Creative Energy

I would say that in my sixty-seven years of life I have spent at least fifty years of it being filled with restless creative energy. Like most people, I spent the first decade and a half of it doing the work of growing and learning. I grew in social, mental, physical, and musical ways, and was fortunate to grow up in a place (Newton, Massachusetts), where I was stimulated by my friends and my teachers. I was also stimulated by adults in the musical community, and was fortunate (in some ways) to have had a great deal of freedom to explore my interests on my own.

In my young adulthood, which was riddled with and rattled by circumstances that were beyond my control, I became increasing restless. Even when life circumstances became safe and stable by marrying Michael and raising our (now grown-up) children, that restlessness found its way into my head in the form of creative energy that needed to be expressed.

Practicing and playing music wasn't enough. Learning a new instrument from "scratch" wasn't enough. But writing music was just the ticket. And doing it every day gave me a way of turning my restless energy into productive energy, and allowed me to write satisfying music that I found beautiful to share and to hear played.

Now that I have this cancer occuping my body and my mind, I have been filling my days with things to distract me from the reality of being sick. I practice violin and piano every day, and have found that I now have more technique on the piano and more control on the violin than I ever imagined I would have.

I can even sometimes play the piano fluently, and that makes me feel me feel stimulated and satisfied.

I do not, however, feel restless. And for the first time in decades I do not feel compelled develop musical ideas that might pop into my head into pieces of music. Maybe it is because I have written enough, or maybe there isn't room in my coping mechanism for the restlessness that kept me so full of creative musical energy for so many years.

After I recover from my upcoming (June 30th) bone marrow transplant, which will take some time, I wonder if the creative energy and restlessness that once fueled my writing will return. And if it does, I wonder how my new-found piano skills and deeper physical understanding of piano music might inform what comes out.