Moving Beyond Fear

I realize that I have carried fear in my body and in my being since childhood. How did it get there? When I was a child, my parents and most of the adults that I knew taught me to be afraid. I learned to fear them, to fear my teachers, to fear all authorities, and to fear God. It was the way I was raised.

I was not given permission to explore and to discover the being that I am. I was taught all the sins and mistakes that I might make in life and how I would suffer as a result. I was not given resources for finding my way in life or helped to learn what skills I possessed or what path I might want to follow. I was taught that I was a defective being, made imperfect by my ancestors' sins, and totally incapable of doing anything on my own.

I also grew up in a neighborhood where many teenagers joined gangs, which served as the center of their social life. There were bullies and thugs all around, although the few blocks around my house seemed safe, an enclave from the surrounding violence. I was terribly afraid of these bullies and thugs. My father was a big man with a short temper who had grown up in an even rougher neighborhood during the Depression. He was used to fighting for his rights and his dignity, so he felt powerful in his own limited way. He terrified me as well. He never hurt me or lost control when he disciplined me. But his anger was so huge and sudden, that I was afraid that he would. I never challenged his authority; I just tried to blend with the family to avoid his wrath.

I am now aware that I still carry that fear in my body, stored there and reinforced by all the years of living on edge, approaching almost any new situation with fear. My body has probably been running on adrenalin because my programming would have me react to everything with fear.

It feels strange to talk about the fear I have carried. Discussing it brings it to consciousness and that changes my relationship with it. When I'm aware of it, it doesn't have power over me like it does when I'm unconscious of it. I feel different in my body, like anything is possible and I am free to explore.

This is important, because I would like to give myself the gift of living without the constant experience of fear. I want to experience being in a body that is not pumping adrenalin automatically in almost every situation. I have a sense that I can feel what happiness feels like only after I am free of fear's strangle hold.

Facing the Music

What would it take to believe that I am whole?

I feel ready to embark on my adventure into creating musical arrangements for my flute pieces. I would like to begin by believing that I can do it, that I have every right to create musical arrangements and that I don't have to follow any patterns or rules that I do not know at this time.

This is an opportunity to play with my music. If I had begun these arrangements earlier in my life, I would have attempted to pattern them after some model of what an arrangement is supposed to be. For example, if I decided that one of my pieces was a Native American song, I would have felt compelled to mimic the style of Native American flute music as it is being recorded today. This is not the same as creating an arrangement that communicates something I feel in or about the music.

Each piece is different from the others and could use an arrangement of its own. I don't exactly know what this means, yet. My kid wants me to have something in mind for each piece before I begin, as though I should already know what I want to create. This creates an impossible task, since I can't begin unless I know what I'm going to do. But I can't know what I'm going to do without spending time playing around with various possibilities.

I would like to begin by recording the pieces, one at a time. If I record it in synch with an established beat and synchronize the song to the measures of the score, I can play around with Garage Band sound loops to apply different backgrounds and sounds behind the melody. That might give me an idea of what I want to add to the arrangement for each piece. If that doesn't work for some of them, I can play around with the synthesizer to come up with sounds and harmonies.

I am amazed to realize that I know enough to begin this process of arranging my musical pieces. I can use Logic Pro as the basis for experimentation in a way that my limited keyboard skills don't allow on a synthesizer. Yet, I can play around with synthesizer sounds well enough to explore possibilities, once I have the melodies recorded.

I like thinking about the possibilities in this context. It helps me get clear about what I can do and what I am not yet capable of doing. I don't need to be able to compose music for orchestra before I can create arrangements for these songs. If I could arrange for orchestra, I'm sure my arrangements for these pieces would turn out differently. They would not necessarily be better, just different.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. I am taking my first step, now.

Twilight

I find twilight to be a magical time. When the sun sets, the light in the sky dims and the trees, shrubs and buildings lose their definition. Where I live, there are no street lights. At twilight, the entire natural surroundings gradually grow dark. As the light fades, the shadows grow. The shapes in the natural environment become less defined and their edges become less distinct. When the light fades and the shadows grow, my imagination goes wild.

