there is rarely a place for a pianist in an orchestra - except as a soloist. When I'd finished my ARCT, I knew that my chances of becoming a concert pianist at the concerto-soloist level were about equal to my chances of becoming an Olympic triathlete. I torture myself sometimes by wondering if I would be playing in orchestras now if I had learned the cello or bassoon instead. Then again... if that was the case, I would quite likely not be writing music - as the piano is such an excellent tool for composition. So then I torture myself further by wondering if I could be composing symphonies and concertos instead of songs, if I had devoted myself to composition right after high school - had spent the years since then in European Academies, studying with great Masters.

I did not include the 3rd stanza of e.e. cummings' poem (above), because the first 2 stanzas speak perfectly to me. But the 3rd does not.

(and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there's never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile)

I feel a note of resignation when I read those lines. They turn down a path to which I dig in my heels. I've known this poem from heart for some time - and I realized yesterday, after watching Gergiev, that I feel a pang of hollowness and regret at "do nothing usefully". It's not that I take those lines literally - I too love art because it is, in a sense, 'use-less'. It's that they evoke in me a feeling of humility and insignificance that I relate to a little too strongly.

Walking, yesterday and today, letting my mind drift about, I found certain bare patches inside me - hungry places. I tried to discern if the familiar sense of uselessness and not-good-enough-ness was just a result of comparing myself to Gergiev. (How could I compare myself to Gergiev?!?!) I doubt there could be more than a few handfuls of people on this entire planet with his passion, drive, enormity of spirit, and staggering talent. It's beyond comprehension. I don't need to be such a God-like creature.... I am but a modest little being with a wish to make some contribution to the world. Gergiev studied in the same rooms as Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Borodin, Shostakovich, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev.... He was raised in their footsteps, in the richness of that tradition. Thinking about this, I feel like an ambitious ant in a parade of elephants.

My heart and mind are thirsty, hungry - but are they fearless and supple? I take my steps forward inchingly, because even inching is sometimes hard and overwhelming. I do what I can when I can, because if I let the weight of my expectations ride upon my back, they crush me. But am I too gentle on myself? Will my lenience, in the end, leave me so short of the mark that I will have bitter regrets for not pushing myself harder? What is 'the mark' to me, anyways?

I feel confident about the path I am on, and pretty overjoyed to be on it. Overjoyed to have given myself permission to live this life. Overjoyed to be creating and performing my own music. But that hunger is pacing around like a tiger in my belly. Hunger for more. It's easy to be hard on myself and wish that I had acquired more skills by now. There's no point in doing that - it doesn't help me in any way. The only thing I can do is assess the present and ask myself if there is something that I could be doing that would be more satisfying now, make me happier now.

One thing continually comes to mind: Writing for larger ensembles. Writing outside of my little niche. Learning how to orchestrate. Hell's bells, I think I've just hit the nail on the head. I have a fear that I might be venturing down a street with a dead end. I'm afraid that if I keep writing songs in my own convention, that I will get bored of my song-writing and find myself not knowing how to do anything else. I don't want to be confined to writing tunes for a band. I want to write string quartets! I want to write for brass ensembles! I want to write suites for orchestra! I want to PLAY with an orchestra... And I'm not talking about 'Symphony Pops' garbage.

I read something once that said that Fear is a signpost that says you're going in the right direction. The scarier something is, the closer you are getting to the real Essence of what you want. Again, it's the dragon guarding the treasure. Delving into 'real' composition scares the hell out of me, because I don't think I'm capable of doing it. And because composition sometimes seems like a mysterious elusive alluring dangerous hypnotizing Being that I don't know how to approach.

I feel that I'm a dabbler. Like someone who dabbles in the Occult, but stays safely on the fringe.
I fear It will eat my Soul, or that my Soul will eat It. Yet.... I yearn for it so passionately. I listen to 5 minutes of Prokofiev's Scythian Suite or Stravinsky's Rite of Spring or Rachmaninoff's 3rd, and I want to both step into the fire and run away from it. I don't care what anyone says... there is nothing more ecstatically/horrifically elemental than an orchestra united in an exquisite inferno of music. Aaaaaaghhhhhhh.

