Nectar Amist the Percussive Weeds

Nectar Amid the Percussive Weeds


After two weeks away on vacation, I was struck and somewhat horrified to see just how overgrown my garden had become with weeds. Weeds in all shapes and sizes. Weeds that just seemed to spring out of nowhere and usurp their territory without any consult or apologies.

After spending the previous months tending to the garden and trying with painstaking effort to grow a few roses, shrubs and even applying my paltry skills in the current sentiment of ecological self-sufficiency to planting a modest 'Victory' vegetable Garden (...which ended up being more of a defeat, but that's another story)--I was more than a little aghast to see just how the weeds had taken up residence in so aggressive a manner.

It led me to think of the nature of things...For instance, a beautiful garden left unchecked, will quickly evaporate and be taken over by weeds. It is the natural state.

Although, is it the most beautiful?

I will take flowers over weeds any day of the week--but it seems that despite nature, producing a flower takes much more effort, attention and nurturing. One has to override the stronger tendency for weeds to invade and to suppress them at all costs.

I am going to try to make an analogy now between weeds and the nature of a musical instrument which I love and have spent my life with--the piano. It may be a stretch, but here it goes:

The piano is an anomaly as far as instruments go, because it is tricky to classify. The basic classifications, or families of instruments are: string, woodwind, brass, and percussion. With this system it makes it straightforward to classify a violin under the string category; the trombone under the brass family and the clarinet under the woodwind family, just to name a few obvious examples.

But with the piano, we run into a hermaphroditic problem: Due to its more complex nature it is considered both a String instrument AND a Percussion instrument.

Because of the strings which vibrate and hence produce the piano sound, it is classified in the string category--However, because of the hammers inside the piano
(part of the component known as the 'action') which are thrown into flight when a key is pressed down, this act of the hammer hitting the string gives the piano also the classification as a percussion instrument.(A percussion instrument is defined as one where the act of striking produces tone, such as a drum or timpani).

As any pianist will attest, the quest to draw a beautiful tone from the piano is among the most challenging of aspects in mastering the pianistic art. It requires apt listening, a perfect harmony between the player and the instrument and a true choreography in physically applying the correct 'touch' in order for this aesthetic magic of tone to happen. In pursuit of this, the player must dodge the easy to attain, overwhelmingly percussive aspect of the piano, for when one strikes the keys with an undue amount of force, it will easily destroy the tone so that it becomes shrill, glassy and harsh. Under these conditions, it aborts the ability for the instrument to sing and for the hidden lyrical beauty to shine forth.

This is the nectar--the elusive flower of tonal beauty which is only attained by extracting it amist the garden of percussive weeds that form the basic landscape of this instrument.

In life, I think it is often necessary to rise above what is the natural tendency. It is refinement in the highest sense of the word.

But why should we make the extra effort? Why NOT take the easy way out? After all, sound is sound...Who will notice?

In art and in life the extra effort required to extract the beauty within the weeds will not only lead to finer results--it will open a channel for communing in the aesthetic Garden of Paradise where blossoms the Divine.

Zen and the Art of Surviving a Rip Tide

Walking along the beach in beautiful Long Beach Island, NJ at night, stars glowing over head and hypnotized by the waves metronomically crashing along the shore, I started to think about rip tides.

I am not a good swimmer and am fairy uncomfortable in the ocean--In fact my level of discomfort got heightened yesterday when I took my two daughters, ages 6 and 8 in for a dip. Boy, was I really taken aback by how deceivingly calm the waters seemed. In no time we seemed to be bombarded by waves and taken further and further away from the shore line. It wasn't a rip tide, because we managed to get out of it with relative ease...but the experience was so disconcerting that I started to think about the phenomenon of rip tides and how they relate to our lives.

Here's what I learned about rip tides: (some of these facts are taken from popularmechanics.com...funny--but true)

Riptides, or rip currents, are long, narrow bands of water that quickly pull any objects in them away from shore and out to sea. They are dangerous but are relatively easy to escape if you stay calm.

Do not struggle against the current.


Life: How often do difficult and confusing situations bombard us. Sometimes it's in such a profusion that the old saying "when it rains, it pours" seems quite apropos. How often do we feel the need to change the current of unwelcome events--In our effort to control things and get out of the turmoil, we often not only make things worse and aggravate the situation, but also we exhaust ourselves in the process.

Most riptide deaths are not caused by the tides themselves. People often become exhausted struggling against the current, and cannot make it back to shore.

Life: I think sometimes no matter how uncomfortable the place is that we are carried away to by the unwelcome current--it just seems that the best solution is to ride it out and not fight it.

Do not swim toward shore.
You will be fighting the current, and you will lose.


Life: Can we ever really return to square one--? No matter how we might want to go back, we could never retrace our steps in life. We can't get back to the same place on the shore we started from.

Swim parallel to shore, across the current.
Generally speaking, a riptide is less than 100 ft. wide, so swimming beyond it should not be too difficult.

Life: What is interesting about this is how small a riptide is--only a 100 ft, but in the hysteria of the moment, it might as well be 100,000 ft! Just as when we experience the 'emotional riptides' of our lives--they sometimes feel just endless, but really for all we know they are also minuscule--and the bright side maybe just moments away, around the corner--But in the heat of the moment, it's hard to see--We deceive ourselves into thinking that it will last infinitely long.

If you cannot swim out of the riptide, float on your back and allow the riptide to take you away from shore until you are beyond the pull of the current.

Now here's one that completely makes me aghast...Can you imagine--there's a monstrous riptide, pulling you out into the deepest parts of the ocean with nothing to hold onto--its power is overcoming you and depleting your resources;frantically you attempt to fight it-it's a full blown struggle for life or death--

And now in the midst of it all the high-pitched anxiety you're supposed to just nonchalantly flip over on your back--and FLOAT????!!!

It seems impossible, but strangely it's the favored option--To have the Faith that it will work out--To submit to the current....and it will effortlessly drift you back to safety...

...Funny, I always thought that being called a 'drifter' was a bad thing...

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