Andante

(Sonata no. 2 in A minor for solo violin, 3rd movement, J.S. Bach)

It is tucked between a difficult fugue and a fourth movement that really wants to fly, quiet and lyrical and probably my favorite movement to play. This morning it is what I most want to listen to. I think it is the heartbeat threaded through the whole thing that appeals so much. That continual pulsing beneath a fluid upper line—this music tugs at me. Somehow, too, it glows.

It is cool and cloudy and wet outside. No rain right now, but I can hear the wet under the tires of the cars driving past. My feet are cold, but my coffee is strong and dark and hot. My microwave is a faithful friend, allowing me every day to drink my coffee as slowly as I want, but still enjoy it hot.

I just learned that today is Clara Schumann’s birthday. She is somebody I think I would have liked to get to know over coffee. Did you enjoy practicing more, or less, once you had children? Did you ever fall asleep while you were writing? How frustrated did you get when that thought was finally just making itself visible and somebody came in and they absolutely couldn’t wait for you to get it down on paper? Tell me what it was like for you, all that balancing. Did you end up being the person you wanted to be, in the end? Maybe when I was done with my questions I would confide in her. I just had a birthday, myself. I remember feeling shocked that 16 didn’t seem nearly as old as I thought it would, once I got to it. I still get that feeling, every single year.

That heartbeat carries you through, but it is also a touching point for the lyrical voice. Something to keep coming back to. A steadiness that allows freedom. Violinists don’t often get to be more than one voice at a time, but Bach makes it possible here. There is something about that pairing of steady and free, solidity and fluidity. Getting to be both, at the same time. It feels very peaceful.

And so I listen to this one movement, over and over again, and allow it to sink in deeply. I keep re-heating my coffee, and wrapping my cold fingers around the mug to warm them, and drinking slowly in order to enjoy my morning allotment as long as possible. I try to hold myself in one place to write, but find that my mind, as usual, is much happier to weave around, instead. It comes back to rest often, on how the music seems to glow, and on the heat and strength of this slow last cup of coffee, and on that recent birthday and how time keeps moving forward and how could I still feel so new at it all?

I’m not sure when the thought hit me, exactly, that if I wanted to be a certain kind of person someday when I was old, I might as well start living as if I were already her. At the triathlon I participated in on Sunday—my first, as part of a team—one of my teammates and I watched the very last swimmer come out of the water and get on her bike. She was at least 70. “Hey Karen, that’s gonna be you,” he said. Oh, absolutely. I would love to be that kind of woman.

I hope I still have more years ahead of me than behind. But I’m starting to believe that they go fast. I want to keep feeling new—at some things, at least. But maybe the fact that everything keeps moving forward is okay. The thought of stagnancy seems ominous. Maybe that pairing of steady and free, solidity and fluidity, that I’m listening to is a good thing to emulate. Maybe the key to aging gracefully has nothing to do with the color of your hair or how well your body works, but more to do with what you are creating, what pulses within you, what you touch back on. Tell me it’s about the warmth and strength and light.



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From Middle, with Love

 

Nope, this is not a bead. I just know a girl who likes to find treasures in driveways and parking lots. And she made me promise to share it. Hope today gives you something good, my friends.

 

 

 



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A Time and a Place

For everything there is a season,

and a time for every matter under heaven…

a time to keep silence, and a time to speak…

Always, there has been that tension between speaking and silence.

My senior year in high school, I often ate lunch at my locker. My schedule was different enough from my closest friends that it was easier to be alone than to walk through the commons-area trying to find a place for myself among others. Better to create my own place, just off to the side, leaning against a locker and eating my sack lunch, lost in a book.

I remember still, how it felt—lonely, but almost sacred. I loved that time to myself. But I remember, distinctly, leaving school at the end of the day and not being able to remember if I had spoken to anybody. There were days my mouth felt numb from lack of use.

I had close friends, and teachers I adored. I had acquaintances I smiled at and said hi to in the halls. Whenever we had a substitute teacher who mispronounced my name, both first and last, during role call, there was usually a chorus of voices that joined mine to correct him or her—“It’s Kah-ren! Kah-ren B-york!”

But really talking—asserting myself and speaking up—there was often a struggle there.

And there still is.

Because I don’t know how to reconcile the fact that I sometimes hate the sound of my own voice with the fact that I’m compelled to use it.

Because speaking up brings both connection and alienation.

Because often it all goes beyond words, anyway.

