How to Unlock Your Teacher's Super Powers

Yes, your teacher has super powers. They are hidden, and you the student hold the key.

I am thrilled to have this article included in the latest edition of the American Suzuki Journal, and they have seen fit to put it up on their website this week. It is a special message for students and their parents, and absolutely just as much for those outside the Suzuki world as for those within.

If you want, you can tag your favorite superhero teacher on the Suzuki Association of the Americas Facebook page, here.

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"Imprint" at Rock and Sling

It is an honor to have my piece, "Imprint," up on the Rock and Sling blog this week. It pulls together some things I have been mulling over for months (sparked by the baby mouse and its siblings pictured below) and I am so pleased to be able to finally have it out in the world. You can read it here.

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Update: May/June

I am honored to have had two pieces published recently: an article in the American Suzuki Journal, and a poem in Rock & Sling (Issue 12.1.) 

It was a special treat to see my article in the ASJ featured on the mailing label that came with the journal--I am rather proud of that. The article, "Walk the Hills, Crawl if Necessary" was something I worked on for months this past year. The basic point was that as parents we run into times when we have to loosen our grip on our expectations, that sometimes what looks like stagnation is still a moving-forward, just maybe hidden, or very slow. It ended up being very, very close to home, and depending on the day (week/month) it was sometimes nearly impossible to write about.

The poem in Rock & Sling was also difficult to write. "The Beatitudes" by Vladimir Martynov, Rescored for Kronos Quartet was a piece I nearly gave up on. It began as an assignment at a poetry workshop I attended in 2015, the last assignment at the end of an incredibly full, intense week. I hated what I had written so much I decided not to turn it in. In the end I could not leave it alone, either, but it took many months to shift into its current form.

Today's theme? Never give up. Time is kind of a magical thing, and I keep forgetting to factor it in. 

I have been working on several projects while away from this blog. Day-to-day what I see around me is Mess, but over the course of time I can see that I am making progress. In time I hope to share about those here. In the meantime you can find me a little more frequently on Instagram.

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"That Hard Passage," ASJ

Last fall my friend Sarah asked me to share what I had carried with me into adulthood from my childhood Suzuki training. There are many things--part of what I love about teaching is that it keeps showing me more about not only my own musical training, but my whole upbringing, deeply informed as it was by Shinichi Suzuki's teachings and philosophies. But this answer, what I am starting to think of as the discipline of beauty, is the one closest to my heart. I think it transcends the Suzuki philosophy, actually, to all of music and art, but this is where I encountered it in my own life. I am thankful to the American Suzuki Journal for giving me the chance to share my essay, "That Hard Passage," with a larger audience, both in their most recent volume (44.3) and here on their website.

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Recently--Spring 2016

Music and dance and field trips and State Solo and Ensemble contest and recitals and concerts! And plans for the summer and plans for next year. It is hard to even think straight, this time of year, but somehow we always make it to summer. In between, especially as the kids get older, are conversations about music and art and justice and politics and kindness. Oldest shares what he is listening to. Middle, even if she is sleeping over at a friend's house and her phone is dead, will make sure I know the moon is rising outside, full and magical. Youngest shares her art and her passion and her compassion. Husband brings home mystery snails and we delight in them, some of us maybe wishing we could move through the world the way they do. And there are small treasures to find outside as the world warms and greens: seeds and sprouts, fireflies, the sound of frogs, the scent of lilacs and honeysuckle.

Light, 12/3/15:

Today's light: what these kids can do.

Light, 12/2/15:

Today's light: honestly, today was dark. I caught the news in between private students and Violin Project, and all I could think on my way to the school was, I am going to go spread light now, because it is the only thing I can do. And I saw Oldest walking through the park on his way home, and I got to class and saw the faces of my students and the volunteers who help me and friends who teach at the school and Middle and Youngest because they wait for me after school and Oh, this work drains me but all those faces connected to all those souls--they were the real light.





