Hundreds of Windows

The summer has the space and time to work on several projects that I had wanted to do in during the year, but just couldn't organize myself to make happen.  One of them is to do my website.  As I've been working on it, I'm realizing how much organizing the resource that I want it to be for my students is organizing the way that I think about my teaching and my studio.  One of the pages I would like to have is a teaching philosophy.  So that means brainstorming my teaching philosophy and my goals for my students, regardless of age.

Summer also allows for sitting and staring time.  As my dinner cooked, I sat at our dining room table and looked at some of the hundreds of windows that are visible from our own window.  It's a wall of windows.  Most of them were still dark at the dusk hour, but one of them a floor down and a bit to the right was lit and the blinds were open as they usually are with that particular unit.  On the bed, for the first time, I saw a woman playing with a young child, perhaps 12 months old.  She waved a fan over the child and the child reached for it, turned over, crawled around and played with it, stretched its legs and the woman stroked them or played with them.  I got my dinner and they continued to play and interact.

I wondered what that woman's hopes and dreams were for that young body in that moment.  What drove her play, and her touch?  What do we wish for our children or for the children of others?  To see such a young body, so full of potential, stretching and turning as though with limitless possibility, I thought about the ways we train minds and bodies and shape them into societies.  What do we wish for them?  Do we want them to make money, or be sensitive to others, or scholarly, or a good care-giver?   What drives us to engage with them as we do and to shape the world around them as we do?

The blinds to that apartment seem to always be open, maybe they don't even have any.  And while it may seem voyeuristic to look into other people's windows, that's the view from our apartment and the lives that all of us in these buildings live.  If our windows are open we are sharing with others.  I've admittedly even gotten quite lax about what I'm wearing, as do others.  There's the naked man that sometimes appears across the way, and why not?  We're all naked under our clothes.  We all have bodies.  That's the way it is.  We keep them covered or close our windows but sometimes I wonder why.  What a gift it is to see a young child, so undifferentiated, so flexible, so full of everything possible.  Just one of the hundreds of windows outside of mine.

New York Draft Riots of 1863

When I went to Ellis Island last month, I was inspired to buy a simple New York history book, one oriented to probably 5th or 6th graders.  It has activities like making colonial porridge, or doing archeology in your own New York City backyard.....  Haven't tried that yet, but I read it in bits and today I was reminded of the riots that occurred in New York following Abraham Lincoln's draft law which stipulated that people could avoid the draft by paying $300.  The riots were fairly severe, and I recalled reading about them in Dorris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals.  

What struck me about them as I revisited them today, was what this said about the people of the time and what it could teach people of our time.  When authority asks something of us, or tells us something must be a certain way, we can feel very powerless.  There is nothing that can be done in a corrupt world like ours.  We must carry on and just make the best out of our world.  Or maybe we even pretend that our rights are not being violated, or maybe at a certain point, things seem so futile that we don't even notice.

What does it take for a person, or a group of people to believe in their own rights and to voice them?  When these people decided they could and should riot, was it because they had at some point been treated better?  Or were they exposed to ideas that led them to believe they were entitled to something better than a blood tax on the poor?  Something at this time and place made people believe in their voice against such oversight.  And it mattered and they became less powerless for it.

And for us as individuals, we may also have such rights.  If we reflect on our needs as people, and reflect on the obligation of our government, what do we conjure?  What are our rights?  And how are they being violated?  I think of the way our government is representing us in the world, the way people and natural resources are being exploited.

Do we see these things, and do we use our voice, or whatever power we can find, to work against them?  It says something of a period in history when people are awake enough to find their voice in the midst opposition, or worse, unjust status quo.  Are we awake right now?  Are we listening to ourselves, to what can and should be in this world?  Do we believe that it matters?

Frustration

I had several days away from the piano (and cello, too) and have been coming back to them in the past few days.  This morning I had a familiar experience, though not one I've felt recently, of playing something on the piano that I know I can play, but not being able to get my brain and fingers to really do it.  It was frustrating and unproductive.  So I decided it was time to more on to the next piece.

