I open up the side porch, and sweep up all the winter dirt. The dogs and I sit in the sun, listening. Isabela, hopeful that she can magically transport herself next to the squirrel on the lawn, thrills an undertone growl and pants.
The earth is beginning to wake up. Daffodils bloom, and birds sing and sing. I am half hibernating between projects. A new piece soon?
Trembling. This part of composing is always difficult; the hearing it into existence. Half of me is eager, the other half resistant – wanting to scale back, to sink back into bed, into books, into a life of teaching, and nothing more. My energy flags, my spirits gray out.
The book, In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahrir, is beautiful and rich. Her writing about the separation of self at an early age and the need to find home resonates deeply with me.
For her, it is in language. Caught between Bengali and English, she turns, as an adult, to Italian and begins to learn it without the comforts of a native tongue.
Delving deep into the language – now speaking, reading and writing in it, she becomes unchained from the desire for perfection. Her Italian will always be imperfect, and thus more free. “Imperfection inspires invention, imagination, creativity. It stimulates. The more I feel imperfect, the more I feel alive,” she says.
I danced with the dogs last night and ate sweet ripe oranges, fennel salad with tuna and avocado.
I worked on my new string trio, creating a fabric with sound – oscillations, repeated notes sliding upwards; a throbbing.
From concert to concert, I go, half drunk with sound. Poulenc’s choral work one night is followed by the Jasper Quartet’s performance of a work by Aaron Kernis. Then, the play “Still” at Julliard, and tomorrow, Piazzolla’s Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas.
I have become a glutton for moments that touch and move me forward in my understanding, thinking, and feeling. I am always looking for the meeting between deep investigation and spiritual presence.
I miss my little dog Max at the oddest times. Not when I look at his collar or his leash laid out next to my bed stand, but in the middle of the night when I absentmindedly reach up to pat the space where he used to sleep. Isabella carefully sleeps down at the bottom of the bed, out of the way of any movement.
I am reading my memoir, Let Your Heart Be Broken, aloud for the audiobook. This is not an easy thing to do. I have a new respect for the muscles of the lips, mouth and cheek, and where I put my tongue to articulate a word. I am constantly dropping plurals, fumbling over words, or seeing the end of the sentence at the same time I see the beginning, and reordering the words. My engineer often raises his head from my book as he follows along with a look, and even will repeat a fugitive word for me.
My neighbor, on the other side of the creek, cut down a slender adolescent oak I had been nurturing. In a confusion of where the property line was between our houses, the oak found itself outside of my jurisdiction. So he gleefully chopped it down, and dug up all the roots for good effect.