on practicing

Here is the thing: no one ever got famous by trying. For instance, Charles Ives was just an insurance salesman who came home in the evenings to compose because he could not live without it. Apparently Woody Allen wrote tons of screenplays, more than were ever published, because there they were inside him and they had to come out, no matter whether or not they landed in the laps of high-praising critics.  Artists who are deep thinkers and seekers — these people must create. It is in their very blood stream and it is not a choice.

A few weeks ago I went to see a play called “Maestro: Leonard Bernstein,” a one-man show by pianist and actor Hershey Felder.  My mother said it would be life changing and I was unwilling to believe her, but as with many things, she was right. Since graduating NEC, I’ve been struggling with questions like: in which genre should I write, how should I write it, what instrument(s) should I write for, or should I really just be practicing instead?  By the end of the Bernstein play I had a realization that was so obvious, it felt as though I had stepped into my own skin, like I had just cleaned a little more rust off my pipes; I should compose.  Not just songs, but pieces that develop, that are not necessarily limited by genre and “shoulds.” For me, the word “compose” implies Scheherezade, The Rite of Spring, Schoenberg, Three Places in New England, the 8-movement Gematria-based song cycle my sister recently composed, Gershwin. To compose is to allow. To make space for. To get out of ones own way.

The magic of this realization lasted about twelve hours, and when I woke up the day after the play, I remembered that composing is actually hard. At this point I decided to give up altogether, succumb to the desire to spend my days reading the New Yorker and knitting.  Maybe I would listen to music on good days, when I’m not too depressed to see that other people can successfully write inspiring works.

But then I remembered that the composers I admire did not get famous in a day, nor did they write a symphony in a week. (I’m ignoring you if you are mentioning Mozart right now).  I am a far cry from any Charles Ives or Woody Allen, but it turns out that creativity is in my blood stream too and I do not have the option to ignore it. Trudging through the sludge of neurosis and judgment is indispensible to the creative process. This act of searching, searching, finding, losing the way, searching again — this is how art is made.  

The only fly in the ointment is, though I know all of this, it is nearly impossible to believe when the voices of doom are saying that if I do not sit down and crank out some kind of masterpiece in the next hour, I am a failure. So, I ask myself three questions:

1) Were you always able to play concertos, improvise and walk bass lines on the cello? I answer no.

2) Were you always able to touch your toes? I say, no, but due to a regular yoga practice of five years, now I can.

3) What is the common denominator?

And then I remember.

I practiced.

As Alan Watts said in a quote recently emailed to me by my mom, “The point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.” It’s true that practicing gets you places. But it is trusting that it will get you places, every day for the rest of your life, that must keep you going, that must keep you in this precious moment that will, quite literally, never come again.

If I happen across fame or money along my way, then won’t that be nice? Until then, I’ll just keep attempting to clean the rust off my little old pipes.

rain

Today it is raining in Boston. It’s the kind of weather where, in a perfect world, I would be sprawled out on the carpet with a book of Calvin and Hobbes, drinking earl grey tea next to my fat cat, Sophie.  In a way, I am doing some version of this: happily sitting on my grey couch after arriving home from a rehearsal and an hour of traffic-sitting. The rain has placed a gentle spell on my evening.

For me, rainy days are one of the only times when the wildness in my mind becomes more like a murmur, when the battle-cry of Stop and Slow Down is finally allowed to be heard.  This does not mean I always listen, but it’s certainly easier to feel its presence, this quietness just outside my peripheral vision. Today it means that, instead of transitioning from traffic jam to practice space, I came home and wrote this post. There is something so deeply less at stake when I write words than when I write music. To devote years of time and energy to one artistic outlet comes with the weight of ego, attachment, and equating oneself with the value of this work.  When the opportunity arises to be creative in a different way — prose and poetry in my case — there is less judgment. There is less need for perfection and therefore there is stillness and space where there was no stillness or space before.

As Adrienne Rich says in her poem, Stepping Backward, “We must at last renounce that ultimate blue / And take a walk in other kinds of weather.” We are a willful group of humans and rain is often considered a setback; we can’t take our daily run in the sunshine, or bike to the laundromat or even be happy at all.  I may be an anomaly when I casually mention that snow and rain are my favorite.  But I think Adrienne is talking about more than just weather.  She is talking about the incessant need to better ourselves, something that is so deeply a part of the human condition, in fact I think it is the human condition.  According to a book in which I am currently enthralled, this need began at the dawn of humanity when we first began knowing that we know. Conscious of time, we began to struggle with the future and thereby struggle with the self which, “while somehow unchanging, continually comes into existence.” Our awareness of time makes us entirely unable to be at peace with ourselves.

