Why Does Intuition Want to Spoil My Wonderfully Logical Plans?











Let's say you want to be a rich and famous novelist.

You have it all planned out:

1. get a writing job at the local newspaper;
2. come up with a brilliant story idea;
3. write novel;
4. find an agent who gets your book published;
5. tour the country for signings;
6. have novel made into blockbuster movie;
7. win Nobel Prize for literature;
8. retire to the South of France.

You get step one and two checked off. Great!

Then one balmy Tuesday in October comes along. Your "Intuition?" tells you to call in sick and enjoy some golf. You call your friend Alfie and meet him at the North Fork Country Club. Your boss runs into you at the 19th hole and you get fired from your terrific job at the Suffolk Times.

Back to step zero.

Now, the only lousy work you can find is scraping barnacles off boat bottoms at the Greenport Yacht and Shipbuilding Company. You get depressed as the weeks drag by.

Then you start noticing that the strange characters who work with you each have their interesting quirks and histories. Your novel starts to percolate. You can't wait to get home each night and type away. And Danny, the old man who's been painting the names on yachts, his daughter is a top literary agent. You meet her at her Danny's retirement party and she takes interest in your writing.

Your logical mind says, "Well, why didn't you tell me that we were supposed to write about the characters in the shipyard? And that you were planning to meet an agent through one of them?"

"Why?"

Well, your intuition isn't interested in wasting time talking to your logical mind. It speaks a different language. I haven't figured out if its Medieval French or Pre-Cyrillic Russian, but I know it's something I can't translate just yet.

Besides, your intuition only deals with the next step. It only will tell you the next thing to do.

This is important, this is why I actually wrote this entry. Your intuition only deals with the next step. It will only tell you the very next thing to do and will sometimes wait years until you do it.

It won't not nag and hound you like your mother did when you were 14, to clean up your room. It will just whisper. Sometimes just once and if you don't listen, you miss out, you file the thought away, you forget about it. Or if you keep pestering your inner feelings instead of taking the next small step, you might get to hear the wrong answer you wanted to hear all along.

If you want to hear your intuition, you need to blindly take the step it is telling you. Afterwards, you may stumble into what to do after that, or your intuition may speak to you again.

I like to think of life as a maze. Your logical mind tells you that you want to go a certain way. It knows the cheese you want is to the north. But you will sometimes will have to go east or southwest as you follow the maze path. You have to if you want to eventually get to your goal, your cheese at the end of the maze.

It can be frustrating, your mind is shouting "the cheese is thataway" and your gut is yelling, "I don't care, this is the next step in the maze." They can sound be like two brothers, 8 and 9, fighting over that last jelly doughnut.

And it takes courage - what if your gut feeling is wrong?

At one point in my life, I studied from Stuart Wilde. He said that, "Your logical thinking isn't right all the time, so don't expect you intuition to be either." You will make some mistakes. When you follow you intuition, do your taxes, or paint the name on a boat, you will make mastakes.

It will take practice and mistakes to know when it really is your intuition speaking.

I don't like writing articles like this for one reason. Too much theory, too much thinking. All the words in 180 books can matter less than one bumbling, tiny attempt to do something. My gentle reader, just make some small, clumsy attempt to do what your gut is saying and I will feel today's writing was worth it.

(Oh, man! I was going to have oatmeal for breakfast. Now that I wrote about jelly doughnuts, It ain't gonna happen.)

A Chinese Yom Kippur?



Well, there is a Chinese New Year and a Jewish New Year. This year I had a Chinese Yom Kippur.

Sort of. . .

There is an old Chinese New Year custom is to go out to the street and break one of your dinner plates. Any bad luck which was slated for coming year is transferred to this loss of a plate.

Now, when the Jewish new year starts, G-d pencils in what will be allotted you for that year - marriage, how much money you will make, a broken foot, a trip to The Great Wall of China.

But He gives you a second chance. If you get nervous and feel that things might not go too well in the next 12 months, you can be comforted in knowing this. . . He watches to see if you made changes in yourself during the few days after the new year. If you did, He gets out his eraser and then pens in your new destiny on the 10th day, Yom Kippur. You get a new this year's karma.

The day before Yom Kippur, my desk computer died. I was upset and then realized, well it is the new year and I probably deserved worse in this coming year so this is a kindness, a softening of my karma sentence.

Years ago, a rabbi told me that when you repent, G-d may lessen the serious consequences of your wrong actions. He said, "Maybe instead, a cup of coffee you buy will be cold" or maybe your computer will break like a dropped dish.

