From Mushrooms as Medicine to the saving of the Bees...

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About A Boyhood

Artists and lots of other occupations often talk about the Flow State, where all your focus is pointed squarely on one task. Where you stop thinking in steps and start "flowing" in the work.

When I was at Cal Arts I worked as a "chair-schleper" and handyman in their world music department. I got to listen in on great lectures and musical conversation coming from incredible musicians and students. One day in 3rd year I worked the night Branford Marsalis came through. He told us how the daily practice on any instrument was the key that unlocked the creative spirit of the artist. Being super-green, I was like -- Wha? But then he broke it down again for my scattered young mind, always playng catchup. He talked about the musician's relationship to practice, the tension that's always present between you and the fulfillment of your potential. All of which I could relate to. For him, practice was a kinda this ritual making it possible to connect the parts of yourself that create together with the parts that perform a physical task. No musician could use their performance to express the music with excellence until they knew the piece well enough to forget it, and have it come out as  past the note-by-note sequence of a song and into that state of communication , of statement, of invention, where you can actually get into a conversation with yourself outside of time, about ideas rather than your technique. The artist's heart comes naturally though the performance in the ideal way, where the audience experiences the piece one is playing. The music can enter their ears and keep on moving past the ears and hearing centers of the brain, and slip through the listener's inner-defenses and let them have what I can only call an authentic experience.  And hearing that, I got a flashback of my Middle School track coach admitting how good it felt to run until you could escape yourself in the heat of a run.. Mind and muscle-memory in sync. 

I had loved to play, hated to practice, like all kids. But sometimes, very occasionally when I had learned a piece of -- say, Scott Joplin or Beethoven, I could almost get into that state of flow, where it felt like my fingers were acting on their own, doing everything and nailing it! The left hand was holding it's own with the right! My thoughts were free to really listen to what I was playing.  Until drawing took center stage in my world, that weird sensation of freedom that came out of all the practice kept me coming back to my lessons week after week, still interested in what the piano had to teach me.