So while we are all in constant search of that ultimate blue, a day that would be the very epitome of e.e. cummings’ “leaping greenly spirits of trees / and a blue true dream of sky,” why don’t we take a walk in other kinds of weather?  It’s probably too late to re-program our prehistoric genes to stop seeking out new heights of knowledge and success, but maybe we can take a walk, a short one, perhaps. Just up the hill and back. The smallest change of scenery, one where the rain still comes from a dream of sky, where even the brownest of winter’s trees are still leaping.

begin it

My grandfather’s favorite acronym was D.I.N.  Do It Now.  While this has always been second nature to me, it has come with a cost.  I answer emails and make phone calls promptly, not because I want to be responsible, but because the thought of having to do them later is more than I can bear.  The problem is that this cycle does not end.  There will always be emails to write, bills to pay, phone calls to make.  D.I.N. turns into D.I.A.T.M (Do It All The Time). And thanks to my iPhone, these days I check email more frequently than I am willing to admit.

I think there is a balance that can be found here, but the point is that my grandfather actually did know what he was talking about.  And it wasn’t necessarily about life’s endless errands.

Recently I was teaching a cello lesson in which my student was expressing frustration. She wanted to be improving faster, but due to her frustration she was not slowing down to practice details, to delight in her instrument, or to find peace in the journey of learning. She told me that, within the last year or so, she and her partner had taken up beekeeping and that she felt a similarity between learning cello and learning how to keep bees; both are enshrouded in mystery, she said, until you begin to experience them. The more you approach the hives, the more you sit down with your instrument, the easier they get, the more sense they make, the more nuance you are capable of achieving. Then she made a beautiful analogy: Let’s say you wanted to be a botanist but you had not yet learned anything about plants.  If you noticed a tree of interest, you might go up to it, study its bark and its leaves, then look it up in an encyclopedia.  But once you delve into the learning process and botany becomes a part of your life, you will eventually walk down the street and be able to point out the flora. Ah, there’s a maple. Here is a spruce.

In other words, if there is anything in this world that is pulled toward your heart, why not do it now? As musicians and artists, we have the ability to choose to construct our lives the way we want.  I still believe there are a lot of “shoulds” around the careers of musicians. Many people from a classical background are expected to go to school until they get a job in an orchestra.  This is what I thought I would do from an early age, but at a certain point this stopped feeling right to me. I realized I had other choices and I wanted to experience them.  When I first started playing fiddle tunes on the cello at age eighteen, I felt like I was flailing around. Learning by ear was hard. My musical rug had been ripped out from under me.  As I’ve continued on my search, I notice this to be true over and over. My two years at NEC took everything I thought I knew about music, shook them up and dumped them on the floor.  Instinctively, I dropped to my hands and knees to clean up the mess, and here I am, still on the floor, slowly and steadily lining up the broken pieces. Without a doubt they will get scrambled again and again, only each time, I will have a new scrap of knowledge to add to the mosaic of my life.

We must take risks to be in this profession and this, as I am finally realizing, is the real meaning of D.I.N.  My grandfather’s favorite quotation was by Goethe: “Lose this day loitering and it will be the same tomorrow. If you can do it or think you can do it, begin it.  Boldness has magic, power and genius in it.”  To do it now is to throw oneself in, one hundred and fifty percent. Eventually the flailing becomes graceful.  The bees become approachable.  The piano keys start to look like chord shapes.  Making a life as a musician becomes a reality, one day at a time, easier and easier, broken piece by broken piece.

a quiet voice

Hello readers, and welcome to my first ever blog post. For the past many months I have felt this tiny pulling at my heart, a barely audible desire to have a public place to put my thoughts, poetry, and other people's thoughts and poetry; a place, in other words, to attempt a coherent outlet for my frustrations and inspirations, both little and big.

So. Here we are.

Having just arrived home from three weeks of traveling and teaching abroad, I've been thinking a lot about creativity. And more specifically, about how I have not been very creative lately which, in my animal mind, translates to mean that I am useless. 

If you don't know me, you probably have someone in your life very similar. I am your typical Type A, Enneagram number 3, some very telling combination of introvert and perfectionist with a not-so-quiet inner voice that is sure of imminent failure if I am not writing, practicing, or generally improving in my spare time.  My various spiritual practices tell me that I am not this voice in my head, I am not what I do, nor what I hope to be. “Do not try to see through the distances,” says Rumi.  “That is not for human beings.” Unfortunately, this is not tattooed on my arm.

