Silence
...doesn't mean "inactivity". Especially not in my case.
It usually means there's so much rattling around in my head I haven't been able to distill it enough to get it into words. So I've been "silent" since July 31 but it's because I needed to breathe.
Jay Smooth over at Illdoctrine has this exercise he does--"The Morning Pages"--based on Julia Cameron's "The Artist Way." He was trying to do it visually with his video blogs. And I thought of that often last month as I was writing every day. It's kind of ironic, too, since Cameron is--or was--a friend of Poppy's. It's one of those things that makes me chuckle... a "Six-Degrees-of-Separation" type thing. But I digress.
The point is, the concept of "Morning Pages" is pretty interesting and I thought about the concept a lot last month as I was writing every day. But I found that for me, especially near the end of the month, writing every day gave me less room to think, to ruminate. Cuz I needed to get stuff out, rather than focus on the content.
For instance, I didn't really get to delve into how much I got out of the Sun's String camp. And I still can't cuz it's the kind of thing I really need to turn over in my head a good few times before I figure out where it's taking me. But I got a lot out of it, in a very profound way. The concepts that DBR--in particular--threw out in some of his classes were WAY over some people's heads, particularly the kids that seemed to gravitate towards him. And I know they gravitated to him cuz he's youngish and contemporary and very energetic. But watching him teach was interesting and I took note of several things, one being the way certain kids were a lot more "familiar" with him than they were with other teachers. Almost to the point of being disrespectful. And I have a theory about that but it's not something I can really throw out there without a lot of thought and I'm still too tired to think.
Then at one session he'd done a demonstration based on musical notation. He threw out a random series of numbers based on 1 - 5, with "rests" (for the non-musical a "rest" is an interval of silence in piece of music) interspersed. He then had the class clap the number of times indicated... something like this:
5 3 4 2 R
1 5 R 3 2 ...etc...
... the idea being that you clap 5 times, then 3, then 4, then 2, then NO clapping for one beat (the "rest") then once, then 5 times, etc.
And then he split the class up and had half the people start from the bottom of the "score" and the other half from the top of the score at the same time and it was way cool that they always ended at the same time. DBR had said earlier in the week that numbers meant a lot to him and there's a mathematical thing in there somewhere that I can "feel" the understanding of but can't explain. Cuz math ain't never been my thing... which is why I sucked at theory in high school.
But the most interesting thing to me about the whole demonstration were the "rests". Those moments of silence. Up on the project blog I'd written about words and lines and silences and then sitting in his class that day chaperoning the Sun, I was taken back to that thought. The thought of silence, and how very powerful a silence--a "rest"--can be.
So I wasn't purposefully silent these last few days, it just happened that way. And in the written rest an awful lot happened.
One being that the Scrub's pain almost did me in except that by now I've learned when a pain isn't mine and so it doesn't overcome me as much anymore. In fact, less and less. Which is amazingly freeing, by the way. The last time I wrote, I wrote how I'd had a dream about him. And the freaky thing is that that turned out to be the first of three nights in a row, which almost NEVER happens with me. The second night (well, morning really since I don't go to bed till then) the pain was so intense that I woke myself up, expecting to be in tears. But as soon as I opened my eyes the pain and the intensity disappeared.
Then he came to visit the other day. And the pain coming off of him shimmered in the heat.
And I am the Comfort Doll...
which kind of sucks but somehow this time not really.
Because "rests" are what make the music more powerful, that second in which you take a breath, that pause before you speak or act... And I had a minute to think before I made a decision and in that minute I realized (again) how I make mountains out of molehills and how sometimes my own expectations do me in.
So on the one hand, I know exactly what I want out out of life and I'm not losing sight of that or giving up on it just yet, but on the other hand I have to be cognizant of the fact that I cannot project my "wants" onto a situation. Yes, I know. From the outside it's very easy to say. But from the inside... not so much.
I am still an all-or-nothing chick. And since I know that with the Scrub there is no such thing as "all" and there is no point in wishing for an "all" that inner core will give up nothing this go round.
Cuz then there's still the Cricket, which is one big "rest" right now, but it's kind of the space between the time the conductor taps on the music stand and raises his hand and the music begins....
