loz5
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Strengthening the concept of obstacles with metaphors, we talk about walls and roadblocks, their height and prevalence, and what it will take to overcome them.This is downward spiral talk, and it is part and parcel of the effort to climb the ladder and arrive at the top.The catchphrase downward spiral talk stands for a resigned way of speaking that excludes possibility.The little old ladies who support classical music are all dying out, the conversation goes in downward spiral mode.Every industry or profession has its own version of downward spiral talk, as does every relationship.Focusing on the abstraction of scarcity, downward spiral talk creates an unassailable story about the limits to what is possible, and tells us compellingly how things are going from bad to worse.Why does it spiral downward, why do things tend to look more and more hopeless?For the same reason that red Dodge pickups seem to proliferate on the highways as soon as you buy one and that pregnant women appear out of nowhere approximately eight months before your baby is due.The more attention you shine on a particular subject, the more evidence of it will grow.Attention is like light and air and water.Shine attention on obstacles and problems and they multiply lavishly.The practice of the way things are is a reality check on the runaway imagination of the calculating self.Then the obstacles are simply present conditions—they are merely what has happened or is happening.The father in our story might say, I have not inquired about my son’s life, and he is not volunteering any information, and he would be describing present conditions in the family.I am afraid I don’t know the right questions to ask, and it irritates me that he doesn’t come to me to talk, and he would still be describing the way things are.So, too, the chairman of the orchestra board might be satisfied with the description, There were 800 people in attendance for the March 14th concert and 700 for the program on April 10th, without going on to create a trend.For diminishing audiences, like bogeymen, are never anywhere to be found except in someone’s story.The naysayers pride themselves on their supposed realism.The practice of being with the way things are can break the unseen grip of abstractions created as a hedge against danger in a world of survival, and allow us to make conscious distinctions that take us into the realm of possibility—dreams, for instance, and visions., as a preface to our every next remark.I would do the kind of work that Jane Goodall does, but I couldn’t face the horrors she sees everyday, my daughter said as we walked together on a stony beach.It’s easy enough to be fully and passionately present on a rare day in Maine, when one is free of obligations and nothing is at stake.But how can we stand to be present in the face of pain, loss, or disappointments?I had shared with my daughter, Alexandra, my response to hearing Jane Goodall speak at the State of the World Forum in San Francisco.Renowned for her research on chimpanzees in the wild, she has established sanctuaries in Tanzania and in other parts of Africa by working with the people of the areas to support themselves in harmony with the biologically diverse environment.Governments around the world now fund her brainchild, Roots and Shoots, which educates and helps children in at least fifty countries to care for the ecosystem.As she addressed the San Francisco assembly, her quiet speaking captivated the room, as it has so many heads of state.We heard about it all—the poaching, the carnage, the degradations of nature, the destruction of the habitat—but nothing she said stood as a barrier to possibility.Her compassionate gaze encompassed it all, the good and the bad, the painful outrages and the joyous signs of life.Never did she intimate that anything that had happened should have happened differently, not a hint of blame escaped her lips, while she related tales that were torturous for most of us.She simply told the whole story, and showed us the pathways leading out from where we are, while her face expressed only compassion and love.Jane Goodall’s transcendent power was rooted in being present, without resistance, to the world just as it is.The practice of being with the way things are allows us to alight in a place of openness, where the truth readies us for the next step, and the sky opens up.Pleasure disappoints, possibility never.And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating as possibility?The universe is sparking with generative power.But how do we tap into the source—where can we find an electric socket for vitality?Do we have to pump up the energy on our own to carry out the day, or can we catch the current of another wellspring beyond ourselves?Suppose for a moment that vital, expressive energy flows everywhere, that it is the medium for the existence of life, and that any block to participating in that vitality lies within ourselves.Of course, our minds tell us a different story.Rarely do we come upon or experience this integrative energy, and sometimes only serendipitously, like Alice falling through the rabbit hole.This kind of vibrancy may take us by surprise when we find ourselves committing to doing something extraordinary or when we meet each other on a most personal, elemental level.Yet our minds and bodies are perfectly capable of actively surrendering our boundaries and suspending an edge once we know how and where the lines are drawn.The first step is to notice where you are holding back, and let go.Release those barriers of self that keep you separate and in control, and let the vital energy of passion surge through you, connecting you to all beyond.The second step is to participate wholly.Allow yourself to be a channel to shape the stream of passion into a new expression for the world.The order and predictability that civilization strives for supports us to get on with the things that matter to us, like starting companies, guiding our children, studying the stars, or composing symphonies.Places in the wild draw many of us to experience a vitality greater than our own, but it may take an act of surrender to let the gates give way between ourselves and nature.It was late March, and the landscape of northern New England was in a dramatic frame of mind.Skies and mountain lowered in black and white, while dark river water shouldered up under the ice cover.Spring was cracking open and making no bones about it.I walked across a swaying suspension bridge over a formidable section of river, and climbed down the bank on the other side to a focal point of activity.There I faced the scene of an ongoing accident.Titanic triangles of green ice stood straight in the air, as the raving waters split the frozen surface, piling jagged ice sections one upon another.The river roared like mad, its waters roiling by with incessant energy.The abandon was outrageous, confrontational.I could barely hear myself think.It was impossible to be there and resist for long.Yet standing stationary on the bank, utterly still, I took an existential leap.Let its force run through me, I allowed, not having moved an inch.Many months later, on a dazzling summer day off New England’s coast, I oddly found myself exclaiming, What is nature asking for?