What to do, what to do? I don't want to turn my life upside-down and toss out my plans. They are still valid. But... maybe I apply for a grant to go study orchestration with a composition teacher for a few months somewhere. Or maybe I just start working with an orchestration programme like Sibelius, and learn how to do it hack-style, on the computer. (Ergh, that appeals much less.) I'll have to give this some thought, and see if I still feel this way in a few days, after the Gergiev spell wears off. I think I will - this was a deep primal reaction and I know it's been there all the way along. Maybe I find a teacher in the French Caribbean and I combine my studies with my winter-getaway? Mmm - now we're getting closer to the mark! (Honestly. Why must the great music centres of the world be located in such miserable climes? Russia in Jan/Feb/Mar? No thank you.)

This blog is starting to outgrow its breeches. I'd better finish off. My keyboard is staring at me, leering even. It's losing respect for me by the minute...

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moving bricks around

Re: the clarity I was writing about yesterday.

I knew that there was some obstruction in my path. Yesterday I finally saw it and named it. It was nothing more than a goal/expectation that I'd formulated a long time ago and become attached to for no good reason. Before yesterday, I hadn't scrutinized it carefully, and once I gave it some serious attention, it excused itself and quickly left the room. Interesting. Ideas can be so very powerful. The only things shaping my future and my path (apart from uncontrollable events) are my intentions, my actions, and my expectations. I can feel clear about my intentions, but my expectations are often not in proportion, and they can affect my actions and distort my intentions. (Why is everything so circular and cyclical like that?)

I like the Buddhist precept of non-attachment to beliefs and ideas. It's obviously important to be rooted strongly in both, but maybe it's also important to be able to let go of them when they are no longer helpful or relevant. We really let our identities become defined by our ideas and beliefs, as if they are non-changing characteristics like eye colour or ethnicity. But I want to stay open to change in all ways, and notice (like in this particular instance) when I’m getting stuck on an idea that is simply not helping me to move forward.

Removing that obstruction opened the channels; my mind is moving freely again, and ideas are flowing. Now I have a one-year game-plan that feels right. When I think through it, it feels manageable, attainable, but still really challenging and full. Here’s the quick run-down:

June – send CDs to media in Europe; plan show for birthday

July – rehearse with band; play birthday show; start planning September show

Aug – rehearse with larger band; prep for September show (get publicist); find contacts in Scandinavia

Sept – promote show; rehearse and play show; start booking May tour; apply for Music BC tour grant

Oct – apply for Can Council Career Development grant to hire publicist and media manager; apply for Factor Recording grant; more tour-booking

Nov – apply for Can Council Music Project grant for composition/living subsidy; more tour booking

Dec – apply to music festivals internationally; rehearse and play show with Andy’s band

Jan/Feb/Mar – relocate to Costa Rica or the like; play solo shows; finalize May tour

Apr – major tour prep and rehearsal; apply for Can Council Concert Production/Rehearsal and Can Council Intl Touring grants

May – apply for Banff Indie Band Residency. Leave for solo tour in Scandinavia

June – rehearse for festivals and plan for new album

Summer/Fall? - festivals, new album, etc etc

*((It also goes without saying that throughout the year, I will continue to practice and write on an as-close-to-everyday basis as possible.)

Man, it feels so good to have a game plan. It's not about adhering to it strictly. Maybe lots of these items will change and I need to be open to that. But for now, I have an intention and motivation again, and it feels exciting and good.

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devil's club

This is the little patch of earth under two big maple trees that I am calling my garden. It doesn't look much like a garden now and I don't really mean for it ever to look like a garden. It's just an area that was overgrown and weedy, and now is open and clear.