...cuz I feel like things are about to start again, in some form or fashion. And since I never gave my "all" I'm still mad at him and disappointed but I'm not "done". I'm mad at him for a very specific reason but it's his own hang up and not mine. And I know our project is going to move both of us somewhere, though I don't know in which direction or where we'll end up, and I still LOVE that whenever we intersect it's always at the right spot. One of my HighSchoolPeeps is a pastor and she'd written me that at one of our chorus rehearsals she had seen a blessing coming for me. She never said what it was, or when I'd get it. And of course, the kind of "blessing" that I want is the kind of thing that makes you want to keep asking "well, now? Can I have it now? Is this it? Or this?" but I somehow knew she meant business-wise and not THAT-wise (*sigh*). But the other day, Sunday, she wrote me to say she still saw my blessing coming and this time she actually said "the business." And I believe her cuz she's the kind of chick you believe. People with long curly fingernails are not to be trifled with or doubted.
And then over the weekend I went to a high school reunion barbecue. We were all set to meet in a park in New Rochelle but the heavens opened up that morning and poured buckets of rain. My HSPs are an intrepid bunch, and enough of them had showed up at the appointed place in the pouring rain to warrant moving the party someplace else. My place was suggested... but I freely admit the thought of all those people traipsing through my house gave me palpitations. (Plus I also freely admit there are some people who I love but from a distance and don't really want them traipsing through my house.) But then I felt bad about it since I'm closer to New Rochelle than other people, and offered to let them come here but thankfully it had been decided to move the party to Harlem.
The ironic thing was that the house we ended up in was my old ride-or-die's on 120th. It turns out there are six brothers and sisters who grew up in that house--4 girls and 2 boys--four of whom went to M&A. So it was fitting that we ended up there, and we had a blast. The Sun stayed and had a good time but at some point he called his dad and his father rolled up with his cousin and took him with them. Which was great cuz it left me to hang and eat and drink without guilt. And then the sun came out. A highlight was that someone I was really tight with my freshman year turned up. And I got to tell her why we stopped hanging out, which was that at the time she was in love with this kid (a senior and a pretty well-known graffiti writer) who I thought was extremely disrespectful of her and it pissed me off. I hated watching what he did to her. I guess that was the very beginnings of me feeling other people's pain, and I hate seeing people I care about be in pain. In the past I would drop the person because I'd get mad that they couldn't let go of the thing that caused them pain but time has given me a lot more understanding of how that works... and now I just feel it without really having to fix it. But I was really happy to see her again.
Afterwards I got a ride home that was sort of a "getting to know you/maybe get something going" but eh. I'm kind of in a "rest". Well, sort of...
It usually means there's so much rattling around in my head I haven't been able to distill it enough to get it into words. So I've been "silent" since July 31 but it's because I needed to breathe.
Jay Smooth over at Illdoctrine has this exercise he does--"The Morning Pages"--based on Julia Cameron's "The Artist Way." He was trying to do it visually with his video blogs. And I thought of that often last month as I was writing every day. It's kind of ironic, too, since Cameron is--or was--a friend of Poppy's. It's one of those things that makes me chuckle... a "Six-Degrees-of-Separation" type thing. But I digress.
The point is, the concept of "Morning Pages" is pretty interesting and I thought about the concept a lot last month as I was writing every day. But I found that for me, especially near the end of the month, writing every day gave me less room to think, to ruminate. Cuz I needed to get stuff out, rather than focus on the content.
For instance, I didn't really get to delve into how much I got out of the Sun's String camp. And I still can't cuz it's the kind of thing I really need to turn over in my head a good few times before I figure out where it's taking me. But I got a lot out of it, in a very profound way. The concepts that DBR--in particular--threw out in some of his classes were WAY over some people's heads, particularly the kids that seemed to gravitate towards him. And I know they gravitated to him cuz he's youngish and contemporary and very energetic. But watching him teach was interesting and I took note of several things, one being the way certain kids were a lot more "familiar" with him than they were with other teachers. Almost to the point of being disrespectful. And I have a theory about that but it's not something I can really throw out there without a lot of thought and I'm still too tired to think.
Then at one session he'd done a demonstration based on musical notation. He threw out a random series of numbers based on 1 - 5, with "rests" (for the non-musical a "rest" is an interval of silence in piece of music) interspersed. He then had the class clap the number of times indicated... something like this:
5 3 4 2 R
1 5 R 3 2 ...etc...
... the idea being that you clap 5 times, then 3, then 4, then 2, then NO clapping for one beat (the "rest") then once, then 5 times, etc.
And then he split the class up and had half the people start from the bottom of the "score" and the other half from the top of the score at the same time and it was way cool that they always ended at the same time. DBR had said earlier in the week that numbers meant a lot to him and there's a mathematical thing in there somewhere that I can "feel" the understanding of but can't explain. Cuz math ain't never been my thing... which is why I sucked at theory in high school.