My Cello













My meditation teacher of years ago told us that when you meditate with a question the answer may not come to you then, but rather the next day. You might be walking down the street and what's written on the side of the truck that almost ran you down might tell you the answer. Or you might be just sitting having coffee and the answer comes. You'll know. The answer is usually so simple and obvious, you might want to laugh at yourself for missing it before.

For some months I had a real problem regarding my cello. The other day I briefly thought on it before meditating and expected no solution and found none then. I forgot about it until the next day when the solution just slipped into my mind. It was so simple and obvious. Duh!

And when I actually followed through on this, the solution was severely better than I thought it would be. My wife was a bit shocked with the results and my son impressed also, (though until now I didn't mention the meditation to anyone).

Rocky III, Err... I Mean The Three Rockys



I watched Rocky III for the first time some nights ago. The music running through the film was "Eye of the Tiger" by the rock group, Survivor, a great choice.

The "Eye of the Tiger" is an interesting concept in martial arts. It is when a fighter goes to the next level of perception while in the ring. His view shifts from the view of fighting someone across from him to a birds-eye view. The fighter looks down at both himself and his opponent. It is as if you were playing a video game and your view point changed to over your head.

But the movie didn't deal with the actual point-of-view shift. I first read of the phenomenon when the New York Times covered a scientific study of it over a decade ago.

What the study didn't say was how it comes about.

Enter Charlie Campanelli, the boxer. He was, when I met him, in his 90's and had been for many years both retired and a consultant to all the big name boxers. He was what your would call "A real character" and he looked exactly like Rocky's trainer, played by Burgess Meredith, maybe just older and somehow harder, rock like.

He would preach to Muhammed Ali, or some other boxer, not to look at the opponent's hands. Look at his feet. You can't throw a decent left punch unless your left foot starts to the rear. Of course, same with the right.

I realized that when you do this, you start to shift your viewpoint to overhead.

Everyone listened to Mr. Campanelli except for one boxer, Rocky Marciano. He didn't have to. He was so enormously strong that he would just punch the opponents arms until that opponent couldn't hold them up any more to defend himself. Then came the knockout.

How strong was Marciano? Well, to illustrate. It takes a lot of energy out of you to throw punches and it will tire you out. Ali defeated the hard punching Foreman by his rope-a-dope method of leaning on the ropes and letting Foreman punch at his body for four bells. Then Ali knocked out the tired Foreman in the fifth.

Marciano must have been strong. Charlie Campanelli said he was. Campanelli also said some other interesting things when my friend Howie asked him at two different times, "Who's the greatest fighter in the world?"

The first time he said that the greatest fighter was someone who never stepped into the ring. Yoda said the flip of the coin with "Great Warrior... Wars don't make one great." (I just quoted Yoda?)

The second time he chided Howie, "You can't tell how strong someone is by looking at him. He could be the world's greatest fighter."

Well, I didn't think so. He was pointing at this skinny guy, me. But Campanelli was right, you can't tell.

If you were counting, what happened to the third Rocky in my title? Someone once sent me a postcard of Rocky and Bullwinkle. It was funny, Stallone and Bullwinkle. I'll leave you with that.

What I Write



Three times in these past few days, I was asked what I wrote. And I didn't have an good answer.

Now, If someone button-holes me and wants to know, I will say "Potatoes."

I guess you could say I write about potatoes as much as anything.

I write to make magical rings and dragons as real as unwashed potatoes.

I write to make wooden chairs and a sack of potatoes as interesting as what the last ice dragon is hiding in her broken hand.

I write to show how the smallest acts (like sweeping the floor and peeling some potatoes for a poor, old neighbor) can change the history of nations.

I grew up surrounded by potato farms and beaches. It's good for a writer to have a deep sense of the common, muddy world before he goes and tries to make his own paper world or tries to explain the complexities of the one we live in.

There is a certain writer I admire because she wanted to describe what a certain poison tasted like, so. . . she tasted a bit. As a writer you need to know this, or what rotting potatoes smell like, or what the hundred different night noises in Harlem mean.

The easiest beast to draw is a fantastical one, like a dragon, rather than, say a horse. We have a Da Vinci drawing of a dragon, and it is terrific study because his idea was to patch together different real animal parts to make a new whole, a dragon. The imagined, if done well, is not something new, but a delicious variation of the mundane.

You have to first know your common russets and yellow finns, whether you write of them for a cookbook or you tell a tale of gnomes sneaking off with enchanted tubers. You have to know how your common goat and lion are sinewed together to create a dragon real as that bowl of steaming, buttered potatoes with dill sitting on the table before you.

