Summer 2024 will remain in my memory as one filled with new images—new physical landscapes through our travels in the States and in France, the faces of new friends and colleagues who shared the journeys with us, and not least on this list, new creative endeavors born from the imagination and prompted by an inner drive that often seems inexplicable.
As a firm believer in the exercise of free will, of making one’s own choices, and charting one’s own course, I have come to embrace another co-existing energy that bypasses our own decision-making capabilities. I call it, “The Path that Chose Me.” In simple terms it can be described as a kind of inner urging to take one route over another to reach a certain destination, an invitation to create/build/grow something that touches others, and a clear knowledge that an indwelling force is always accessible to instruct you and guide you.
When my siblings and I grew up, we had the privilege (or the burden, if you ask my brother) of taking piano lessons. My sister and I loved it, whereas our brother preferred to listen to music than to try to create it himself, and I use the term “try” a bit liberally. Yet for my sister and me, practicing the piano became a joyful daily exercise, one that we grew to embrace as a time for contemplation as well as development of our talents and skills. When we were teenagers, our mother used to say that she knew we were trying to work out some problem or issue when we went to the piano just to play not to practice, to get lost in the music for a half hour or more.
For me, that ritual became not just pleasant auditory escapism, but the vehicle for internally “hearing and seeing” the path that lay before me, for stepping away from my own thoughts as well as from external issues, and detecting the unseen magnet that was drawing me towards itself. The result of those interludes always led me to greater understanding of a situation or person, to discovery of fresh opportunities for problem-solving in an internal collaboration, if you will, with my own specific creative process.
Now years later, different contemplative rituals have been added to musical ones in my life—yoga, drawing, oil painting, sewing, and yes, writing. They are pursuits that allow me to acknowledge and tap into that powerful gift that has always been within me just waiting to be accepted, embraced, respected, utilized, enjoyed and shared whenever, wherever, and with whomever the path chooses to take me. It lies within us all. I’m forever grateful.