return to the blogosphere (LONG!)

What a whirlwind...it feels like forever since I last posted.

So, here's a bit of what has been going on in my little corner of the world.

First, I headed to Hope Springs, where I spent a few days with some women I have been getting to know over the past year. I brought my violin along and gave some very small recitals of Beethoven and Rachmaninoff, and improvised along with recordings by Deva Premal and some other new age, far out stuff.

I also did some reiki, although I had been planning not to, for fear of being seen as playing favorites. But people's pain called out to me, and I was thrilled to have some tools with which to respond. A woman with acute abdominal pain told me she suffers from a gall bladder disease, and I was able to place my hands deliberately and lovingly on the gall bladder meridian and focus on giving her some relief. While I did so, another woman asked if she could work in tandem with me, and waved her hands above the first woman's body in ways that I can neither describe nor understand. What I do know is that the first woman was able to get up and go to breakfast, and this is good.

Another woman was clearly struggling to find a comfortable position in which to sit and participate in our firsts evening' circle-shaped discussion group. I went over to her and learned that she was suffering great pain in her knee. Working reiki on her later, I felt tremendous heat radiating around her knee joints, and discovered that supporting and applying focused pressure to the base of the calf provided instant and measurable relief. The woman reported immediate improvement in her comfort level, and the next day said I had helped her feel well enough to sleep through the night when she had feared she would not. She gave me a beautiful mug she had made on a potter's wheel in her basement and glazed in my favorites tones of earthy green and brown.

The second morning there, I noticed a third woman evidencing tremendous difficulty finding a comfortable sitting position. A famous sensualist, she loves massage, so I took a leap and had her climb onto a professional massage table kept on site, and administered an intuitive scalp, neck, shoulder, upper back and foot massage, combined with reiki. At the time, she insisted upon giving me a pair of sparkly crystal earrings she had made herself. Today, I got an email from her, thanking me for having done body work that made a HUGE difference in how well she had continued to feel for the rest of the week at Hope Springs. Boy, did that make me feel good.

In the interim, I have been to Philadelphia and Washington DC with my husband and three children, where we first celebrated Passover with family and then visited every known national memorial, as well as several museums, the zoo, and the cherry blossom festival. Utterly exhausting, but also intensely beautiful and awe inspiring.

Now that we are home, and I have made four laundry loads of progress towards returning to normal, I went out and adopted a dog. But not until first spending the morning reading a surprisingly complex Telemann quartet with three wonderful musicians - two flutists and a cellist - and discovering, somewhere along the way, that I have the most notes by far. Hello! How could this be? Oh, that's right: I'm the one playing the violin. Sigh.

Instead of blogging, I suppose I should be practicing, but I am too wiped to do anything but sit in a terribly slouchy posture and rest my wrists on the edge of the kitchen table and move my fingers around to share a slice of my life with all of you. I just gave Max a strenuous massage. He deserves it; first, he asked very nicely and second, he and his very first real girlfriend broke up last night. My heart bleeds to see him so torn up. But tugging and prodding him seems to have sapped my last drop of energy from me.

Suki, the dog, is stretched out on the cool laminate floor beside me. She is sound asleep. Soon, I will be as well. Then, tomorrow, after a catch up coffee with my long lost local friends, I will resume my attempts to master my part in Respighi's Pines of Rome and the Rachmaninoff 2nd piano concerto. I will do so with greater urgency than I had originally anticipated, seeing as I have just accepted, via email, the invitation to become the sinfonietta's new concertmaster. Now, there is nowhere to hide. I have a lot of notes to learn, and many of them in the high register.

I swear: every time I face another page of really, really high notes to learn, I think "damn, I should have played the viola." But soon enough, I am learning another beautiful piece of violin music, and I am happy again with my choice. I do love the cello rather desperately, and even own one myself, but I soon realized, after purchasing the instrument after my youngest child was born, hiring a baby sitter to let me out of the house for a few lessons, that what I really should do was to brush up my very rusty fiddling skills. It's been a long climb back up, and I still have a way to go before I fully reclaim my former skill set, but I am determined. I figure when a girl gets compared to a Hindu goddess, she isn't about to become a quitter or a sissy.

So, that's what's at the forefront right now: progressing with reiki, practicing the violin, acclimating to dog ownership. Not to mention that it's baseball season, which means four practices a week for my two younger sons, Sam and Isaac. On top of the dance, acting and piano lessons we were already juggling, this is quite a lot for a naturally disorganized woman to handle. Hopefully, the new level of chaos will not cause me to pay bills later than they are due, or fail to register Max for his summer teen trip to Israel, or Sam for his summer camp. I know sosmething will fall between the cracks; it never fails. I owe a client a pair of far out fancy nancy pants, and I owe my memoir mentor another chapter of manuscript. But since I am a mortal, and NOT a Hindu goddess, only possessing two hands and only functioning for a maximum of 18 hours a day, well, it cannot all happen at once.

I've promised to plant sunflower seeds with Isaac tomorrow - he has been asking for eons, but we had to be home to water them every day for the first six weeks at the very least. He no longer remembers the giant sunflowers that shot up in back of the house our first summer here, when he was a toddler. It felt more like a jungle than a garden, so I did not repeat the planting, but now it is time to revisit the phenomena. I wonder what Suki will think of flowers that are nearly twice the height of her owner.

Wow, I am impressed that you read all the way to the bottom of this overdue, oversized blog post. Isn't there perhaps something else you are supposed to be doing? That's all right; I'm sure it can wait. Good Night!