Well, I don't actually write much about potatoes. But I write about potatoes, if you get my drift.

Missing One House Cat



Last month, we would occassionaly see this small creature run across the floor. And for weeks, when I woke up, I would have to light a candle, open doors and windows and wait for the little fellow's smell to disapate.

We were afraid. Would he (she?) bite? Would the smell get worse, what of diseases? Would he invite his in-laws and cousins to move in?

I finally had to get rid of the rat. I went to the hardware store on Broadway and bought some sticky traps and a snap traps. I was reluctant because I really didn't want to hurt it. If I bought a humane trap, the animal control people would kill it anyway.

A house cat could have helped, but my wife has a strong allergy.

In the store, when I was standing in the aisle trying to decide between sticky traps and snap traps a young woman stopped by me and looked at me. I said that we have a rat and have to get rid of it. She said, "Do you have to kill it?"

I said the kitchen stunk from it and it could bring disease.

"Well," she replied, "It is just one rat and there are millions of them."

"No," I replied, "It's a creature and it has a life and feelings. I wish I didn't have to kill it."

When I went home and set the traps, I was still reluctant so I said to the rat, (though I was guessing it wasn't nearby), "Mr. rat, I don't want to kill you. Look, I am setting some traps, please go live somewhere else."

I checked the traps the next morning and they were untouched. But there was no smell either. I figured he would return the next morning. But no, It has been six weeks and he is gone.

Afterwards, I was reminded of a story I read decades ago from the Babylonian Talmud about a rabbi and nest of mice.

Rabbi Yehuda HaNassi was a perfect tzaddik, yet he suffered great pain. How did it begin? Through a deed of his. He was walking through the marketplace when a calf being led to the slaughter ran to him and hid under his cloak. He told the calf, "Go. For this you were created."

That is when his troubles began. An angel who witnessed the incident argued that since Rabbi Yehuda HaNassi had no compassion for an innocent animal's suffering, why shouldn't he have some suffering too.

And it ended through another deed. The rabbi's maid was sweeping the floor and found a nest of mice beneath the boards. She began to sweep them away, when he stopped her. "It is written," he said, "that His compassion is upon all of His works." That is when his suffering ceased.

My "plague of rodent" ended when I felt sorry for him. I wish all our problems could be solved so easily.

Yesterday, I had another dilema with an animal. Outside Barnes and Noble, some animal shelter had puppies and kittens up for adoption and I fell for a felix domesticus. I asked my wife if there was no way we could get it. My wife found him cute too, but unfortunately... her allergy. The answer was no.

I stayed out until dinner and when I returned, I found a large cat lying against our door and mewing plaintively.

I didn't want to disturb the cat and went to knock on the door of a new neighbor to see if it was their pet. Then I heard people calling and found out the cat belonged to apartment directly above us and wanted to get back home but couldn't figure out the right floor.

But her timing was impeccible.

The Worth of a Writer



We writers can make this mistake - valuing our writing in how many pages we finish. Beat this...

"Barn burnt down, now I can see the moon."
- Masahide

Or this tiny story from a conversation with the Japanese lady who sat next to me at Lynn Harrell's concert on Saturday (he is a great cellist and my teacher's teacher)...

"My one daugher played the violin and the other played the cello, the best was my son on the violin. But my son became too busy for the violin when he went into medical engineering. He told me that he felt his identity was gone. He had time to build a Model T Ford from scratch, but the violin takes a different kind of effort."

Harrell talked about Shubert before his last encore that night...

"When he was one of the pallbearers at Beethoven's funeral, little did Shubert know that he would only have a year to reign over classical music. He died the next year at only 31. In that year, he wrote great music, but if he only wrote this one little piece, it would have been enough..."

Don't number words, my friend.

The Owners of the Two Half Chickens



I have just one small story from when my family was in the old country. And while one small story does not make much of anything (anymore than one chicken bone in water makes a soup), it means a lot to me because it is something that is mine, the oldest thing that I know that is part of what made me, me.

• The old country is Poland. I had only one grandmother. One grandmother and one Bachi. My father's mother who lived with us in my early years was Bachi to me (and even her children called her that). When my cousin Barbara couldn't pronounce Babchi, meaning grandma in Polish, our Babchi's middle b was dropped and she came to be called Bachi, which now to me is also kiss in Italian. It just meant my dad's mom then. I miss my Bachi, but after maybe thirty years, I can still stop and let myself remember her specific kisses, the touch, her smell. It's funny the things that are chosen for us to remember. And I think I could still pick her hands and thin arms out of a lineup. This is her story I now tell, Connie's. To her friends, she was Connie.

