Finding the Heart of Gustav Mahler

Its been the driest of Mays in my little world. The swamp has fallen into drought. I shudder to think of how my daughter's grades have fallen. In the middle of the night, my kitchen and living room flood and I shudder to think of all that is still not mended. A move-out date is looming on my calender and festering in every unpacked corner of my apartment while a clouded air of insipid vacations, unpaid debts, and uncertain relationships loom.

In the midst of these ominous ramblings, I went to a lovely performance of the Houston Symphony on Sunday afternoon which is notable because my mother and I usually only attend three of four concerts a year. Classical music is a bond we have had since I was child who played the double bass quite well and she was a devoted mother who drove me across the universe to attend private lessons, orchestra rehearsals and various performances. My mother gave me a lot of her time and a lot of herself.  She taught me how to walk away from an unreasonable argument, to appreciate artist expression even when you don't understand it, and to love classic movies. I like to think that my short lived career as a child musician helped my mother appreciate classical music, even if she doesn't fully understand it.

Symphonic music at its best expands our capacity to feel, to enter the compassion and the pain of being human.  Classic music holds joy deeply, and for the time we are experiencing a composer's work we borrow his passions and make them our own.

Such was the case of Sunday's performance of Mahler's 10th, and unfinished Symphony. When Mahler wrote the sketch for his final symphony he was a man living on borrowed time. Doctors had discovered he suffered from an incurable heart condition and it was uncertain how long he would live. He had learned too that his wife, Alma - an insatiable flirt - was having an affair. As unfinished works go, the sketch Mahler left behind was quite complete. Mahler wrote out all his basic melodies and cords and filled the margins with his notations of regret for the life he would not live and the heartache brought on by a cheating wife. When he died in 1911, two years after starting his final work, Mahler left us not only the bones of a symphony, but a memoir of human suffering.

And yet, despite the shrinking high A of his trumpeter and funeral march of his bass drum, the final movement of Mahler's final symphony leaves us with an uplifting melody. The kitchen floods, the grades slide, the good man is gone, the lawn turns brown, but with Mahler you come back to basics: Do I regret this life? Is it, despite all our brave words, a cheat and a waste? Does it make any slight difference to the universe that we are present?

Spending an afternoon with the Symphony simply is an extravagant gift from the heart of the performers to the hearts of whoever is sitting nearby. Life is good, no matter the disappointments — O God the disappointments. Just square your shoulders and give them your utter best. As the late great Marilyn Monroe said, "I don't want to make money, I just want to be wonderful." Life is insurmountable, but we mount up every morning and ride forward.

April has come and gone....

Here it is, just two day left in April and looking over my shoulder I'm not quite sure where all those other days went.

This month, Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey. We all waved palm branches, morned his death and celebrated his resurrection. Meanwhile my daughter celebrated her twelfth birthday. Twelve is the last year of childhood, the time of coming of age novels, so one can understand the excitement that comes with being twelve. Though for my daughter this birthday meant one thing, riding in the front seat of my car. It's a good thing she didn't ask for too much else.

Yes, there was a flurry of activity this month, but the skies did not bring April showers to Texas. There have been wild fires to the north of our buyou and our grass has turned from a lush green to a crunchy brown. We had so much rain this fall that I think we all got a little over confident and tricked ourselves into believing that with enough humidity we could all avoid death, but we can't avoid the patterns that keep the circle of life circling.

It won't be long now...

In a couple of hours it will officially be the first day of spring. The vernal equinox will occur then, the time when the earth's axis is not turned toward the sun (summer, for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere), or away from it (winter), but is aligned with the center of the sun. The word equinox comes from Latin: aequus means equal, level, or calm; nox means night, or darkness. The equinox, in spring or fall, is a time when the day and night are as close to equal as they ever are, and when the hours of night are exactly equal for people living equal distance from the equator either north or south.

A Light exists in Spring

by Emily Dickinson

A Light exists in Spring
Not present on the Year
At any other period-
When March is scarcely here

A Color stands abroad
On Solitary Fields
That Science cannot overtake
But Human Nature feels.

It waits upon the Lawn,
It shows the furthest Tree
Upon the furthest Slope you know
It almost speaks to you.

Then as Horizons step
Or Noons report away
Without the Formula of sound
It passes and we stay-

A quality of loss
Affecting our Content
As Trade had suddenly encroached
Upon a Sacrament.

Spring Lunchon in the Park

Daylight Savings Time has come and stolen my chance to arrive at work with the sun and so my walk to work is still in darkness and yet early spring weather has arrived. Along the gulf coast our summer carries oppressive heat and humidity and so in spring we enjoy the outdoors with wildly nervous abandon. Yesterday, under the spell of spring I took my lunch outdoors, and enjoyed my sandwich in front of city hall. On the new benches by the reflection pool and green patches of grass I ate carrot sticks and read a book on my new Color Nook. Two children played tag as I read and a gang of skate boarders rushed by.

