Say Yes to Your YES

Initial Montanaro instructions are simple:  Run in a circle. Say the word "yes." Repeat. Continue. Go.

Keep it that simple. Feel : Yes.

What will happen? We don't know. Mine won't be yours, yours won't be mine. Start, to just get there. GO.

Embody the word, the meaning. BE : YES.

Wildermann Photography

Really feel it -- deep, visceral, both the animal and the angel of it. Keep running. Say / scream / whisper the word Yes. Keep running until you feel it first here, and then there. Yes. Higher, beyond, through the core. YES. First physical, then mental, then spiritual in whatever that means for you. YES! Feel it in every part of your being, every layer, linear and vertical like a gorgeous berry cream trifle, spherical and horizontal like an ancient wider-than-arms weathered oak.

You will know when you arrive. YES. We'll watch. We are the Witness. YES! We're with you in your shoes, or your bare feet, your flailing, screaming, elevating, rousing, softening self in this white-hot red-tinged experience. YES!! We'll feel the exhilaration, the universal multi-level-layer orgasm void of doubt, concern, ambition. YES!!!

One focus.  Be -- and be in -- YES. It's deceptively simple. You might, like me, sometimes break down into a NO -- a solid pithy grey foamy bog that refuses to abate despite figurative foot speed and vocal volume. Go, again, in a day, or a month, or a year's time. YES.

It can't help but bubble up -- or geyser push -- to the surface. It's both small and BIG. Maybe not so wide anymore, but oh so deep. It's strength is rooted and also shooting straight through the earth and out the other side, no dimension, phobic-free, unshutterable, cadence-less. YES.

What is it, to what do you say it, how you do it -- not the point now.

YES feels like this... preceded, and followed by, both question + exclamation marks.

It's choosing to wear the red dress in addition to your standard black. Roaring through walnuts off the pristine park path. Whisper soft fist-clench-pull-in -- or hoarse yell spread-finger sky sprint -- when you've nailed the note or the chord, final-stroked the creation, aced the looming test, clearly answered the query, sharp-pinned the presentation, made the goal, screwballed the pitch, shot the arrow BAM to middle center black.

It's behind the life-changing decision AND behind the choice of this week's peanut butter brand. YES.  The one that fuels both the beginning -- and the end -- of painfully personal relationships and power-play professional alignments.

Run literally and metaphorically until you feel flight. YES.
Out of breath -- not beaten down, but pulled up and out. YES!
Move until every fiber of your being knows that yes, this is... YES.

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Another imperfect post, accompanied by:

Low -- Walk Into the Sea
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Popular posts:
Sense of Place
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Now Hear This -- Self-discovery through music and stories
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Trista Hill is a professional harpist and fine artist, creativity coach, educator in the arts, and Board-Certified Music Therapist. What her formal degrees in music and art gave her pale in comparsion to the gifts she's experienced in working with creatives just like you. Visit her website — tristahill.com — for links to her blog, performances, and other fantastical creative offerings. 

Breaking Through: Philip Glass and Maybe Minimalism

This week Philip Glass celebrates his 75th birthday.  In a most interesting interview with his second cousin Ira, he explains, "It's not how you find your voice, but how you get rid of the damn thing... "

I first experienced Glass in a college music class that offered an uncreative listening format of brief lectures followed by corresponding music samples.  Sitting through Minimalism, 12-tone theory, and the like had zero appeal to my frazzled spirit.

I had barely survived creating my composition for this module in another class, shutting myself inside a piano practice room for the weekend to get it done.  Now I know the immense value of composing and performing "live" your own piece for each style we studied, an element I embrace and employ in my own teaching / coaching today.  But at the time it was an exercise in insanity -- I had very limited time then to appreciate the assignment as a way to learn the music from the inside out, truly absorb it, through an intensely personalized process.

Fortunately this time, we were able to play a pre-recorded version of our piece instead of perform it live.  My aggravation shone through in the title I selected.  "This is called S.O.S," I told the class simply, enjoying that it could be interpreted whatever way the listener chose.

A classmate who knew my angst slowly smiled and asked what that stood for.  I stared at him, stood a little straighter, and delivered.  "S.O.S. stands for Same Old Shit."  Snickers ran around the room as I pressed "Play" to share the angry solo piano recording I had probably made only 12 to 48 hours before.  That class included written critiques.  My classmate's: "Well, it didn't sound like shit to me."  My professor's: "I hope 'S.O.S.' isn't the way you really feel -- you do good work as I've said before and I've really enjoyed having you in class."

But back to Philip Glass.

Armed with all my baggage and preconceptions, I braced myself for our listening session.  And then, there it was -- loud and clear and jarring, the frenetically perfect musical example of my life as I knew it.

I have no idea how the professor introduced or explained this musical sample -- I could only feel the class recoil at the maddeningly repetitive nature and the sheer volume and never-ending layers that cascaded over us.  "Can you hear when one element is shifting, an instrument, a rhythm, one note in the melody?" he offered.  "NO!" The class screamed.  "What IS this?!? Make it stop!"

And then there I was, maybe wearing yellow, staring hard at the wall, dead silent and solid, mentally pushing everyone and their noise away, Shut Up! Yes I can hear it! FEEL it! Let me listen! Do NOT stop!

I was riveted.
I couldn't wait to get inside it.

listen listen LISTEN don't you hear?!?? - this is life, this pulsating hypnotic incessant NOISE, this pounding pulsing driving insistent forcing of rhythm and melody - this pattern, over and over and over again, sustained tones that do not go away - what bravery to capture the human condition like this, to be with it, over and over and over - how as a listener or performer do you not go deep within it and yourself to find the nuggets, the seeds, the place from where all this expanded and grew?