In the undefined fuzziness of the visible world, my imagination adds definition. The dark shadow sitting where the large shrub rests during daylight becomes a crouching troll, watching my every step. The shadow among the trees across the way becomes a lurking creature whose name I never knew but whose existence I suspected. The fading light in the meadow seems to give each cluster of flowers and plants a life of their own as they dance and swirl to a melody that I can't quite hear. The fairy ring comes alive before my very eyes.

It's a mysterious time at the close of day. There's darkness lurking about and yet laughter catches on the breeze rustling the evening. Where do these creatures live during the day? What brings them out as night falls?

I say that twilight is a gateway between daylight and night. For those who brave the portal and enter into night's enchantment, it is an exciting adventure. For those who shy away from the dark shadows and avoid the mysterious summons at twilight, night is only a time of day that lacks light. Such people project their fears into the evening's shadows and toss megawatts of electricity at them, to illuminate the dark corners and prove that there's nothing hiding there. It is a hard-won safety, a battle that continues every night.

What do you suppose happens when the lights fail?

The Best Arrangement Possible

I don't want to locate my musical pieces in a music category. Doing so, only creates pressure for conformity, some sense of how they ought to be, what they "should" sound like.

The point of my musical arrangements is to find what pleases me. These melodies came to me and I have nurtured and listened to them over many years. I now want to put them into larger musical contexts, but my challenge is to create settings for them that I like.

I have been programmed to think that an arrangement, or any creative work for that matter, is not worth doing unless I can create the best possible arrangement. I can only stand back in awe to admire the hierarchical formula at work in my programming. Since I couldn't possibly ever know whether an arrangement was the best possible, were I to pay attention to my inner voice and follow this impossible task, I would be essentially immobilized by trying to insure that any arrangement I came up with was the best. In fact, it is likely that I would not be able to come up with any kind of arrangement in the first place because I would not be confident that it was the best possible one. Think of all the possible chord structures and voicings that could be made, all the different combinations of musical instruments and choral settings that could be tried. How would I know?

In light of this inner pressure to create only perfect arrangements, I want to alter my thinking about this task. I want to play with the melodies and experiment with various voices and instruments to which I have easy access. Since I don't have access to a symphony orchestra, I don't need to consider orchestral arrangements. I want to explore my response to the music, what feelings and emotions arise in me in response to each melody, and express it appropriately.

An arrangement is not the final word on the form that each song takes. An arrangement is an expression of it. I might create other arrangements later, if I am inspired to set the music differently. It would be like having orchestral arrangements along side of string quartet arrangements of the same piece. Why not?

Is guitar and flute better than strings and timpani for expressing feelings and emotions musically? There is no way to answer that question. Do I like the way the guitar and flute sound together for this particular piece? That question I can answer.

I want to open the door for my creativity to express through the musical arrangements I create by bringing my perfection programming into consciousness. I don't want to create the perfect arrangements. I want to express myself musically.

Music on my Mind

I awoke this morning with a song. It wasn't a new song, but one of my compositions that I've played for more than 20 years on my flutes. I heard it in my mind, as though I were recording a CD, using this song as the first and last piece on the CD. It seemed right and natural to me that this song open and close the selection of music. I felt right about it.

I have wanted to record my flute songs for several years but I haven't gotten around to it. I want to create arrangements for each song but don't know very much about doing that. Nonetheless, I have developed a sense of what I'd like with some of the songs. I hear background pads that surround the flute melodies in a few of the songs. In others, I don't have much of an idea.

I don't have a title for the collection and many of the pieces do not have names. That doesn't really matter. The names might come when I work with the songs.

My inner kid holds back. He's afraid that my songs won't be good enough and that my arrangements won't enhance the melodies sufficiently to make them sound good. He responds to the recording idea with fear. His sense of the project being successful is based entirely on what others might think of it and whether they will like it.

