A draft of the introduction to the play that I am writing

Dim lights. A clarinet plays a light melody with a pure tone.

A large wooden chest is on the stage, just off the centre and to the right. It is deep brown and is perhaps made of mahogany. It gives the appearance of being altogether mundane, antique, and oppressively heavy. A lock keeps it tightly closed.

With slow and deliberate movements, a girl enters the scene. She appears about twenty-seven, although she could be older. Still, there is something in her movements that make her seem sixteen or seventeen years old. Perhaps it is her light step.

Eventually, she notices the wooden chest. She steps towards it, but hesitates. She takes one long, visible breath, and then approaches the chest, bends down, and touches the lock.

GIRL: It's funny how we forget some things and how we remember others.

Silence. There is no one around to answer her. She jiggles the lock lightly.

GIRL: I don't remember them giving me a key.

University Applications

Ask me to write a paper on Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and I'll write one, right away. It wouldn't necessarily be a good essay, but it would have some structure, and I would know how to take a theme from Tess and develop it into a thesis, which I'd then flesh out in my body paragraph before wrapping the whole work up with some sort of thought-provoking summation.

Ask me to write a paper on myself, and I'm lost.

Unfortunately, this situation is faced by countless number of youth across Canada and the world as post-secondary application deadlines approach. We haven't practised writing 400 word 'essays' on our deepest desires, so how can we possibly be expected to write effectively, eloquently, and efficiently?

A Spider-y Day

I don't mind spiders, but it's not exactly my cup of tea to wake up on a Sunday morning to find spiders laying in bed with me, or crawling on my legs. Not surprisingly so, I became more than a little jittery for the rest of the day so far. In fact, seeing two jumping spiders chilling on the wall beside my desk wouldn't usually startle me so much... but today I freaked out a little more than I should have.

Maybe I should take my own advice and do some meditative practice on my piano or cello.

Except the piece that I'm working on for my Grade 10 Cello Exam is called "Tarantella" by Popper, and it's about doing a dance to dance out the poison of a spider bite. How pleasant.

Piano it is.

Musical Practice and Meditation

The act of practising music is a very odd sort of thing. Musical practice is meditation-- it's a time when you can just sit, breathe, and listen. It's a dance, too. Your arms moving away from your centre, towards you again, forward, back... And then your own body swaying with your violin, hunched over your double bass, caressing against your guitar. You're enveloped in sound, but still, I find that when I practice, it is more about a quiet peace than constant reverberating sound waves that echo back and forth and back and forth.

Music practice is what gives me quiet in my day. I read once that one of the most important parts of a day-to-day routine should be to always find time for quiet. Quiet gives you space, it gives you time, it gives you thought, and it gives you energy. To find the time to practice, even just 1/2 and hour of just open strings on my cello, or a C-major scale on the piano, that is my time for quiet, for peace, for thought.

And the results --in both my mental well being and my technique on my musical instrument-- are tremendous.