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What You End Up With

I have next to no expertise with a camera. I am in awe of what people who have skill can do with their cameras, and I’m frequently frustrated by what I can’t do. But I’m also fascinated by what I can capture, even in my ignorance and lack of skill. In the car with Husband a few nights ago, appreciating again the colors of winter in my adopted state, and setting sun, and gentle rolls of fields, I took as many pictures as I could. I liked so much of what I ended up with, even while I didn’t capture exactly what I saw out the passenger seat window. Expectations aside, I ended up with something beautiful. I was still participating in some form of seeing.

That play of expectations and my response and what I end up with in the end—it can make me crazy, but it also makes life something of a holy kaleidoscope. And I like that. A lot.

It struck me a few months ago, while walking an unruly bunch of young violinists back from the bathroom and wondering at the crazy swinging we do every day between off-the-wall-tired and brilliant-short jags of learning: what if one of our primary responsibilities while we wade through this life—this chaos—is to dip our hands into it as it flows past and make something of it? Sometimes it requires great skill to form something (smooth, perfect, compact maybe, or maybe towering and grand.) Sometimes all that is needed is to reach into the torrent and hold up, shining and raw, what I get hold of. Either way I am on a treasure hunt. Either way the best thing next to the find is showing it to you.

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Light: 12/15/14

Every day I see this. During arrival/tuning/snack time, especially—they are experimenting, exploring, asking each other questions, teaching each other stuff. Every day I see this fire for learning igniting around the music room. Yes, they are tired and distracted after a long day at school. But still. I get to work with that fire.

Maybe one of these days when someone asks me what I do, instead of saying “I’m a violin teacher” I will tell the whole truth: “I am a violin teacher, a witness-er of miracles, a problem-solver, a counselor, a herder of squirrels, a maker of music, a fanner of flames.”

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Thankful, 2014: A Chance to Watch

1. At my students’ fall recital, sitting finally—momentarily—watching and listening. These milestones—you hit them whether you feel ready or not, whether you are sick or healthy, regardless of what else is happening in your life. We work for mastery. We work to capture the spirit of the piece. But what is on display in front of us is always deeper than those things, broader than the performance.

 So many dramas at play, and most of it hidden.

My pride in my students, and the fact that I am on the edge of my seat for each person who walks to the front of the church and bows and plays and bows again has everything to do with knowing them. Their stories, their struggles, their triumphs. Working with them I have gotten glimpses of these things, and I promise you even Twinkle is never the same piece twice.

2. Sitting with the pit band on the opening night of Fiddler on the Roof. Technically my first high school musical, if you don’t count the All-City Opera production of “The Magic Flute” I played in ninth grade. It is an odd and beautiful experience at 42, and I can’t get enough of watching. 

I am here to play, but my heart is with Oldest, on stage. Stage fright for the people you love is almost worse than stage fright for yourself, and it has nothing to do with your confidence in your loved ones or their abilities. As we start playing “To Life” the only thing tempering the adrenaline is the fact that I am used to playing despite it. Besides, I have to focus on what I am doing. 

And then it is his solo, and he is standing on a bench, hand raised in blessing—hand with new angles, and handsome—nailing it:

Za vasle zdorovie

Heaven bless you both, Na zdrovie

To your health, and may we live together in peace!

I get to watch, and I get to be part of the music—his music. My pride in him, the fact that I am on the edge of my seat—you know what that is. I have been watching him since what must be the beginning of time, and the story is rich and complex and I know I will never grasp all of it.

But I get to watch.

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Violins!

Wednesday I brought the new violins to class, and the rest of the week was an even more pronounced mix of our usual brilliant moments and chaos. The anticipation building up to this week has been thick, and now that it has been released—oh. 

Wednesday pretty much everybody forgot about snack. They forgot to be squirrelly when we went to the bathroom. They were focused only on the violins, and for a certain amount of class I gave in to the noise and the spirit of discovery and watched them explore. My seasoned second year students helped the first year students, showing them how to put their shoulder rests on and how to tighten the bow, and then everyone just tried stuff. It was beautiful and loud, and I wish all of you could have witnessed it. The pictures, I think, tell the story well:

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Today is the Day

They have been waiting. And waiting. Practicing with box violins (mac and cheese boxes, stuffed with plastic bags and wrapped in turquoise duct tape, paint stirrers hot-glued in for necks) and dowel rod bows. They have been practicing, and singing and clapping and marching and dancing and listening. And waiting—mostly patiently but not always—for today.