Connie and her neighbor in the village pooled their few kopecks together and bought a chicken. I don't know what kind or if they gave it a name. They would take turns with the egg their chicken would lay most mornings. The neighbor would get it one day, Connie the next.

Once, for almost two weeks, the were no eggs and the neighbor kept accusing Connie of sneaking all the eggs for herself. Connie protested her innocence. Then chicken started laying again but the bitterness of the owners of the two half chickens didn't abate.

Soon after the hen was seen with a clutch of little chicks trailing her. The mystery was solved and the neighbor bought a dozen eggs for Connie as an apology.

I apologise that I have no more stories from the old country. Maybe that's why I read so hungrily the Issac Baschevis Singer stories of Poland. My wife and I have especially loved for many years his stories of the inhabitants of Chelm, who, in all his humorous stories of them, were schelmiels, wonderful fools.

A couple weeks ago my wife found out that two of her favorite students had ancestors who hailed from Chem. We had thought it was a mythical place. Now we are delighted that somewhere in Poland, our favorite old world village actually existed and maybe still does.

I have heard of immigrants who kept keys to their old country homes or something else, candlesticks maybe, and then they passed them down to their children. I am not jealous of them, I have this. A good story is one of the best things to have.

Hiroshima

Two weeks ago my thirteen year old son visited Hiroshima for the first time. The same day he arrived there by Shinkansen train from Tokyo, I saw a beautiful hardcover book on a street vendor's table for only four dollars. It was John Hershey's Hiroshima, which was one of the first serious books, the first I remember, that I read. I borrowed it from the local Cutchogue library. I have looked over many used books in stores and on the street over the years and would have noticed this volume before. But not until that day did I see it.

I am quite skeptical when it comes to coincidences and intuition, but these things seem to occur at an interesting frequency. I saw another book last week about how we overestimate the importance of coincidences with our minds. I believe we do. Yet there must be something going on even though I was trained by my Christian upbringing to believe in these things in the abstract but not live among them.

After years of schooling where I was told to not speak when I wanted; not eat when I felt like it; wait when I felt the need to relieve myself in the rest room; not to play or socialize when I felt like it; to concentrate when I wanted to rest; to do math when I felt like doing art; to read science when I wanted to study math; to be with dull, bitter teachers I wanted to get away from. . . I, like most Americans, learned to shut up what I felt inside.

Tell me, if you refuse to go the bathroom when your insides scream 'I have to go now,' how are you going to hear a more subtle, quiet message of intuition? I was trained to be counterintuitive for years and years.

Now, I don't know why I found Hershey's book when I did. I don't have to know but I can enjoy the event.

Why intuition you say, I thought you were talking about coincidence. Because intuition is to me, when you listen to your inner self, and some coincidence follows. Though you don't always have to sit down for 45 minutes and ask hmmmm. . . what are you saying, Miss Inner Self? Though sometimes that is what you might want to do.

I recently found out that John Hershey wrote another interesting small book called A Single Pebble, a story of an American engineer who travels the Yangtze to find places to put dams. Now, 50 years later, it is even more poignant with the the damming they are doing to that river. But while this is a touching, tender story, there is another story about Hiroshima and a single pebble that I would like to share, a true story.

A boy and his friends, perhaps it was his sister, were walking in Hiroshima near the end of the war and the boy stopped to pick up a small stone that caught his eye. There was a brilliant flash of light which burnt his friends, but the boy was shielded by a low cement wall as he bent down for his stone; and he lived.

(Atomic bombs can be configured to do different types of damage, only killing people and having the radiation dissipate quickly or giving off little radiation but doing much physical, heat damage or producing radiation that will stay a long time like in Chernobyl. So that is why this is possible.)

I collect stories of stones. One of the important hidden motifs of the Hebrew Scriptures is that of the Even Shetiah, the moving stone. If you have any stone stories, please share them with me.

And the lantern boats in the picture are sailed on the Hiroshima water each summer to not forget the tragedy and perhaps, help deal with it.

I don't think my son was there for the lantern boats but maybe one day he and I will go see them together. For me it will be complicated, my father was a navigator on an airplane which bombed Japan, though he was not on the Enola Gay, the one that bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki; my wife's parents were in Tokyo at the time, being bombed by planes with conventional bombs.

If I do make it, I will look for a stone to carry in my pocket.

The Perfect Sunday Morning Service

As a musician, I love playing both carefully composed works and my improvisations; I love playing squirreled away within my own apartment or out in the wide world.

