THE LIFE FORCE

I'm no music critic, nor do I play an instrument, nor do I have any serious knowledge of musical history or theory. I do go to concerts fairly regularly, however, and do my best to pay attention--as I encourage people to pay rapt attention to a painting when they come to one of my "One Hour/One Painting" sessions. What comes more naturally for me with the visual experience is hard when it comes to the aural. I assume it's different for the trained ear, but my attention wanders easily and rapidly at a concert, and I have to keep reminding myself to bring it back to what I'm supposed to be listening to. It's easy for me to allow the attention to slip off into looking rather than listening. I actually find that I can listen best with closed eyes.

The two activities came together quite delightfully for me this past Saturday evening, at an intimate concert in a private home here in Laguna Beach. There were perhaps two dozen of us in the audience, and only three performers--on cello, piano, and violin. The featured artist, Eiline Tai (seen here at the age of 10), is now an eleven year-old girl--you could scarcely call her even a young woman yet, though she is certainly mature and poised beyond her years--whose instrument, the cello, rivals her small stature. The bond between them, though, transcends scale. It seems sometimes as though she is not playing her instrument, but that they are playing each other.

I found that visual image so compelling, I could not keep my eyes off her as I listened. Forget the virtuosity... no, correct that, don't forget it: the dexterity of her fingering and her masterly command of the bow are astonishing, especially when she played a movement from a daunting, emotionally punchy and wide-ranging cello concerto by Dvorak, accompanied by the piano. (The pianist for the occasion was Kevin Weed, himself a composer. The concert also featured two vibrant violin pieces played by the concertmaster of the Southern California Philharmonic orchestra, Jessica Haddy). But beyond that virtuosity, already so accomplished, the depth and range of emotional understanding that flows effortlessly from every note is miraculously in advance of Eiline's eleven years.

The concert came, for me, at an opportune moment. I had been directing my meditations during the previous week to an encounter with that part of our being that remains constant through all the stages of our physical existence here on earth, no matter the impermanence manifest in its changes. We know that our bodies change not only from year to year but even from moment to moment. But there is some part of us--call it what you will, a flame, an energy, a life force, what the Chinese call the "chi"--that accompanies us from the moment of our birth to the moment of our death; and perhaps, who knows, from before birth until after death. In my attempt to identify and sit with this peculiar energy, I have been trying to visualize, even to re-experience my own life from the moment of its conception through all its various progressions and, projecting, to the as yet uncertain moment of the death of this physical body I am given to travel in.

So it came to me yesterday, in one of those lovely moments when perceptions seem to come together with great, pleasing clarity, that what I was experiencing through that young woman's performance was precisely the manifestation of a life force like the one I had been looking for; and that, if not identical, it is a close cousin to the spirit of creativity. As artists, writers, musicians, and so on, we are at our best when we step back from our selves and allow that energy to flow unimpeded--by thought, intentions or ambitions, even by the skills we have acquired, or virtuosity; when everything comes together in the act of creation, the immediate realization and expression of what-is, right now, in the singular moment of its arising. It's the same pure being-in-the-moment that I can find sometimes in meditation, at those rare moments when I manage to sweep away all the trash of circumstance and ego.

And it's good to remember that, strive as I might, it's only when I stop striving that it happens.