It will feel different—the real violins are heavier, and not as easy to get in the right spot on your shoulder. Today will feel like a step backward because the playing positions and bow holds will not be as familiar as they were yesterday. I promised them the ease will come back, and will arrive much sooner than it did the first time around.

Everything will be more breakable now, and we've had a few accidents in class, already. We'll deal with that when we need to.

But—sound. We are so close to making sound, and learning notes, and putting real pieces together, bit by bit. We are going to make music together.

Today is huge.

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Medley, 10/13/14

1. Tuesday evening: moonrise. A not-quite-full moon, pale and round and flat. The sky, too, is clear and pale. Peaceful. This week is busy, like so many of the rest of them, but the sky remains open and peaceful, changing and unchanging.

2. Later Tuesday evening: orchestra rehearsal, all Beethoven. The 7^th Symphony, and Leonore Overture No. 3, and the Piano Concerto No. 4. I’m not sure how many times I’ve played any of these pieces, but the past performances are present, always. The piano concerto, for instance: I once got to play this with Daniel Barenboim as both soloist and conductor. The intensity and concentration of that performance, it turns out, is burned into my psyche. As we run through the piece with tonight’s soloist I can hear both the present version and the one from all those years ago. And this music is so good. 

3. Wednesday morning: I’m sitting alone in the waiting room at the dentist’s. All three kids are having checkups at once. I hear Youngest’s voice—she is singing “Let it Go” with all her heart. I imagine her face, and the way she must be moving in the dentist’s chair as she swoops for the high notes and dips for the low. “The cold never bothered me anyway—” I think she especially loves that line, and the meaning she intuits in it. The hygienist tells me later that they waited at the doorway of Youngest's  room until she finished the song. They did not want to interrupt.

4. Saturday: the last birthday cake of the season, chocolate with cream cheese frosting, sprinkled with dark chocolate curls and golden sugar. It struck me, looking at the finished cake, that the frosting works as a sealer, holding in moisture, at least as much as it sweetens and decorates. I’ve always thought of the frosting as the best part; I’ve never before thought of it as a kind of armor.

5. All week, each weekday afternoon: The Violin Project. These kids are young, and they're tired at the end of the day. It is a difficult time for intense focus. The room is often noisy. I have been trying to get them to be quieter—especially while I am tuning their violins. But this week I suggested that they use tuning time (which for them is waiting time) to help each other—second year students could help beginners with bow holds, playing positions, rhythms; older kids in general could help younger; second year kids could join forces to puzzle out new skills and pieces. The noise turned into something special. This is what I am looking for, at least as much as I am seeking order. What could happen, if we all keep learning and growing like this? 

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That + This, Both True

Wednesday morning: pink fog for a moment, so briefly that by the time I mentioned it to someone it had shifted to gray. Mushrooms-like-flowers in the lawn. Ripe tomatoes and eggplants on the counter, and a recipe for black bean chili. In my head, alternating currents of Beethoven 7 and the Romance from Wieniawski's Violin Concerto No. 2. I get to play both this fall. Also in my head: projects—some unfinished, some un-started; the emails to friends that are as yet un-typed; the endless connections with friends, acquaintances, loved ones waiting un-made; the endless (urgent!) daily things to attend to. It is all water streaming through my fingers. I cup my hands to drink and my feet, the ground—everything around me—gets soaked. Is it a fight for you, too, to focus on how cool and sweet the water is? Even on my feet the water feels good, if I let it.