In central park there are three large lawns : the Sheep Meadow where, years ago, sheep actually kept the grass short; the Great Lawn where Simon and Garfunkle, the N.Y. Philharmonic and many other famous groups perform; and the North Field at whose edge I sat and played recorder this Sunday morning, watching the first stray players trickle onto the baseball fields.

I moved to the handball courts when my hill was taken over by a cacophony of dog owners, the courts just a few strides away. Stepping on the courts, I remembered practicing tennis here on another morning last year with two young raccoons shyly peering out of the near garbage can as my audience.

At the court, I played again but stopped when I thought I heard church bells. It took me a moment to realize what was happening. In the middle court there is a high chain link fence dividing two lines of courts and when I played my recorder there, the fence resonated. The actual sound was like the fuzzy after-peal of church bells sans the percussive knock or a loud glass harmonica.

If I have to attend a Sunday morning worship service, this is how I like it: Bach's music and improvised tunes, soft pealing sounds in the background, gorgeous woodsy setting, no preaching, no husband or kids dragged there when they'd rather be still under the covers or getting ready for the beach.

I have to report that 100% of the congregants (me, the only one) were thrilled to be attending.

I mentioned "Bach's music and improvised tunes." Of interesting musical note, I read a book on Bach's Art of the Fugue yesterday. It mentioned that while Bach improvised freely, when he then took those improvisations to paper, he would then adjust them to musically flawless, technically correct works.

This goes along with my thinking that music writing is a two part process, the first part being a freely created tune, often inspired by half remembered melodies now with new twists; infused the remembered rhythmic feel of a dance, a heartbeat; animated by birdsong (which that morning I heard and played with); laughter, which I personally believe (though I never heard anyone else say this), was the persistent basis of Mozart's melodies; or in one case (Harold Arlen, "Over the Rainbow"), kindled by the whistling for his dog.

The second part being the sometimes wonderful developments, patterns and clever teasings reworked into the piece.

In a review last week in the NY Times, Bernard Holland explained...

Countries with powerful popular cultures don’t produce many fugues. Abstraction and formal design have a hard time competing with musical impulses that seem to grow out of the ground, especially when the country is Spain and the melding of European and North African music remains so strong.

Folk cultures and popular music genres have no time for fugues, their musicians are busy playing melodies. Makes sense.

Bach, spent more of his energy on development, borrowing (stealing away for us?) tunes he found, including one song from Martin Luther (for which arrangement, two days ago, my son just finished studying the four recorder parts, SATB). "Serious" composers develop songs they find. Aaron Copeland's famously took the Shaker's It's a Joy to Be Simple and did hardly anything to it.

Of course, composers do love to make their own tunes. When improvising, I find myself focusing on a melody and its variations, while at the same time focusing on its development, progression and its interweaving with other melodies. It's like having two parts of your brain converse with each other, each speaking at the same time and it's you in each case being the speaker and listener.

When I do this, I see that multitasking the brain is deliciously addicting and must reluctantly admit I can't criticize my son for playing two demanding video games (and typing away like a demon to talk to other online gameplayers) at once, while watching a movie on the screen and listening to music, and researching stuff on the internet in between. I'd like to criticize but I can't.

But no matter how complicated the composition gets, its the tune, that short story of what happens to notes and harmonies, that matters.

People want to hear pretty, unforced melodies which feel like they grew out of the ground, whether played by popular musicians or reworked in classical style; whether they were created centuries ago like Greensleeves or improvised on the spot; in a concert hall or in a chance encounter in a park.

A pretty tune is like an cute girl. You want to spend time with her.

Pineapple triplets

Dear reader, I hope this story of my childlike attempts will encourage you even if you are not studying the cello as I am.

I want to tell you about Pineapple Triplets. First off, musical triplets are fitting in three notes where you would normally count two notes.

The easiest way to do triplets was suggested in Arnold Steinhardt's book, Violin Dreams...

When playing a whole note, play it to the word... Pear.
When playing a half note, play it to the word... Ap ple.
When playing a quarter note, say to yourself... Wa ter mel on.
And what is the word for triplets?... Pine ap ple.

Each syllable so easily directs one to play one of the notes. It's like having a little conductor in the brain, (Hormunculous' cousin?).

I was having trouble reading through some Scriabin (And as I am meeting with his great-grandson, the pianist, Elisha Abas, felt I should be playing a bit of the composer's music).

The music piece has dotted triplets (wouldn't it be neater if it was spelled trippplets?). And dotted triplets are more complicated than triplets; making one of normal length; one, half-length; and one triplet of one and a half-length.