Yes! Let me IN!

I remember the album cover as pulsing light emanating from a bright white center that both pulled you in and pushed you out.  I can't find that image anywhere now, perhaps I made it up, saw it as it felt.  In my single dorm room I huddled next to the cassette player, closing off everything around me, pushing everything to the side, get and go AWAY, I'm going in.

Overlapping patterns, shifting ever so slightly, in any direction, required my dedicated attention.  Wavering even slightly from an inner focal point rendered it chaos.  Brilliant.  Devastating.

My own life then was exactly like this.  I had created so many layers of existence, and it was a constant fight to not drown -- my journals from then document my mind-bending frustration, isolation, and a strange dependency on the glutinous anchor of schoolwork and a schedule not my own.  Overloaded with credit hours each semester to graduate early with two degrees, in the throes of a full-blown eating disorder, grappling with imploding issues at home, attracting attention from all the wrong places in all the worst ways, I retreated to campus hiding places where I locked myself overnight to hammer out papers and projects, and walked for miles and hours off campus longingly gazing at warm-lit windows of houses where life appeared to be far removed from my daily careening chaos. I had a zillion eyes watching me but none that really saw.

In all the chaos, Glass' music assured, there is a subtle shifting.  The shifting is inevitable -- nothing stays static.  Direction is unknown, but headed somewhere.  Linear doesn't apply, there's no room for it.  Paying attention to what is happening along the way, hyper-aware and sensitive of the pulsing shifts, is the only way through.

That album cover and that music was a musical illustration of hope in a world where I felt I had little to no control.  It was a vivid portrayal of what didn't make sense, and the meta-vision of what did.  In a morass of confusion and overwhelm, choosing one pathway or anchor -- an instrument, a motif, a rhythm -- and following it all the way through, suddenly lifted the veil and revealed a brilliant landscape of incomparable intensity and magnitude that, in a powerfully parental way, demanded focus and reverence.

This is how transformation happens -- to be pulled, by your own volition or not, out of one place and into another, of newness, openness, and expansiveness.  Glass seeks for himself -- and offers to us -- a way "to break out of your own training."  Time and time again I've seen my own students at the harp or piano, all faculties ablaze, hit that white center.  With a little coaching, they usher in small and large transformations and breakthroughs that shape the course of life from that day forward.

The "noise" is begging for you to notice its layers, what lies beneath.  Demand the space and time to grab that glittering end and hold on tight.  You're in for a ride.  Open your eyes.  Get IN this place that is anything but Minimalism -- inside the chaos is immense beauty and light, illuminating both the path you're on and the one you've been searching for.

Happy Birthday, and Thank You, Philip Glass.

What is your transformative "Philip Glass" moment?

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Another imperfect post, accompanied by:

Philip Glass excerpts, all recordings listed on his website

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Popular posts:

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Dear Creative Work

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A Night in the Life

She is booking it quickly quickly quickly through the aisles of the grocery store in her high pink plastic boots and grey baggy pants she is hoping no one will notice are pajamas. Her puffy white coat is hot but it's doing a great job of covering up parts she doesn't want seen, wait are people staring do they notice no makeup behind the hair do they see parts of her losing the gravity war? Hurry hurry hurry avoid lingering looks but they keep looking all that's needed is some foil some parchment paper a toothbrush to replace the one in her frenzy she mistakenly used to clean the bathroom and there is no way she'll make that mistake again due to the neon selection only available to her now.

How did she work herself up to this? Days upon days of being unable to make a decision, so far away from her heart now, all in her head, there is no right or wrong, it's complicated. She is afraid one way means she's not stepping up and that the other way just spells trouble and that doing neither means a constant folding up like endless origami or the Chinese whatever folded paper fortune teller game that incessantly moved like a chomping mouth but never said anything at all. Eating even more of that vegan peanut butter cheesecake with brownie crust isn't helping because this decision has grown bigger and more weighted and more important and she's almost convinced herself that if she can't make this happen she is flawed and failing and destined to flail this way forever.

At home it looks like again someone has ripped the corner gutter off the house and tossed it five feet away, why would someone keep doing that how ridiculous is it to reattach gutters in the rain doesn't this just fit okay okay it all flows and we just direct it that's what they keep saying keep creating the way to direct the flow show it where and how. Again.

Inside she hates the foil box because it rips at her hands but she's got to cover these holiday items at least that decision is made the ripping foil makes a glorious musical noise. The oven fires up like an opening line and the boom box designed to look ancient launches into its otherworldly soundscape she responds like a fluid Howard Schatz photograph work this out in the body maybe it moves up into the mind and blows wide open her heart and soul will feel the way. It's a really big boat in thick deep blue fog and it's aching to change direction but it is slow to change this monster, she's already alienated some with small decisions and losing them overboard as they willingly go not running but simply blind-stepping off the edge. Somehow it's hard to notice the people coming on board running at her with arms wide open because they are so light and beautiful and not in the heavy cloak of need she's used to.

She is thrashing in her grey baggy pi's and it's dark and rainy and cold and she knows that if she just keeps focusing on beauty and the escalation of her own universal spirit she'll feel connected and homeward and warm again like tears moving flowing not stuck and there is light somewhere and the heated rhythmic drums the high arching echoing guitar line the aching voice -- what's it all saying where is it going? Follow.

Music = real life = music = real life = music = = life = = = light = = = = choose = = = = be = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
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Another imperfect post, accompanied by:
Achtung Baby! (U2)
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