Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" (the first movement) just came on. I've turned the volume way up. I don't think my night-owl neighbors will mind.
I'm mesmerized... by the intricate beauty of this piece of music and by the subtle changes in tempo and volume that create its emotional current - something totally dependent on the skill of the musician. It's so romantic, so passionate, so soul-stirring. When I played piano (when I had a piano) this was one of my favorite pieces, both to play and to hear. When I lived in China one summer, it was the only sheet music I took with me (why I thought to take it I don't quite remember), and one of my most memorable experiences there was finding a piano in one of the classroom buildings on the university campus and playing that piece every afternoon for a few weeks in a row. I had an audience of one - my friend Martin - and that was just perfect since playing for crowds always made me terribly nervous.
I have recently thought about playing again - maybe finding a used keyboard (full-length only, please) and setting it up in my new home, whenever I move into it. And that would be after I find a new home. And that would be toward the end of January when I move out of my apartment. But I digress...
I thought about playing again especially because I found my box of sheet music in the attic as mom and I were cleaning it out the other day. Funny what is unearthed when you are moving stuff out of a home. A very cathartic process, to be sure, and one that has been particularly revealing for me.
I have realized over the past few weeks just how much of myself I have left sitting in boxes in the attic or basement, just waiting to see the light of day again. Whether it is sheet music, or art supplies, or my poetry notebooks, or letters from dear friends I haven't written or talked with in months/years, or files with pictures I tore out of magazines to stimulate ideas for decorating a nursery... these are all little pieces of me. And they have been noticeably missing for quite some time.
As we were cleaning, sometimes I would come across a missing piece that would have me wondering for days, "What happened? What happened to that Delara? Where did she go?" And sometimes I could do nothing more than sit and just marvel at all the loose ends, all the missing pieces, all the unfinished paths.
It is amazing what happens when we finally face ourselves with an honesty so brutal that it shatters any illusion we may have held onto for years in the guise of reality.
And it is even more amazing that the human spirit can often pick up where it left off - if the desire is strong enough - and regain lost yardage, lost time, forgotten interests, temporarily suspended habits and behaviors that, in fact, make us who we are. Or who we were until we got off-track or were distracted from our *true* self, our radiant self, our higher self. Even if it was for a good reason or intention.
So, it is quite possible that I will search out a keyboard sometime in the next year and bust out that old box of sheet music and see what these hardly-used fingers can still do. Ah, they're still limber from all the typing I do! Perhaps they can help show me the way back to myself.