*     *     *

I wrote that paragraph more than two weeks ago. All of it is true. But I haven’t been able to finish what I started writing because of the other narrative in my head—because this is also true:

So now tell the rest of the story. Tell how the water spilling onto your feet metaphor breaks down—how sure, those missed opportunities are signs of the richness offered, and maybe you can absorb a little of it as it falls—but it’s not that simple, is it? Tell how what gets your feet wet is all the ways in which you have failed family and friends and students. How unfair it is to romanticize that. Tell how you constantly feel like a failure. How you are haunted by the fear that those you love will stop loving you because you cannot manage to be good enough. How, even after you learned to fight for yourself, to not bury yourself inside pleasing everybody else, the fear remains. You have ways of fighting it now, but the truth is you mostly only hold it at arm’s length. It is a permanent resident in your life, following you into whatever you do. 

*     *     *

I was going to tell you how it seems that the thing to do is to get comfortable with both the fear and this feeling of not-done, not-as-good-as-I-wanted-it-to-be, not-sure-I-can-handle-this-next-thing failure. How getting comfortable with these feelings is no compromise, but survival. I was going to tell you how violin is what taught me this, that all those years of practicing, little by little working my way through techniques, through etude books, through concertos and sonatas and partitas proved to me that each day’s drop in the bucket matters, that the bad days don’t steal as much as you think they do, that in the end it really is the trying that matters.

Maybe all those years of trying in the practice room—maybe one of the most important things I was doing was one of the invisible, inaudible things: learning to never quit working towards a goal that constantly shifted out of reach, to push for perfection knowing I would never get there, if only because it always proved to get me somewhere.

I don’t know that I have the courage to show you how messy my office is (putting things that are “in progress” away is almost equal to giving up on them,) or how I don’t stay on top of the laundry, or how quickly all my attempts to get organized fall apart. But I can tell you that it is as easy to be overwhelmed by the great beauty I get to see every day as it is to be overwhelmed by all the rest.

Sometimes spilling and bucket-filling look a lot alike. I keep trying to make these crazy days into more than that, but maybe it’s really that simple. No more beautiful and extraordinary than that, but also no less. See how our wet hands shine.

And by the way? Yesterday: more pink fog—jeweled, this time.

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The Violin Project, Year 2: Notes from the First Day of Class

Seventeen is a big number. Seven returning students, ten new students. When I group them that way it all looks very manageable. All together they look like more than the sum of their parts. 

They were excited, yesterday, coming in. Eyes big. The new ones wanted to know when they would have violins. They are ready to play concertos. One child informed me, very seriously, “I’m doing violin because my mom said I had to.” One gave me five examples of How Fast A Learner I Am. We will move slowly, and that is hard but at the same time easier—so much less overwhelming than “Here’s your violin, this is how you hold it. Here’s your bow, this is how you hold it. Now play.” And I think we will have fun, regardless of how we ended up together in the first place.

I don’t know who was more nervous, the kids or I. For them I want to project calm and confidence, but every year is new, the territory fresh and a little wild, and every year I wonder if I am really up to this new year of teaching. I have trouble feeling calm.

And then we start, and everything’s okay.

We began yesterday with background music (Twinkle Theme and Variations) and coloring (treble clefs) and snacks, and worked our way into learning each others’ names, standing still, listening to and following instructions. The newcomers will be painting the fence, Karate Kid-style, for a while, and that tends to fly in the face of young peoples’ expectations. But it is like the scarf I have been knitting for months and months: day-to-day the progress is slow, and certainly not our culture’s usual way of acquiring things. But I got used to the slowness, and I enjoy the process. Recently—suddenly, it seemed—I noticed that the thing has length. Someday I will wear it and forget how long it took to make. Someday, suddenly, we will look at each other over our violins and say, “Look how much we’ve learned!”

Here’s what else I forget, and have to keep re-discovering: it’s not just every year that is new. Every day is new. Getting to know each other, fence-painting, problem-solving—we are in it together. What luck. I can’t wait.

For more about The Violin Project, click here, or visit our Facebook page.