Traveling can give us the freedom of taking a break from our creative practice.  When I’m on the road or teaching at a camp there is no time or space for writing; my ego allows this and I gratefully welcome the moments when I can let myself off the hook.  Teaching and touring often fill me up, but then I get home and remember that one of my primal life forces comes from writing and creating, in whatever form that may take — currently and surprisingly, this appears to be poetry — and that this is hard. I am not the kind of artist who just whips out a song (let alone a song cycle) once a month. I need to feel that rare inward blossoming, that something greater than me is being coaxed to the surface, the moment when my heart says Pick up your pen, Now. This time, the minute I stepped off the plane at Boston Logan, the horrible voice spoke again. It wanted me to write a new song pronto because what have I been doing these past three weeks gallivanting around the globe?

The thing is, inspired work does not come from this voice. Yes, I have to show up every day at my desk, or my keyboard, or my dark little room with my reluctant self, a cello, a notebook, and Voice Memos. But as long as that voice is shouting its fearful alarms, I will not be able to create anything. When traveling, there is no time to show up, and I can rest in the arms of performance, which is the fruit of writing’s labor.  The difficult part is not getting back in the creative swing when I am home, but quieting the voices of judgment.

Anne Lamott recently tweeted: “We must let go of our obsession with being remembered, because we won’t be.” What sweet relief! Yet somehow, that ever-convincing voice cannot grasp this wonderful notion. Herein lies the real work.

On that note, to refresh my own travel-weary spirit, and hopefully yours, I am reposting a relevant piece I wrote last fall for NEC’s Entrepreneurial Musicianship blog.

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showing up

Now that school has started again and I’m not there, I’ve been thinking about how to commit to continued creative growth without the container of school.  I am a classical cellist gone folk cellist gone aspiring jazz cellist, pianist, singer, and songwriter and now that I’ve graduated, one might think I’d have all the time in the world to hone these skills. On the contrary, my days are filled with errands, gigs to play, lessons to teach, and a seemingly endless flow of email-answering and planning.  I feel grateful for my active touring and teaching schedule, but I continue to come up against this question: how can I make my own music and wellbeing a priority?

I think it is the constant striving for creation that propels us forward in this world. No matter how many times I practice a new standard or Popper etude, nothing compares to the satisfaction of writing a piece of music, or adding a new verse to a song in progress. It is this act of tapping into something “beyond the margins of the self,” as Mary Oliver puts it, that I am after—this elusive quality, combining concentration with subconscious, and the time and energy it takes to access it—and what continues to fall to the bottom of my to-do list.

For most of my life, I have struggled with feelings of powerful guilt if I do not somehow improve myself in a given day. It’s only been within the last three years that I’ve begun to access the part of me that creates music, and now there is a new level of commitment at stake. Practicing is still something I check off the list. But songwriting? The creation of new, deeply personal and relevant art? Do these things have a place on my checklist?

Yes.

Yes yes yes.

And that’s because it is about showing up. It is about waking up in the morning, doing yoga, eating breakfast, and writing.  If I do not show up to my work, to that higher self beyond my own margins, then that self will disappoint me. Writing, in whatever form, is not about waiting for inspiration to strike.  In the opening line of my favorite essay by Mary Oliver, she writes, “If Romeo and Juliet had made appointments to meet, in the moonlight-swept orchard, in all the peril and sweetness of conspiracy, and then more often than not failed to meet—one or the other lagging, or afraid, or busy elsewhere—there would have been no romance, no passion, none of the drama for which we remember and celebrate them.” Writing takes place when I show up, whether or not I am inspired, day after day after day.

We are a culture who shows up: for our jobs, for our students, our teachers, our families, our partners, our friends. We show up at the registry of motor vehicles when our license has expired. We show up at the grocery store when we’re out of bread. But how often do we show up for ourselves?

I don’t think this answer will come to me in the bright flash of revelation. By now, it is slowly dawning on me that there will never be a day when I say, “Now I am done practicing. Now I have arrived.” If I did arrive (wherever that is), life would be awfully boring. Instead, I am in pursuit of pursuit. For the rest of my life I will be navigating how to write “Show Up For Self” on the top of my daily list, just as I will be negotiating what it means and how to approach the process of creating meaningful music (while, ever-hopeful, simultaneously practicing all of my instruments and genres).  The first, and hardest, thing I have learned is that patience must be involved: patience with the writing process and patience with myself, for the myriad of days when I just don’t show up.