*       *      *

I’ve been thinking a lot about place recently. About how within all that silence in high school I was finding a place to be myself, learning how through art, and music, and writing, I could find a voice. How, at least for me, silence and space were necessary to cultivate a way to speak. And how, also, there was a danger of staying silent too long, and using that place of silence—that sanctuary—as a place to hide.

Since then I’ve learned that if silence has often felt like a sanctuary, speaking can feel that way as well.

Because speaking takes whatever-it-is outside of you, gives it a less-ghostly form.

Because you can learn a lot when your words reach somebody else. Maybe you aren’t crazy, after all. Maybe you aren’t as alone as you thought. Maybe you really can find the strength.

Because even if speaking up brings alienation—well, then you know, don’t you?

*      *       *

So I find sanctuary both in silence and in speaking. And I see danger in both. And I find myself right back in the same quandary: keep silent or speak? I know the Sunday School answers, and I want more than that. Is it enough to know for now that there really is a time for both? That one doesn’t always trump the other? Maybe.

I watch one child learning how his words and tone of voice reflect back on him, kindness or hurtfulness amplified. I watch another break her silence to experiment with any number of different voices, unsure which one is really hers. I watch a third discover that it’s true—sometimes you’re actually not allowed to talk, and other times you are, and it’s helpful to at least know what the rules are.

Oh child, I struggle with those things, too.

When does this wisdom thing kick in, anyway?


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Blue Moon

Somewhere above us Friday night, there was a blue moon. I would have loved to see it lighting the darkness. Instead we had rain, after a summer of almost none. And I looked out the window and saw something beautiful anyway.

It is amazing how quickly the green can return.




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Outside: Water

Running Monday morning, before sunrise, after a day of much-needed rain, the fog was so thick I could feel individual droplets hitting my face. Two hours later, biking behind my kids on their way to school, it was still there—heavy all around us, changing everything we saw and didn’t see, cool flecks of it wetting our skin. I don’t know why I like that feeling so much, but I do. And I like when the clouds descend to earth and the light changes and the world looks completely different.

There is nothing like the feeling of water—the coolest good thing sliding down your throat when you are thirsty; the blessing you get when you decide wet is wet and stop running to get out of the rain and let it soak you instead, turning your face upward for more; the way a lake wraps around you when you finally relax and let yourself float in it.

It is almost too big a word to write about, water. It conjures up so many other words: washing, cleansing, thirst, deluge, baptism, holy, pure, flood, waves, ocean, lake, river, stream, rivulet, drink, pour, fill, flow, float, bathe, drown, sprinkle. I’ve approached many times and quit, because there seemed no way to encompass it all.

But I can try to get at it in tiny droplets. Or maybe even a lake at a time. Maybe it’s possible to approach the meaning of water like a poem—let it wash over you, let the parts you understand soak in, and hope that next time you come to it more will make its way in. Because you certainly can’t carry it away in your hands.

 

 

I love what a lake does with light. Regardless of the circumstances, it always reflects. Calm, choppy, undulating—whatever state the water is in, it reflects what is above. Always, it shines back the light and color it receives, sometimes solid and clear, sometimes broken into a million diamonds so bright they hurt your eyes. But always, the water is giving back some form of what it is shown.

All the time, though, that it is reflecting, a lake is hiding something else. And how can you not love knowing there’s a secret world underneath? You can get glimpses of it from above, depending on how far the light penetrates. You can visit for a while, depending on how long you can hold your breath or what tools you have to mimic a creature that doesn’t need oxygen the way you do. But that world is not yours, and I don’t believe that all the study in the world would allow a person to know it, entirely. The fact that it is there, regardless of whether or not human eyes ever see it—does it make you wonder?

And what the lake is hiding, it nourishes. Light soaks through that surface reflection, or cuts through it in shafts, and there is life there: swimming, waving, floating, teeming.

Do you ever wish you could work that seamlessly—reflecting and harboring and nourishing what was given to you? It would not matter if you were perfectly still or violently wind-whipped. You would inhabit your space, live out your purpose without faltering. Somehow always at rest.


More in this series:    Fern, Moth, Birch, Turtle Hunting



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Sometimes

Sometimes you need to hide someplace and read a good book.

Sometimes you need to sit in the car in the grocery store parking lot at 10:30 at night and listen to the end of the symphony. (This and this really spoke to me last week. That first link—listen to at least 7:11, and then see if you can stop.)

Sometimes the kitchen floor needs to turn into an art studio.

Sometimes you need to go ahead with the read-aloud, even though it’s way too far past bedtime.

Sometimes you need to allow new additions to the already-long-and-complicated good-night kiss routine.