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Notable

We followed up our girls’ week at the Chicago Suzuki Institute with a week in Minneapolis—all five of us—while Oldest attended Voice Camp at MacPhail Center for Music. Minneapolis, it is safe to say, remains the city closest to my heart: there are lakes with accompanying parkways and paths that will always be mine; parks, a library, a creek, and food that feel like home; family and friends I miss all but a few days out of each year.

All those things were wonderful and welcoming for this trip, plus Oldest got to sing his heart out. We returned home exhausted but full.

Two extra things I particularly loved about this visit: Little Free Libraries popping up everywhere, and the yarn bombs we discovered while walking, running, driving. Both spoke of community, and beauty, and chance encounters/connection. I want to scatter both all over my adopted city.

  

 

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Sideways

Some stars disappear when you look at them straight on. Pale glints in your peripheral vision when you look up, they slide into blackness when you turn your eyes toward them. The issue is in our eyes: the cones concentrated in the central part of the cornea—the part we use when we look at something head-on—do not pick up the dim light that the rods around the edges of the cornea do. Regardless of the constancy of what we're looking at, we are stuck with what our eyes can see: stars-like-phantoms. They must be approached sideways, and gently.

It’s not just stars, though.

It’s something I’ve been thinking about for months—the sideways-ness of things.

It is ever-present in teaching, especially so for me this past year, working with a small group of children every day. Threaded all through the process of learning violin are other things: how we treat one another, how we handle problems, how we respond to frustration. How we show love and respect and kindness. How we create and respond to beauty. How we learn to discipline our fingers, our ears, our mouths, our minds. How we simply learn one another and build relationships—complicated, real, and gritty.

This is why I find it hard to write about teaching. It is personal, ongoing, complex. It is also universal. The fact that I can focus on one thing—learning to play violin—is very helpful, because I can rule out Everything Else. Except I draw on Everything Else to do it—faith, psychology, physics, storytelling, eating Dorito’s—everything. And then of course it turns out that learning violin touches everything else. Try to nail the whole thing down, narrow it, look at it too directly, and you start to lose sight of certain things. Sometimes you have no choice but to approach sideways, gently.

It’s fair, I think, to start wondering which is the true art—the direct work or the sideways, the music or the people working on the music? It’s both things at once of course, but it’s worth considering what you might see when you shift your focus, and what is most important to you to see in the end. 

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What I'm Doing This Week

I’m not sure why I thought I’d get a lot of writing in this week. I am at the Chicago Suzuki Institute with my daughters, filling up on music and technique and new friends and Everything Violin. And—most importantly—reminding myself why we’re doing this in the first place (We are doing this in order to grow, in order to become better human beings. Music, you see, is the medium as much as it is the final product, the art, itself. And our lives—they are the true art.)

Those are noble words. The actual work they describe is awkward and messy and really stinking hard, but it is interspersed with these wonderful moments. Kind of like practicing violin, itself, which when done right is not at all romantic, but instead involves things like practicing the same two notes over and over until they can be played well, and then over and over many times more, until they will never sound ugly again. You don’t necessarily want to be in the room for this process, but the results are worth it. 

There has been music-making this week, and understanding, and beauty. 

We are enjoying ourselves and also bordering on wiped-out. In my characteristic, extremely relationship-oriented/extremely introverted way, I half want to absorb more/connect more/converse more, half want to hide somewhere with a book. One daughter, apparently, talks in her sleep. (“Mom,” a voice just informed me out of the dark of our dorm room, “there are two butterflies in here.”) And to be honest, our moments of beauty and understanding are balanced with healthy doses of snippiness.

Overall though, I feel like we have been able to relax more this year. I prepared myself ahead of time for the comparison game—not that I’m not tempted to play (I am) but I am also (mostly) able to see it for what it is. I resolved early on that frog catching/rescuing (they are tiny and everywhere, crossing the sidewalks like ants,) as well as extra desserts, would be part of our daily schedule along with practicing and brushing teeth. And—luxury of luxuries—I brought an air mattress with me this year. Sleeping on the floor won’t hurt. This is all very good.