I've worked a lot on Fur Elise, and I've worked through a lot of challenges, but this was a different "brain feeling,"  one that felt like hitting my head against the wall.  It wasn't getting better.  It's been about 2 months, and I have it all but performance ready (or so my nascent inner pianist might believe).  And sometimes, in such a state, quality may come from giving oneself exposure to other things, to learning skills from different angles, to broadening repertoire, in short, to quantity.  It's not something I might have admitted 10 years ago, when I took pleasure in beating myself up over a single shift, but I think there is some value in it.

So it was nice, later in the day, to be able to bring this fresh experience to a conversation with a student that has very acute frustrations with cello practice at times.  It was nice to be able to talk about stepping back, taking a breath, doing something else if needed.

But I think it may have to be a part of growing and becoming stronger.  There will be times when we feel ourselves bigger than we are, and that reminds me of trying to sit still as a 5-year-old in a long orchestra concert.  Sometimes that body just needs to move beyond itself but can't seem to do so, sometimes the mind needs to grow beyond itself, but doesn't know how, even if it can see the goal so clearly.

New York, America! (Fireworks on the East River)

Macy's is a department store and department stores aren't doing so well, thanks to online retail like Amazon.  Somehow, they are still able to sponsor some incredible public events, like tonight's Fourth of July Fireworks on the East River.  There's some irony in Fourth of July being brought to us by capitalism in spite of capitalism.  Anyway.... I'm not a crowds person and it would never have occurred to me to go, but Andrew suggested it and I like spending time with him.

Even the train platform to get to Queens was crowded.  And then we arrived and quickly joined a crowd of people channeling to one viewing spot on the river (we weren't the only ones to think of this place?).  And then we spotted some green and so channeled ourselves out and went to another spot.  We found a small patch between blankets that had been laid 7 and 8 hours before the show and ate our dinner as the sun went down over the Manhattan skyline.  Buildings were sporting their red, white, and blue for the evening, including a very visible Empire State Building.

The time arrived and we kept waiting and waiting a little longer, until the first spark went off and the show started.  Fireworks have grown a lot since I last went to a show and it really was spectacular.  Five barges on the East River shot of the same show at the same time so all the crowds could see.  Around us people held up their smart phones for pictures and spoke Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese.

And the great unfolding of the crowds.  It took us an hour to get to the train station.  The held people from going in to regulate the platform crowding, some of the trains were delayed due to unruly passengers at another stop, and we waited quite awhile on the platform.  When it arrived, it was already crowded, so we got to experience the inertia of desperate people shoving into a train car.  I ended up having plenty of room.

Another hot car on another train and two hours later we are home.  Beautiful fireworks, lovely evening, great company, many languages celebrating our country together, a very New York evening.

Controlling Love

Back to a hot New York City with hot living.  It's still fairly quiet here, and there are no family members to live for, but one another, which is something.  And also students, which is something, too.  I get to play "parent" to people at many ages and stages, today a sixth grader finding himself and pushing away from parents.  This was our second solo lesson (no mom) and I'm finding it interesting to hear the harmless mischief he now confides to me.  I'm not his parent, and don't intend to tattle (unless something seems alarming), but being an adult, it is a lesson on this necessary time and stage in life:  finding ways around one's parents and learning how to claim one's space.  My role right now is tangential and relatively easy compared to his parents.  Perhaps one day I'll be able to think back on the humor of his perspective and laugh at myself from his eyes, trying to control, control, control, someone I love and forgetting that that love is the reason why.

Arriving in New York, Leaving Cincinnati

We are back in New York, welcomed by a descent along a sun-setting horizon filled with fireworks in anticipation of Fourth of July.  I've never seen so many fireworks, first from above as little sparks, and then all around us as we came to their level, probably at their finale.  

It is never easy to say goodbye to my mother so I can only imagine what it must be like for her.  

Baby World

The joy of a children's world, seeing the new Cincinnati waterfront with all the water fountains, slides, large interactive musical toys, climbing walls, life size chess set, and swings looking out over the river.  And then an afternoon walk with a fussy baby to go to the library and children's book store and Goodwill to pick up some used bongos.  The evening is wearing into an event of watching the baby roll around on the floor and observe a common world as a new place.