The snow has made it's final retreat. Tulips, daffodils and crocuses, as promised when I tuck them in during the fall, circle the bird feeder.
Vermonters quickly lose their jackets and tip heads back in homage to the new warmth of the sun.
Skis are put away. Gardens turned over, the clods of dirt still cold under our fingers. In our anxiousness to put something under earth we race down to the plot with our hands full of tools, gloves and persistent peas.
Spring also means recital season has opened. Students have reluctantly, but carefully, chosen the pieces that they will work up to performance level.
Making these choices and working up the pieces seems to turn over the insecurity that lurks inside us all. Sometimes during a lesson, but often afterward, conversation turns to the challenge faced when we are revealing something about us that is new, something that even we may not have realized before. Many times these conversations are peppered with negative comments about the effort involved in studying; not being enough, having difficulty making “real music”, being too young, too old, too male.
At some point in our lives we seem to have been assigned our “roles.” That role might be about the expectations and goals of our parents, it might be based on the job that we have been working at our entire lives or it might simply be who we see in the mirror every morning. That assignment becomes how we define ourselves.
Why not change those definitions? Who says that we are only allowed to be one dimensional; have one job, one goal, one partner, one talent?
You can love theater and then study economics. You can work as a lawyer for twenty years and then become a painter. Be a mother AND a cellist.
In doing the herculean work of rolling ourselves over to reveal previously undiscovered parts of us, we just might find that there is something shiny about our underbelly.
What is important is that we are brave enough to take the chance on being all that we can be. To be defiant in the face of being kept in a role that makes others comfortable but us miserable. To know what it is that we want and to march, not walk, toward it.
This begins even before the first lesson; it begins with the first thought of taking one.
Art isn't an anecdote. It's the consciousness we bring to bear on our lives. (Cheryl Strayed)
Melissa Perley