This feeling that there’s so much here, that I can’t possibly process it all, that I also don’t want to stop trying to process it all—that must be a good sign. This too, I think, is why we are here.

More about our Suzuki institute and workshop experiences here.

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Found: Old Yellow Notebook, Fall 1990

Why, exactly, it is so full of odds and ends is not clear. There is no title on the front, only notes of things I needed to remember during that first semester of college: an extra violin lesson before my professor left the country for a week or two, notes on an upcoming piano quiz. On the back are the phone numbers of the guys who convinced me to play in the band they were forming, an address with no name attached.

Inside is random, bits of everything important about the start of freshman year:

The beginning notes for an abandoned composition for violin—a chord, a rhythmic motif, a melody based on the pitches of the wind chimes on my parents’ patio. “story about person w/ eyes the color of peace” is written in that tiny up-and-down handwriting that filled barely a third of the college-ruled lines, that always seemed to float just above the blue line rather than sit neatly on it.

A list of things to pack for the dorm room: clothes, music, books, bicycle, typewriter, decorations. The glass unicorn bought in honor of “The Glass Menagerie” that years later actually did fall and break, losing the horn that made it so special. The doll received as a gift while a toddler in Japan, the books of Swedish  and Norwegian fairy tales from childhood, the thick new Webster’s College Dictionary and Thesaurus. Everything needed to continue as myself, everything needed to start this new life.

The rough draft of an essay written for admittance to the Honors Program, “The most important intellectual experience I have had to this point was learning how to communicate on paper.”

Unfinished letters, a list, plans for a never-sent care package—the skeleton of a breakup. So hard, and so necessary.

Notes from the first days of each class that first semester: Art and Literature in the Western World, a class that lingers in my heart and mind still; Class Piano; Music Theory; Intro to Philosophy (still I wonder about our section—if our inability as a group to correctly answer any of the TA’s questions was due to our lack of understanding of the nuances of philosophy or the nuances of language.)

A note written to a now-unknown friend during class: I’m really suspicious of a musician who isn’t impressed by any other musicians. 

A poem—I had forgotten how many times I started writing and gave up, frustrated by my clumsiness, by the stiffness of the words. It is truly clunky. Still, it is full of images I have come back to repeatedly, and also a dream I had forgotten.

A music list—“Strength, Comfort, and Identity Tape.”

If there is a theme to this notebook besides Fall 1990: First Semester of College, it could be The Things I Have Forgotten, or possibly A Vast Amount of Your Adulthood Has Been Spent Running Away From and Rediscovering This Girl (Abridged version: In Some Ways You Have Not Changed at All. More abridged: Still.) There is a silence in it, but also something breathing. Which brings me again back to that poem, and the dream: I was alone, my friends were gone. I sat drawing a picture of a tree, and as I worked a voice guided me. She told me exactly how to make the picture come to life: how to make the snow in the picture begin to fall—fat silent flakes drifting past dark branches, how to draw a squirrel to life to weave through silent flakes and dark branches.

I had forgotten that dream, but the image is alive again now within me.

The fact that all of it lives, still—I think that is the point. What we draw out of life, what we bring to life, what lives and breathes throughout a life—I am in love with that mystery, that art. Still.

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In Concert

At our last class before the concert, I made them a promise:

No matter how calm I look when we’re up there on stage, I will be nervous too. I’ve been doing this almost my whole life, and I still get nervous. But we’ll all be there helping each other, and it’s going to be great.

I did not tell them that I’ve been nervous for months.

My violin students—Violin Project and private students—were invited to play with the local community string orchestra back in January. I looked at the music and said yes, I think we can make that work, knowing it would be a stretch. Knowing this was new territory for all of us. We had time, and we got to work right away. I believed that together we could rise to the occasion.

But I was nervous. Afraid of letting people (my students, their families, the conductor, the orchestra) down. 

One month before the concert, I was quite nervous. We had been working hard, yes. But we had a lot of leaps to make.  The second violin part didn’t always make sense to a group of kids who had always played melody, and the form was more complex than they had ever encountered. This is not such a big deal if you can just follow what’s on the page in front of you, but to a pre-reader it matters. Memorizing something you would probably never hum to yourself is not a simple task.

