Oh, Chopin! Once I could play this music so beautifully, and I cried every time, it just sang through me. I was reminded of it today when I heard Ingrid Filter play the Fantasie-Impromptu in C-sharp Minor this morning on Performance Today.
I was, once, so proud of how well I could play, and took great delight in it. I was never bound for professional performance, though; I lacked discipline, and I also felt intensely private about music, to the point where I couldn't bear to take on a new, more strict instructor during college, and snuck into practice rooms alone on quiet evenings instead. To this day, I'm loathe to play or sing in front of people, even (especially?) those I'm closest to. I'm horribly out of practice and sometimes wonder if I'll ever sit down and work on it, if I'll ever be good again. I hope so. It was something that was all mine, that felt like a collaboration between these composers and me.
Più mosso is the Italian for "more movement" (and not, as my husband just commented, "Proud Mary"). In music, it gives the artist direction to pick up the tempo. While the musician in me lies dormant at the moment, I'm feeling like my photography is taking the directive and moving more quickly. I'm not sure how to sustain it - it's requiring a lot of time and attention, and it's striking all sorts of obsessive strings in me. I'm struggling again with that lack of discipline and the desire to share what I do while simultaneously feeling like it's a private thing, not good enough to send into the world. It's getting hard to focus on the moment-to-moment stuff because I'm obsessing about the long view.
All day I've been hearing the Heather Small song "Proud" in my head. Maybe instead of focusing on how good I used to be at one thing or how good I want to (and fear I won't ever) be at something else, I should answer Heather's question: "what have you done today to make you feel proud?"
My answer: I comforted a little girl who missed her mama. I plugged through a day on which my creative and physical energies were sapped. I made the image at the top of this post, using editing techniques I had never used before.
I'm trying to keep Heather's words close:
I can feel my soul ascending
I am on my way
Can't stop me now
And you can do the same
What have you done today to make you feel proud?
(Griffin is taking a break from the 365 project today.)