But the most interesting thing to me about the whole demonstration were the "rests". Those moments of silence. Up on the project blog I'd written about words and lines and silences and then sitting in his class that day chaperoning the Sun, I was taken back to that thought. The thought of silence, and how very powerful a silence--a "rest"--can be.
So I wasn't purposefully silent these last few days, it just happened that way. And in the written rest an awful lot happened.
One being that the Scrub's pain almost did me in except that by now I've learned when a pain isn't mine and so it doesn't overcome me as much anymore. In fact, less and less. Which is amazingly freeing, by the way. The last time I wrote, I wrote how I'd had a dream about him. And the freaky thing is that that turned out to be the first of three nights in a row, which almost NEVER happens with me. The second night (well, morning really since I don't go to bed till then) the pain was so intense that I woke myself up, expecting to be in tears. But as soon as I opened my eyes the pain and the intensity disappeared.
Then he came to visit the other day. And the pain coming off of him shimmered in the heat.
And I am the Comfort Doll...
which kind of sucks but somehow this time not really.
Because "rests" are what make the music more powerful, that second in which you take a breath, that pause before you speak or act... And I had a minute to think before I made a decision and in that minute I realized (again) how I make mountains out of molehills and how sometimes my own expectations do me in.
So on the one hand, I know exactly what I want out out of life and I'm not losing sight of that or giving up on it just yet, but on the other hand I have to be cognizant of the fact that I cannot project my "wants" onto a situation. Yes, I know. From the outside it's very easy to say. But from the inside... not so much.
I am still an all-or-nothing chick. And since I know that with the Scrub there is no such thing as "all" and there is no point in wishing for an "all" that inner core will give up nothing this go round.
Cuz then there's still the Cricket, which is one big "rest" right now, but it's kind of the space between the time the conductor taps on the music stand and raises his hand and the music begins....
...cuz I feel like things are about to start again, in some form or fashion. And since I never gave my "all" I'm still mad at him and disappointed but I'm not "done". I'm mad at him for a very specific reason but it's his own hang up and not mine. And I know our project is going to move both of us somewhere, though I don't know in which direction or where we'll end up, and I still LOVE that whenever we intersect it's always at the right spot. One of my HighSchoolPeeps is a pastor and she'd written me that at one of our chorus rehearsals she had seen a blessing coming for me. She never said what it was, or when I'd get it. And of course, the kind of "blessing" that I want is the kind of thing that makes you want to keep asking "well, now? Can I have it now? Is this it? Or this?" but I somehow knew she meant business-wise and not THAT-wise (*sigh*). But the other day, Sunday, she wrote me to say she still saw my blessing coming and this time she actually said "the business." And I believe her cuz she's the kind of chick you believe. People with long curly fingernails are not to be trifled with or doubted.
And then over the weekend I went to a high school reunion barbecue. We were all set to meet in a park in New Rochelle but the heavens opened up that morning and poured buckets of rain. My HSPs are an intrepid bunch, and enough of them had showed up at the appointed place in the pouring rain to warrant moving the party someplace else. My place was suggested... but I freely admit the thought of all those people traipsing through my house gave me palpitations. (Plus I also freely admit there are some people who I love but from a distance and don't really want them traipsing through my house.) But then I felt bad about it since I'm closer to New Rochelle than other people, and offered to let them come here but thankfully it had been decided to move the party to Harlem.The ironic thing was that the house we ended up in was my old ride-or-die's on 120th. It turns out there are six brothers and sisters who grew up in that house--4 girls and 2 boys--four of whom went to M&A. So it was fitting that we ended up there, and we had a blast. The Sun stayed and had a good time but at some point he called his dad and his father rolled up with his cousin and took him with them. Which was great cuz it left me to hang and eat and drink without guilt. And then the sun came out. A highlight was that someone I was really tight with my freshman year turned up. And I got to tell her why we stopped hanging out, which was that at the time she was in love with this kid (a senior and a pretty well-known graffiti writer) who I thought was extremely disrespectful of her and it pissed me off. I hated watching what he did to her. I guess that was the very beginnings of me feeling other people's pain, and I hate seeing people I care about be in pain. In the past I would drop the person because I'd get mad that they couldn't let go of the thing that caused them pain but time has given me a lot more understanding of how that works... and now I just feel it without really having to fix it. But I was really happy to see her again.
Afterwards I got a ride home that was sort of a "getting to know you/maybe get something going" but eh. I'm kind of in a "rest". Well, sort of...
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