Yesterday, I had asked my teacher to play the Scriabin through and then forgot what it sounded like this evening. She additionally told me how to approach the dotted triplets, explaining the process of learning to play them accurately: get the regular triplets down first, then adjust them.

But when I sat down to practice, I remembered Pear, apple, pineapple, watermelon.

I found I could easily lengthen and shorten the appropriate syllables in Pineapple once I got Pine ap ple into my head, I could adjust as my teacher said. But I didn't even have to play them or think them through as regular triplets first, they just easily came out perfect.

It was so easy and struggle-less. It was like playing the simplest tune.

Now I know why I was trying to convince my wife to buy a pineapple earlier in the day, when we went shopping, a purchase I have made three or four times in my entire life...

My inner self was trying to get me to remember about and use pineapple triplets.

And that pineapple tastes great, ask my son.

photo links:
willtooke
RaeA
jwlphotography

A Quality of Laughter

I am thinking of taking a yoga class. And yoga is not my cup of tea; if I find out it will take too much time to get there or it's at an inconvenient time, forget it.

What is attracting me to this yoga class is that it's laughing yoga; and besides being the best medicine, it sounds like fun. Doesn't it?

Years ago, I worked at the farm in eastern Long Island. It was just behind our house; I could just roll out of bed and be there. At the farm's fruit stand this one summer, worked a girl who was quite cute. She had a short haircut, dark eyes and an unbelievably warm, inviting laugh.

When I told her how much I liked her laugh, she told me that I should hear her sister.

The summer passed, the fruit season ended and when the other "summer people" left, she moved to Vermont to live with her laughing sister.

Well, the story could have ended here but I decided to take a car trip to see her, my longest then except for the one to Buffalo and Niagara Falls to see my brother in college.

I felt like the racing car hero in A Man and a Woman who drove across France to spend a short night with his love. It was winter, there was snow, I drove on highways voted the most scenic in America. The trip was a joy.

Beside having a great time in Vermont, I met the sister and heard her laugh. It was shear beauty. One of her college professors had told her she laughed chromatically. Yes, it hit half notes up and down with gentle timbre. I wish you could hear it, just once. Clean as a child laughing on a lazy afternoon, it was.

In a couple days my laugh had changed too. It was like picking up an accent. But I returned home and after a while, like a borrowed Southern drawl on Brooklyn streets, my quality of laughter melted away.

Now, if the laughing sister were teaching this yoga class, or even in it, I would so sign up, even if it were way up in Vermont. I want to laugh like that again. click these photos to visit their home sites.

(The photo of the pretty, young woman is not the girl I knew but a stunt double).

A Joyful, Noisy Thursday

Yesterday, there were two new entries to my son's calendar.

He had heard a car alarm repeating "Thursday, Thursday." (Yes, it was Thursday.)

Windshield wipers, washing mashines, and old refrigerators seem to whisper in our language and dialect, occasionally, deliciously. This was Sage's first encounter with"speaking machines" and it had made me wonder at the time, why he remained blankly on the top step of his cello teacher's brownstone instead of following me in.

Later inside, it happened to be the first time he played a double stop on the cello (a chord, two notes at once). Usually I don't pen-in these such small, delicate events, rather days like when he learned to ride a bike or when he first arrived in Tokyo and met his grandmother there.

I keep track of new things that pop up in Sage's life and put them in calendar form. A decade from now, when he graduates college (or whatever), I'll present the calendar to him and then each January of his life he can see that the 3rd was his first piano recital and each February, that the 27th was when he met a close friend. I hope this will later make for a life of mini-celebrations and smiles.

kriegs' photostream

Practicing the Cello

My cello teacher tells me over and again that it is most important to notice what we are doing when we play a scale, a movement, an exercise.

She asks me to put into precise words what I was trying to do throughout the playing and what I noticed in my playing. Did I hold down my first and second fingers as I played the top C? Did I prepare and start to lift my hand as I played F and G on the A string as I moved higher in the scale? Were my dotted timings correct, my equal notes steady or was I subconsciously imitating the rubato of Casals whom I heard play the piece many times? Being specific in noticing is very hard for me but it is the way of getting better at the cello. The only way.

In the TV show, Psych, we see flashbacks each week to the protagonist's childhood. His father asks him to close his eyes and recall the very minor details around them. In this way, the son gradually learns to notice. Noticing takes work.