—not knowing how to cope with so much beauty.I had set off by canoe into secluded coves of dark green waters, where roots of spruce clung to the cliffs’ edges with their elbows, grass stems quivered brilliant in the sunshine, and birds darted out over the water.My question, springing from a naive part of me, surprisingly brought forth an answer—Nature is asking you to feel watery, rock heavy, to reach out with pine branch and leaf.It is calling you to feel the skimming of the water.There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique.And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost.The world will not have it.It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions.It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.Like the person who, mindless that she has all of nature in her fingertips, blocks the expression of the life force, so does the musician interrupt the long line of passion when she limits her focus to the expression of personal emotion, local color, or harmonic events.Her narrow emphasis can produce a dull and numbing performance.Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata is an example of a piece whose meaning changes altogether when a pianist emphasizes the triplets in the right hand at the expense of the long melodic line in the bass, as so often occurs.The musician’s role is to draw the listener’s attention over the bar lines—which are but artificial divisions, having no relevance for the flow of the music—toward a realization of the piece as a whole.In order to make the connections between the larger sections of a piece, the player may find herself moving the tempo at a faster pace than if she were putting her attention on highlighting individual notes or vertical harmonies.This explains how it is that the metronome markings in the works of Beethoven and Schumann appear so fast, indeed too fast to many performers and scholars.These composers were passionate about launching a long line.Life flows when we put our attention on the larger patterns of which we are a part, just as the music soars when a performer distinguishes the notes whose impulse carries the music’s structure from those that are purely decorative.Life takes on shape and meaning when a person is able to transcend the barriers of personal survival and become a unique conduit for its vital energy.So too the long line of the music is revealed when the performer connects the structural notes for the ear, like a bird buoyed on an updraft.Many years ago, when I was at the conservatory in Florence studying harmony, we were taught to give an identifying rubric to every chord in the music, so that an analysis looked like the ground plan for an office full of separate cubicles.The teachers never suggested that there were any connections between one chord and another, so we remained cut off from the harmonic structure and the flow of the music.We could never get an aerial view of a piece.When one rises above a work to see the long line, the overarching structure, one can see and hear a new meaning, often far beyond the meaning viewed from the ground.And it is only when the essential shape of a musical work is revealed that its true passion can be fully experienced.2 in D Minor for cello, expressively, but with little sense of the intrinsic shape of the piece.The playing seemed to wander aimlessly about, pausing here, emphasizing there, but without a clear notion of the underlying harmonic motion and melodic line.After we had analyzed the structure, direction, and character of the piece in class, the cellist played again with a coherence and simple flow that had been lacking in her first performance.For one split moment, the grass becomes green fuzz, the sun, an overflowing cup of honey.There’s nothing ugly or aggressive about nature blurred.But I don’t know where I am.I can’t recognize friends.At any moment I could trip.That’s how I felt with Hanui’s playing—beauty glimmered all around me, but nothing was defined.I was helpless in a blur of color.The transformation Hanui underwent brought clarity, and with it, a more intricate, true beauty.The pristine architecture of Bach finally rose up to its aching glory.He understood it intellectually, he could have explained it to someone else, but he was unable to convey the emotional energy that is the true language of music.His body was firmly centered in the upright position.The access to passion gives momentum to efforts to build a business plan, it gives a reason to set up working teams, it gives power to settling individual demands, and it gives urgency to communicating across sections of a company.I imagine that his people suddenly remembered why they were there, and what the company was founded for.I met Jacqueline Du Pre in the 1950s, when I was twenty and she was fifteen, a gawky English schoolgirl who blossomed into the greatest cellist of her generation.We played the Two Cello Quintet of Schubert together, and I remember her playing was like a tidal wave of intensity and passion.When she was six years old, the story goes, she went into her first competition as a cellist, and she was seen running down the corridor carrying her cello above her head, with a huge grin of excitement on her face.A custodian, noting what he took to be relief on the little girl’s face, said, I see you’ve just had your chance to perform! And Jackie answered, excitedly, No, no, I’m just about to!
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