This is a 'before' shot, when my garden was full of hollies and hawthornes and salmonberries and other aggressive and fiercely armed plants. To be fair, I like wild and weedy underbrush. I just thought it would be nice, under these particular trees, to create some space for new things to grow. And there really is something so lovely about a bare woodland carpet of composting leaves and needles. One just wants to lie down then and there, amongst the scuttling beetles and the smell of woolly earth and sleep deep and long.


I was able to escape the city today, and I feel so much better, infinitely better than I did yesterday. My mind has replaced the images of packed streets and garbage and cars and glassy buildings with whole, frank beauty.

I'm sitting outside right now in a silence speckled with bird calls. The blue of the evening sky looks much the same as this morning's blue, but the air smells of cooling grass and dews falling - so different from the rising scent of a new day.

I'm getting back the sense of direction and purpose that I've felt estranged from these last few weeks. Found some clarity today. Who knows why. After so many days of low-pressure, drooping grey skies, it was just a relief to get a day of sunshine. Ah, my fickle fair-weather heart.

I do my best under a ceiling of clouds, but I can't help but pine for the brilliance of the sun's unshrouded light. There is nothing, nothing like standing under a deciduous canopy and looking up into the diaphanous skin, veins and glowing chlorophyll of the new leaves, watching the shadows dance and change, all from a breeze so slight as to be undetected by the senses. Nothing illuminates the essence of things like the sun. Nothing lays everything so transparent and naked.

I needed that today - I've been feeling like a dense mass of confusion and conflict, and I needed a glimpse into the simple perfection of life, needed to feel my own transparency. It's amazing how mental and emotional states obscure reality. I'm just water and colourful cells busily working, with a mind whirring away, creating problems and fantasies, and a life source that connects and feeds me but is too mysterious to comprehend. Not quite so impenetrable and hopeless after all, if I can just try to keep tabs on that ol' devil of delusion.

..

Ode to Cat

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Having a cat can be darn nice. Especially if your cat is part-rabbit, and easily enraptured by a morning pat.

coming back

Hmm. Well, I've probably lost all my readers by now. Hello, human being, if you're reading this.

The engine fell out of the cab and it took me a while to fix it, and put it back in. Man, you just can't trust machines anymore! Just when everything seems to be running so smoothly...

I've always found that the only thing as difficult as having no options is having too many. I'm at the base of a mountain and there are no paths. The way up the mountain IS the path, but the trails are too many, the choices limitless. I have no idea where any of them might lead.

People have teased me before about my addiction to metaphor. I was thinking about this the other day when I was in the garden. I realized that even in my attempts to understand why I always gravitate towards metaphors, I was starting to create a metaphor. To me, it's unavoidable. Everything is contained within everything. The workings of a garden seem to explain all that I encounter in this life - as do the rise and fall of seasons, the tides, a sea shell, a grove of trees, a human eye.... They're all just different translations of the same story. There is comfort in metaphor, the comfort of interconnectedness. It's just the only way that I know how to make sense of this life. For nature is and always has been my greatest teacher.

(How do things take root? How do things begin and how do they grow? How do they survive? It all starts with a seed, and the seed needs nourishing.)

My music was spread all over the piano, the floor, my bed, my desk. Heaps of fragments, scores of unfinished attempts, and piles of blank manuscript glaring at me. I realized suddenly that I needed it all to be in one book, where I could flip to and fro various pieces, and have all the fragile new fragments inside the cozy covers of a nice thick album of finished and partly-finished work. So this is what it looks like:

It's a comfort to me to be able to flip through the pages of music that, believe it or not, have come from me, from my mind. I can see that somehow, quite inexplicably, I have produced work, much of it that is of some value I think, and the likelihood is that I will continue to do so. It's heartening. In the last few weeks, I've strayed from my routine. I haven't been practicing, and I haven't had regular time for writing. At least 4 days of my week are spent in the city and I have not had the time or the space (or discipline) to fit any music into them. This is not sustainable - I can feel the erosion that has already begun. But this is just a question of logistics and schedule and discipline, and I'll figure it out. The greater concern, of course, is how to continue to move forward artistically as well as professionally.