The third violinists had their part down quickly, but they had to be able to hold their own rhythmically, and again—not easy. Not playing on down beats when everybody else is playing, not being swayed by the four other parts around you but listening to and sticking with your own part: that is sophisticated stuff for a beginner.

The first violinists—they had a lot of notes to learn. And life is busy, and so many important things want to get in the way. I knew they could do it, but I was concerned about their confidence.

The week of the concert, however, things came together. I started to relax. I got excited. I was thankful for how good everything sounded. 

Then the day of the concert: I taught my regular lessons, picked up my kids at their grandparents’ house. We ate half our dinner in the car on the way home. At home with a few minutes’ turn-around time everybody had a job: Oldest, help set the table, Middle, change clothes, Youngest, go back out to the car and bring your backpack and jacket inside.

A few minutes later, crying. Youngest back inside with her hand to her head. Blood. And then she moved her hand away and I yelled, I couldn’t help it, because Oh-God-she’s-really-hurt.

Somehow what felt like one hundred decisions were made in an instant. Call Husband. Call Friend who will be at the concert. Do not let on to Youngest that she needs stitches until you absolutely have to if you want her to stay calm. You do not have to be at the concert. Your students can do this without you. Somehow I got Middle and Oldest to the concert location along with the stack of violins I had brought home with me “to make sure they all make it safely to the concert tonight.” Somehow I drove to Urgent Care answering Youngest’s questions as calmly as I could, even though every few seconds I had to clench the steering wheel hard. The image of her wound, my bleeding hurt child, flashed fresh in my mind over and over. Over and over I glanced at her face—pale, eyes half-shut—in the rearview mirror. Clench. Release. Clench. Release.

Clench.

Somehow everything worked out.

At Urgent Care: help. The nurse’s eyes looking at me over Youngest’s head after peeking under the gauze, the whole wordless conversation that passed between us. Oh, Honey. Yes. She needs stitches. I knew right away. Oh this girl, she fell really hard. She did, didn’t she? Husband arriving sooner than seemed possible. Youngest, scared and brave, fighting the stitches, still managing to be all at once sassy and funny with the nurses. Her confession to me with deep serious eyes: “I thought maybe I just wouldn’t tell you I fell. But then I thought maybe I should.” Her forehead mended, bandaged. Her arm sore, but not broken.

All the fear and worry that went into this concert—

They moved everything around on the program, and announced from the stage that the orchestra would just keep playing until I arrived to lead my students in their part of the program. Husband took Youngest for ice cream. I arrived at the church where we were playing and my students, a good number of them up past their bedtime at this point, were sitting in their designated seats, listening to the concert. Everybody behaving like angels, as far as I could see. Questioning looks. "She's okay," I told them. "She's going to be okay." We got up and played and I had moved far beyond nervous to shaken and dazed, but even so I could tell how well everything went. 

I am so thankful for all these people—family, students, friends. We were there for each other. I made it there for them. And they were there for me. For Youngest. For each other.

There is this thankfulness, too: I do not understand how Calm can be there in the middle of Fear and Worry, but it was—the whole time. I felt it there the same way I have felt it each time the world threatens to unravel, like the skin that holds my body together when everything beneath it feels shattered. Like that place deep within—at the center, maybe, of my heart—that remains solid and still when everything else is whirling.

And finally there is this, the deepest thankfulness: The day of this concert, there wasn’t room for much more. The day was tightly-scheduled, and there wasn’t room for more than just getting to the concert and playing it, everybody doing their best. I knew it would be great, and enough. And I almost always have a plan like that. The thing is, even when I think it’s a big, grand, wide-open plan that stretches me it ends up being a tight little thing. So when a Hand reaches down and breaks the whole thing wide open, I am shaken, and thankful. Because for a moment I see it all—larger, wider, and more beautiful than I thought it could be. Or than I would have allowed.

Release.

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