Saturday before Sunday

Scurrying through midtown on a drizzling day, dancing with the tourists at the base of the Empire State Building, getting sucked into a mediocre Japanese restaurant by a promoter with menus on the corner, and enjoying the sights and sounds and poetic ambiguity of the MTA.

Tomorrow is my last official Sunday of lessons, the day of the week that used to be such a burden and now has become the pinnacle of the week,  regardless of the energy it requires.   Luckily, endings are often not so black and white, and for most of these students, we will have meetings in the coming weeks.  More Goodbyes dodged for the time being.

Celebrating Young Artists

My questions concern how to find the human soul in the human body, and how to share the process of  that discovery with another so that they may do the same.  My guides are those that are growing and needing to be fed, that pull something from me which quenches us all.  My mentors are the love that binds families and time, and exists in a magnitude unimaginable, yet completely possible, within and without my skin.

I am filled with the life that fills me.  Grateful, undeserving, so alive, and for it, wanting more.

May Time

There's a song by Mozart called May Time.  It's in compound meter and has an upbeat, which means there are a number of levels in teaching it.  It's important to feel all the subdivisions, but it's also important to feel the big beats.  This evening my student had mastered all 6 "beats" nodding his head for every one.  What is this song about?  It's lulling sway, gently flowing.....the beauty of May and the blooming of spring....

"Allergies," he said.

April may be the cruelest month, but May is not without it's complications.

I worked with his nodding, eventually putting my hand on the back of his head, moving it up and down, not to the subdivision but to the beat, saying, "Play head, play head, play head, head...." oh so musically with the song.  He got it to the point of a Pirate's Jaunt, which is maybe a little bit closer to the glory of spring.  As we laughed at this game, we forgot about the frustrations of extensions from the early part of the lesson, and winter melted into spring.

The privilege of swimming in a world I know

In my fingers, in my hips, in my lungs, and in my lips, are all the pieces that I've ever touched, all the people that I've ever played,  all the words I've ever walked.  They are a part of the fabric that continues, to cut through time, in the space in which I move.  What a privilege to be cut of my own, woven of what I have been, endless landscape ahead, with nothing to cross, nothing to knot, nothing to need.

Some ways of loving

I feel like a love hoarder.  It's hard to leave connections that would seem to be able to grow for years. I see that possibility and potential in the people who will miss me, in the way they express it.  There is a sadness that I can't help but wish to remedy.  I'm just not always sure who is the source and who is reflecting it.

But love can grow in other ways, with other people.  Trusting that it can and will is another way to love.  Allowing it to be with another, is also a way to love.  Letting go can be yet another way.

Blue Group

It doesn't get easier.  Everyday is a new goodbye.  Today's was group class.  Last year I taught 4 every week, and this year there was only one, a group of four 3rd-5th graders, beautiful people.  I thought about various lesson plans this morning, but in the end, let them take the lead.  And after several games, and solos, we somehow finished with my favorite closing, French Folk Song.  We stood up to take a bow, and I thanked them for the year, and behind several comments of gratitude, I hid that I loved them, until I couldn't hide it anymore, and let myself say it to them without holding.

Exchanges

I was on another crepuscular bus ride to the LaGuardia Terminal.  Early morning, the breaking, cracking, of day, and I was wedged within that miraculous event of turning earth.  And I was writing in a very New York-style way, bluetooth keyboard and smart phone, piled on my stuffed all-in-one-carry-on backpack.  As the sun pulled apart night, I could feel the leaving that is coming for me in less than two months.

After living here for nearly three years, I recently discovered another truth about the feeling of New York.  If only there were a German word I could conjure.  That feeling, just before entering a turnstile to the subway, or turning the corner to catch the bus, of hustling for fear of just barely missing it, of seeing it, hearing it drive away.  What if I enter the turnstile to discover that the last train just left and I have to wait 9 minutes.  Woe is me!

But trains are always leaving the station, buses are driving away without me.  I'm missing them constantly.

The bus I was on went through Harlem, and at the St. Nicholas and 125th St. stop a deluge of people got on, likely just off the A or C trains.  Middle of Harlem; Spanish, and English, and silent tired faces.

It's another exchange.  And there are so many that we have to make.   Being one place, going to another, transferring from a train to a bus, from work to home, from one life to another.  The trains are always coming and going.  Sometimes I'm there to catch them, and sometimes I'm still walking.  Sometimes I'm nowhere near them in mind or body, but will still call upon their service.  When does an exchange begin, and when does it end?  I have been leaving and arriving forever.