We are well into our new schedule, and it is exciting and a little scary and definitely exhausting. And good. Not perfect, not necessarily smooth, and not without a need for attitude adjustments (mine, too.) But good. I’m thankful for so many moments of grace. And now I’m looking back at this list and thinking, maybe not sometimes—maybe as often as possible.

 

 

 

 

 



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Outside: Fern

“Ferns in general may be thought of as largely being specialists in marginal habitats, often succeeding in places where various environmental factors limit the success of flowering plants.”

—“Fern,” Wikipedia

Tell me about things that thrive in the shade. Things that were made not for bright light, but for cool, dappled places. That take scarcity and turn it into a profusion of green lace.

Tell me about the things that thrive off what seems like not enough. The things that take too-cold, too-dry, too-dark, and blanket them with improbable beauty.

Tell me about tender things that surprise you with their strength.

Here—I will tell you a story, too:

My grandmother, the one I never knew, was a mother and a musician and a teacher and an artist. A queenly woman. She died of pneumonia during a flu outbreak when she was only in her forties, after a lifetime of struggling with severe allergies and asthma. I have always thought of her as strong in heart, weak in body. It recently struck me, though, that a woman who survived her birth only because the neighbor lady sucked the fluid from her lungs to get her breathing, who most likely survived two bouts of tuberculosis, who struggled to breathe off and on all her life, with very little of the medical intervention available now—that woman must have been incredibly strong, period. And from everything I know about her, she lived abundantly.

Does it make sense when I tell you that I feel her legacy as keenly as that of the grandmother I knew most of my life, who lived to be 97? Neither one has seen the end of her influence.

Tell me about those things—and those people—made just for their specific time and place—the ones who blanket their world the way ferns blanket the forest floor, delicate and strong, graceful and bountiful, soaking up every last bit of light.


More in this series:     Moth, Birch, Turtle Hunting




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Violin Lessons

20+ years of taking violin lessons, plus the years I’ve taught—hopefully I’ve learned a few things. There are times, though, when I hear myself saying something to a student and think: Did you HEAR that life metaphor? If I could better apply that I’d be some sort of genius at my life! But the middle of a lesson is not quite the right time to ponder things like that, and the moment passes quietly.

I love those moments, though, so I thought I’d put them together into a neat little list, gleaned from all sorts of people and places and situations:

• What you hear under your ear and what you project to your audience are not always the same thing.

• If you want to learn that new technique, you have to be willing to risk failing. A lot.

• All happy, all sad, all exciting, all tranquil, = boring. Tension and release, going to or moving away from—that’s what pulls us in.

• No matter how many times you’ve played it, there is always something new to discover.

• Sometimes you hate a piece and you have to play it anyway. Playing it like you hate it, though, doesn’t really improve the experience for anyone.

• Practice does not make perfect. But striving for perfection will make you better so you make it your goal—and figure out some way to get comfortable with falling short.

• When you add a new skill, expect everything else to fall apart. You will eventually piece it together again and it will all be stronger.

• It’s hard to communicate anything when you haven’t considered what you’re trying to say.

• Learning is messy.

• Learning is often slow. (Those once-in-a-while times when you get to make a breathtaking leap in what you can do are usually proceeded by a long, hard climb.)


Please feel free to add to my list in the comments below. What have you learned?


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How Good

How good to walk into the woods with one request on your heart:

Show me something—

and part of you knows that’s an easy request because of course there will always be more to see, but part of you worries also that maybe you won’t see it, maybe you will just walk by and be too busy worrying, or too busy telling children “Come on, we have to get back soon” or simply too busy inside your own head to be watching carefully—

how good to then see something,

and then more,

and more.

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Outside: Moth

I wasn’t ready to commit to this being a series at first, but there you have it, that’s what it is. Technically, this is number 3.

I have nothing against butterflies. They are completely magical. Delicate, colorful—how can you not be glad to have seen one?

Part of their magic, I think, is that they seem to be always moving. You can follow one a long way, trying to see it up close, but just when you think it will land it is off again, elusive as a thought.

I’ve had a different experience with moths. Not the nervous ones that throw themselves at porch lights. The other ones—the ones you find in daylight, at rest. The ones that surprise you because you always think of moths as frantic and dusty and colorless, but this one is so big, so beautiful, so still.

There is something special about a creature that allows itself to be seen. Holding a luna moth is a different experience, altogether, than chasing a butterfly. You move and breathe differently, your whole concept of fragile changes.

And that, really, is what I want to leave you with today.


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