And when we take care to notice in our discipline, be it yoga or cello, knitting or sweeping the floor, we begin to fall into the practice of noticing more in our daily lives.

simone_schot's photostream

My Magical Owl

This afternoon, the sky was waiting for snow. Now I finally hear ice plinks begin as I start to write at 2 this morning. I hear that quiet sound I like, of slow cars moving on the wet road. I am not trying to be poetic, just simply writing of my surroundings as I have woken and found myself here - unchanged by an overnight, Kafaesk, metamorphosis; not mesmerized away by a novel; still here in Manhattan, not having suddenly remembered that, Oh, yeah, I flew in to Tokyo last night; and not still dreaming another landscape. But if I may wax just once, Here I, transported by the magic carpet to nowhere else, am. (Ah, the very definition of meditation - though I am currently bumbling through the apartment in the beta state of workaday thinking.)

This afternoon, (back to the point of this entry), I needed to get out of the house a bit and so headed across Central Park toward the Met Museum. I always (always, near to the point of an Adrian Monk obsession) take a certain route when I get to an edge of the Jackie O. Reservoir. I take the jogging path along side the water going toward the museum and come back home by way of the Great Lawn and the pinetum.

This afternoon, I had a feeling I wanted to leave for the museum the other way, by the Great Lawn. It wasn't a strong feeling, I just wanted to take the road "usually" not taken. It was as simple as when you want a glass of water and then you notice yourself automatically getting one. But there must have been some resistance because I found myself needing to say out loud, I want to go the other way today. And so, I went.

There was a man with a large telescope in the pinetum. It was pointing to the sky, and I guessed he was bird watching but the angle looked just too high for the top of the fir trees in the fore. I wondered if he was looking at something in the sky? I had to ask, he said he was looking at an owl. We got to talking about whether there were actually 60 million birdwatchers in the country as I had read just yesterday and he took me a few steps to the other side of the copse where his wife was photographing and the man positioned his tripoded telescope for me to see one of the two long-eared owls treed there.

This afternoon was the first time I saw an owl in the wild even though I grew up not in Manhattan, but wandering field and wood, even taking foxes, rabbits, a turtle and a skunk as pets.

Seeing my first feral owl let me know that I had been connecting to the Life Force, to the greater world. Certainly, we all want these acknowledgments that our gut feelings are spot on, we want these magic owls. But even more is the connection we tangibly have when we stop and ask, How do I feel inside.

Please ask now. Reading this was just a prelude. Your feelings don't have to be profound, they might be just quietly hooting to you, Relax or Get moving. Then go out and try to keep connected as you move about you life. If later you happen to want to buy a magazine you never bought before or take a different route on your way home from grocery shopping? Why not?

And let me know what happens, if you will... TheAncientSounds@Gmail.com.

Hoot, hoot.

From my kitchen window, the road now and the car tops are white, and the plinking of icy snow keeps me company as my family sleeps.

photo by Dave Schreier on flickr.

Coincidental Groceries

I went to buy a chicken for dinner and remembered what a teacher had said years ago, When you go to the bank, don't stop off and pick up your laundry or pop in the record store, just go straight there, and your determination will grow stronger (paraphrased).

I listened and was not be distracted (as was my usual wont) along the way, not by the bookstore or other interesting stores. I went straight to buy for dinner. (Mission accomplished!)

Coming back, I stepped right beside a close friend and we were able to talk as we continued on. (This being unusual in that neither of us had a child in tow and so we could leisurely converse.)

Then I went to Gary Null's Whole Foods and right there was my wife, returning from her work, checking out groceries and I was able to help her carry them home, (this, the first time we met unpurposefully in the 15 years we have known each other).

I guess I was just where I should have been. Perfect Timing, ten minutes later and I would have missed the coincidental meetings. But it's the feeling you get, not the coincidences, which let you know things are as the should be. That palpable connection to the life force. And the term was not coined by George Lucas, I've noticed that Rashi used it in the middle ages, though in Old French.

To begin to feel more connected, just ask now, What do you notice within? And remember, gentle reader, it's the attempt, the asking, not what you call results that matters most of all.

Image by © JLP/Deimos/zefa/Corbis

Sonnata for Tenor Blockflote and Steam Radiator

Yesterday, got my son laughing when I played the recorder and incorporated the steam radiator's soft, plaintive D into the song. The quite recorder-like radiator played somewhat regularly every 20 seconds, sometimes with and extra toot or two.