As for me, I am curious to see what I might create with each piece. Some of them have a haunting quality, a mystical call in them that I really like. I would like to add a pad behind these melodies and perhaps a deep pulse that carries the rhythm. I might like to add cello to one or more of them.

A few others are uplifting melodies that celebrate awakening, becoming conscious. I just don't have a sense of what sounds would go well with them. I would like to experiment and try some things. Guitar might sound really nice, especially if it is combined with strings and something rhytmic like a tambourine.

The others are a variety of different melodies, from classical sounding to jazz/pop, that are simple melodies that inspire me. They're fun, each in their own way. These constitute the largest portion of my songs and are the least defined at the present time. I would like to feel free to listen to them, after I record them, to see what sounds and harmonies I want to add.

The important thing to keep in mind is the reason I want to do this. I want to see what I can create with each piece and what the combination of the songs becomes. This is for me. I want to enjoy the process and see what happens. I have dreamt of creating music for most of my life, so I want to enjoy the opportunity that I have. What fun.

Music and Meaning

Music flows easily through my consciousness. Songs sing themselves in my mind, symphonic passages echo in my awareness at various times during the day. I don't consciously choose what music to play for myself, it arises like thoughts when I'm not focused on something else.

I have often thought that the particular music that runs through my head at any given time has a sort of symbolic relevance to the moment in which it plays. Sometimes the relationship is simple and clear, like hearing Tony Bennet singing "I left my heart in San Francisco" when living in Ohio after moving there from SF. Another example is hearing the lyrics, "I've got to be free," being sung while working in a job that I find stultifying. The symphonic passages are more subtle because they don't have an obvious meaning. Still, hearing the stirring theme from the Valkerie's Ride in Wagner's Ring Cycle can have significance relative to the current situation, although it's dependent more on what's happening now.

Unlike ideas, music moves and communicates in a nonverbal way. I can't always identify why this particular music is playing in my head while I walk my dog in the morning. If I focus and listen to it, usually thoughts arise that I consider. I haven't really considered relating the particular thoughts that arise with the music that was originally playing. I'm guessing that there's a connection and that the connection is subjective. If I were able to take note of the music and the thoughts that arise while it plays, I might be able to learn something about what particular pieces of music mean to me.

I don't know if this relationship is constant or whether it changes. Does a musical movement have only one meaning to me? Perhaps it suggests different meanings and has a variety of connotations at various times. I don't know and I don't even know if I will ever have an answer to these questions.

Everyday Magic

I want to consider magic, today. The word magic conjures images of tossing sparks of light from my hands, causing whatever I want to manifest or happen, power over natural forces and influence over others. In my magical images, I notice that I have a sense of myself as all-knowing and wise, capable of changing the direction of life without upsetting the balance among beings and life. It makes sense to me that I would basically imagine the magical self as my soul, to whom, in fact, I do attribute such magical abilities.

If I, as my conscious self, had unlimited power and magical abilities, I would make changes in the way in which my life is going. I would first manifest enough money to pay my debts and remodel my house to better realize its potential for comfortable living. I would manifest solar cells for the roof of my house to generate electricity from the sunlight that is so abundant in Santa Fe, enough electrical power to satisfy all the electrical needs with some left over to contribute to the electrical power grid. I would want vehicles that run efficiently on electrical power (short distances) and gasoline/electrical hybrids for longer distances.

It's interesting to write out the things that I want, because I can see that I already have much of it. I am paying off my debts and I do remodel and fix the house as much as I can each year. In terms of solar power, my house is passive solar, so I already heat the house mostly through solar gain.

I want to consider what happens next, after I satisfy my personal wishes. I notice that I don't have other wants or needs that I am craving, yet I desire the power to satisfy anything that might come up. I don't want fame and great fortune; I wish for a quiet and peaceful life, natural beauty, and loving relationships with others. And these I experience every day.

I have gone through this exercise to see what this desire for magical power is. In fact, I notice that my soul has done quite a fantastic job of manifesting these things for me and I somehow still imagine that I am not a magical creature.