My mind says - eeerrrblechhhh! -
I love having a project and a challenge. But it's pretty damn hard to decide on what that next challenge is going to be, and to commit to it. And if I don't decide, and commit, then I drift, and my energies trickle out in all directions, and all of my seedlings get just a tiny bit of very diffuse attention, and none of them flourish. So: I'm going to decide in the next couple days what to focus my energies on in the next while. Rather than having a to-do list that's a page long and completely broad and overwhelming, I've going to choose a few specific items, commit them to this blog, and track my progress. I feel relieved even to have decided that much. The first thing that will be on that list, just as a given, is spending time at the piano every day. And writing something down. Even if I can only squeeze in 15 minutes before I run out the door. I've made this commitment to myself a thousand times in this life, and will probably have to make it another thousand times or more. I make a promise, I break it, I make it again, I break it again.... I go away, I come back, I go away, I come back. This is practice. I may never ever be able to achieve anything more, but I remind myself that the point is not to stay forever on the path but to be able to return to it over and over again.

..

the inexplicable

I don't have anything to say; I only have words of others to share. I found a poem that I had printed out last summer that I had meant to memorize and then forgot about. I didn't remember it at all, but it seems that I must have known somehow that I would be needing it.

"But fear of the inexplicable has not alone impoverished the existence of the individual; the relationship between one human being and another has also been cramped by it, as though it had been lifted out of the riverbed of endless possibilities and set down in a fallow spot on the bank, to which nothing happens. For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope.

But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence. For if we think of this existence ofthe individual as a larger or smaller room, it appears evident that most people learn to know only a corner of their room, a place by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and down. Thus they have a certain security. And yet that dangerous insecurity is so much more human which drives the prisoners in Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their abode.

We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares are set about us, and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us. We are set down in life as in the element to which we best correspond, and over and above this we have through thousands of years of accommodation become so like this life, that when we hold still we are, through a happy mimicry, scarcely to be distinguished from all that surrounds us. We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us." - Rainer Maria Rilke

And tonight, flipping through pages, looking for something more to fill me. Nothing filled me, in the end. But I found some words that seemed to have come straight from my own psyche. (If only I could express things in such ways.)

A cold night - sitting alone in my empty room
Filled only with incense smoke.
Outside, a bamboo grove of a hundred trees;
On the bed, several volumes of poetry.
The moon shines through the top of the window,
And the entire neighborhood is still except for the cry
of insects.
Looking at this scene, limitless emotion,
But not one word.

-Ryokan

"... Strange, as if never charted
Stares my fortune untold.

Why is it I am bedded
Beneath this infinitude,
Fragrant like a meadow,
Hither and thither moved.

Calling out, yet fearing
Someone might hear the cry,
Destined to disappearing
Within another I."

-Rilke

Livin' the Blues

Sitting here in silence, thinking about all the times I've heard this emptiness in the silence. I hear it now - vastness and emptiness - and all the objects around me look hollow and frivolous. I'm floating in space.

Yesterday, I worked for hours in the garden. It feels good to sit in the earth, with bugs scuttling around and over me, feels good to put my naked hands in the dirt and pull out the weeds one by one. The weeds are quite pretty unto themselves, deserve a nicer name, but I am clearing them away for my little shade garden under the tall maples. I encountered roots, deep in the earth, thick and strong as rope, roots you could never imagine such little wisps of plants possessing. I suppose all life takes root first, and then it grows. Even before stalks have grown tall and buds have opened, roots of immeasurable strength and tenacity are spreading wide.

It's the way of life and it's also the cause of suffering. We cannot grow without roots; we go through our days attaching ourselves to whatever feeds us, and our roots are severed again and again. So as long as we live, we are bound to suffer, for we cannot live without forming attachments.

(The blackberry roots are shocking. I find a knot under the surface of the earth, follow it down with my shovel, take a firm grip, and pull. The soft loose soil gives way all around me as a network of long shaggy ropey wood pulls taut in all directions. There is no end to these roots. I can't pull them out.)

...