He also drew a map of the moon earlier in the day and after learning how to draw a perfect circle with his thumb as a compass point. There are few things poetic as the name places of our Moon... the Ocean of Storms, the Seas of Tranquility and Serenity, Crater Tycho (I love the story of when Tycho Brahe was walking home one night and realized a new star had formed, he was so intimate with the dark sky), the Sea of Crises, the Ocean of Fecundity, the Lake of Sleep, the Sea of Nectar (never heard of these last two till now) and the Sea of Cold. My favorite is the Sea of Rains. Ah, yes, and the Dark Side. The homeschooling dad in me gives you your first question of the day, where was the Apollo 11 landing?

In the Museum of Natural History nearby, there is a display which shows how scientists believe the moon was wayward planet which bumped into earth (I don't know, it was before I was born) and it shattered then reformed as the moon. In that same little exhibition room is a small rock you could comfortably carry in your pocket. I guess it came from a meteor and you can touch it. It is older than the earth. That is my favorite part of the museum.

I guess homeschooling can be fun, though it is workety-work just to be around your kid and providing quality attention/guidance all the time then staying up all night to write music or whatever. Today we get to go to our favorite cheep-o Japanese restaurant in midtown, Zhia (really wrong spelling, I know), and go skating behind the 42nd street library in gorgeous Bryant Park. Here's the last question of the day, what are the names of the two famous lions outside the front of that library?


Frank Lynch
LeggNet

Playing the Piano Like a Pianist

Certain things were impossible, others I just wish they had been. Then they wouldn't have happened.

I would have said that teaching my son, Sage, to play the piano "wonderfully" within an hour would have been impossible, but it happened and the un-parental part of me wishes it had been impossible. Yes, I am glad o' the resultants, but it was a frozen moment and peppered with beggings for him to consider quitting piano. He wanted to just play the notes not music and sounded as bad as most "talented" young pianists. (He is now a version 12.5 kid and has been at the keyboard now for two years plus a little.)

Sage did not want to adjust his hand/finger/wrist position/movements and play from the solar plexus. While dealing with his ego/crying/sheer anger and deeply analyzing myself as to my pushing him for my own paternal motives (the quote, paraphrased, comes to mind, that "The most important influence of childhood is what our parents did not achieve") and trying to figure out as quick as that instant-satori moment of Zen - what the heck were the exact, intricate changes he must make and how to communicate them? All this from me, who incorporates things musical then erases within, all trace of how they got there and why to do things so. Then afterwards, the playing feels intuitive, instinctive for me. And I knew the window of teaching him this was very small or he would have just closed off. Well, I did it.

It was like that scene in Star Wars, A New Hope where Obi Wan on board the first death star memorizes the mappings of that death star and how to disable its tractor beams at speed-reading speed. My mind raced.

Once I figured out his very specific needs it was sort of easy. I won't go into the details of the motions, positions and concerts of ebows, fingers and wrists - your eyes would just glaze over.

But once shown he played well, completely differently. And the actual physical teaching took only twenty minutes or so. And yes, I also know it will take some gentle reinforcement over time to make all this natural and habitual.

The next day my wife played hooky from school and heard Sage practice from the other room and wondered at the change - very noticeable. Then she came in to see him and later told me that he now looks like a pianist when he plays.

After Sage's two years of piano lessons, this is the second time I actually got involved. My wife said that this help is why, when if you come from a musician's family, it's a big advantage for learning music. but its also the learning from just noticing without knowing they are noticing how the musician parents do subtle things. His teacher is terrific for him (yes, most of the time parents think their child's music teacher is the greatest when the teacher might not be so, true especially for unmusician parents), but he needed a different help here. Yeah, I'm tooting my own English horn, but hey, I am convalescing from the lesson and still trying to deal with the aftershocks yet 36 hours later the quake.


The whole experience reminds me of the man who designed the giant, giant turbines for a dam (was it the Hoover?) and they stopped moving. He was called in to consult in the great emergency. He walked around and looked at the situation, picked up a sledge hammer and went to one of the turbines. THWACK. It groaned and fidgeted and then then hummed full force, starting the others with it. They thanked him but two weeks later had to call him up angrily at the $10,000 bill, which in today's money is probably like above 10 million dollars. Where did he get the nerve to charge $10,000 for just hitting the turbine with a sledge hammer? He capitulated by saying he would send them another bill. A week later they received the second bill, this time itemized... Hitting the turbine with a sledge, $10; knowing where to hit it, $9,990.

Sometimes it takes just a small adjustment but you have to be very precise and knowledgeable.

Please remember, this was for Sage's specific habitual technique adjustments and for his specific hands, everyone's hands are unique (though there are some very basic principles here). Maybe I feel a little better after my rant. It is 2.40 AM here in New York time, no wait, now that the pictures are in, 3.15.

photo links:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamie_marie/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/arteunporro/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/residae/