Mornings in The Bardic Academy begin with practice - this ancient love affair that never flags. For the last five or six weeks, Bach has been at the heart of the practice. I find myself visiting the piano three, four, five times a day to play through a sequence of fourteen of his short, [...]
I am a baby knitter. No, I'm not knitting babies (though one day - who knows?). I'm a beginner, at the wax-on, wax-off stage of learning. So far, in the space between Christmas and Epiphany, I have knitted three hats. This, in itself, is something of a Christmas miracle. Knitting patterns look a little bit [...]
It happens to everyone - and seriously, I mean everyone: the famous and the not-famous, the seasoned and the fledgling, the confident and the wobbly-kneed. All of us at some time or other freak out IN a performance or ABOUT a performance. It's debilitating. The self-talk tends to be vicious and crippling. Hands shake, voices [...]
I don’t come from a musical family. Sure, they liked music. My mother kept a stack of 45’s, including old hits like “Tom Dooley” and “Davey Crockett.” We had a hi-fi with LPs that included the soundtrack to “Black Beauty” and a wonderful, dark recording of “Peter and the Wolf.” There was a Chickering spinet [...]
I’ve got pretty good all-around intuition, but in one area my spidey-sense is just about 100% accurate. Specifically, I can read your future as a musician. Within about 60 seconds of talking with you, I can predict whether or not music is going to play a joyful and expansive role in your life over the [...]
After a recent performance of poetry and song, a man approached me and told me that he wanted to learn my "method" so he could replicate it in an upcoming performance of his own. "What method do you mean?" I asked, thinking that what I do could scarcely be called something as systematic as that. [...]
Last evening I sent out my monthly-esque newsletter and almost as soon as it winged through the ether an unsubscribe notice came in from MailChimp. “Darn,” says the notice, “You’ve lost a subscriber.” The reason for unsubscribing was given: “No longer interested.” Ouch. I’ve read the blog posts and the enlightened FB memes and I [...]
Every single new thing we do - everything - brings up fears, teaches lessons, and leaves us with gifts. Whether we are climbing Everest or going to a party, taking up salsa dancing or singing a solo, this is all part of the package. It's a package that leaves us different than we were: expanded, [...]
Have you ever suffered insomnia for so many nights running that you feared that you'd forgotten how to sleep? Or had - shall we say - trouble in the loo-department and wondered if perhaps your body had forgotten how to perform certain key functions? Well, the same applies to writing. Here, specifically, on this blog. [...]
This post is inspired by all I am learning from the wonderful healer and artist, Robin Hallett, who is leading a group of us online in lessons about business and life, and especially by her clear-hearted essay, Love is the Metric. I can't recommend her work highly enough! I want to tell you the story [...]