I wasn’t the only one taking my lunch in the park, on a bench placed there to honor our former Mayor who, apparently, “loved the city parks.” There were others. Men with knapsacks and trash bags filled with more than just a sandwich, but I suspect, everything they own. No one bothered me. Or talked to me. I don’t think anyone ever even looked at me, and yet I couldn’t help but feel their presence as I sat there and read on my Nook. I felt like a schmuck, sitting there with my Vera Bradley lunch tote and reading the philosophical meanderings of a guy chasing rubber duckys lost at sea by way of a luxury electronic device.

Like most good capitalist I didn’t do anything about this feeling of schmuckiness. I simply read and ate and then walked back to my job in the nearby skyscraper. I sat and ate with people who have nothing and did almost nothing. As I left I offered the man beside me my uneaten apple, which he took with a smile after sniffing it for passions. That made the schmuckiness seem to ooze out of me even more. The act felt wholly inadequate and I felt unwise and unsure and humbled.

I suppose if I were a minister writing a sermon this would be the place where I would insert a story from the bible or a lame antidote about something magical I heard God saying to me that day in the park. If I were a feature story on NPR this would be the opening line to explain the revolutionary way I’ve begun to serve the homeless population. But I’m not a minister and I didn’t receive a divine revelation; this isn’t NPR and I’m certain I won’t be opening a homeless shelter any time soon. I have no bow to tie around yesterday’s lunch. I just offer it, humbly and covered in schmuck to the universe. Maybe God, in time, will tie around this for me, but maybe not.

Live to be Poked

Tomorrowland, Magic Kingdom
Walt Disney World

Katy, 2009

A person doesn't learn much driving around in a car, compared to what you can pick up on foot, and that's a sad fact about the way most of us live. Your car, comfortable though it might be, this little den and dinning room on wheels, is a prison that deadens your senses, and to feel wholly alive you must go for a walk.

I have only discovered this after years of riding buses to work and walking the city streets. It was a discovery that almost went unnoticed until Good Friday when I decided to drive myself downtown. There was no traffic. I thought I might leave work early, and opted to have my get away car near by. It was fun at first. With my windows rolled up tight I could listen to the music LOUD without bothering strangers. I was quite content. But I was missing out on spring, the smell of soil, the exhilaration of walking, the whole show.

If you're used to being wrapped in two tons of steel, you feel naked without it. Anybody could walk up and poke you, anybody at all. You wait to be poked. This weekend I worked in a community garden which is not far removed from our local museum district. In our wonderful city of no zoning laws we tend to our crops amongst an odd mix of rundown tenements and first class yuppie condos. A jazz musician and social worker stop by to help out and an old lady stops to ask for food. Its exhilarating to be out in a crowd on a spring day. We are not alone. The world is larger and more interesting than we imagine.

There are times when I wish the homeless would just stop asking for bus fare. Just fess up to why you really want the money. This morning I wanted to rip a hands free cellphone thingy out of one businessman's hands. What is the point of using that wire thing if you are just going to hold the phone in one hand and the wire in the other? Congratulations, you are using two hands to operate a one hand device while sharing your personal life with 40 of your newest, closest friends. And sure, no one wants to listen to the techno crap that teenage punk is blasting on her ipod, but I was once a teenage punk myself.

For all we think we know, we don't come close to comprehending this complex world. When you walk in the open, exposed to the beauty and grandeur, our common morality and our common failures, no words can quite suffice. Its just a good life in a messed up, crazy ass world.

Happy Spring

Victoria Gardens
Epcot, Walt Disney World
by Katy 2007

Spring is here at long last. I think I have a new apperchiation for the changing of the seasons after that winter I just lived through last weekend. Today started out right and spring like.

Can I just say how much I love spring? It is a time of birth and renewing. A time for fairies and magic. A time of color and peace.

Tinkerbell in bronze
Magic Kingdom, Walt Disney World
Katy, 2008

Also, I have my photos again. I have resorted to using a method that I normally would not use against protected internet imagies, but since these images are mine I don't feel bad.

Equinox

Backyard, by Katy © 2008

Today is an anomaly. I haven't looked it up, but I'm sure that this kind of thing only happens once in ever million years. Today is Holy Thursday and the Spring Equinox. Today is the only day of the year that there will be the exact same amount of sunlight that there is moonlight. From here on out there will be more light than darkness.

I find it really interesting that this day should correspond with Holy Thursday. The day that Jesus washed the feet of his disciples and shared the last supper. Interesting that this event is remembered, this year on the day that a new season is officially here. In many ways, I think we can say, that the last super was the closing of one chapter and the starting of another. It was the first time in the Gospels that we hear Jesus giving his "what will happen to you all when I die" talk to the disciples. It is a dark time. For him, spring has not yet come.

In Spring, we celebrate new life. Bunnies are shagging and eggs are hatching, reminding us that after darkness, winter, the reflection of advent, and fasting of lent, there is new life to be had. We are growing and changing.

It is an odd feeling tonight. Odd that we celebrate the joy of the Earth, yet still reserve the remembrance of the struggles that are still a head. In way this joy of Spring is a good reminder of how the disciples really felt on this night. We see it as the last super. We listen to Jesus prepare for his death. They didn't see it that way. This was a celebration. They were still riding the high of Palm Sunday. They were celebrities and they were feasting with their messiah. It is a good reminder that today is a day of joy. The sorrow comes tomorrow.

On a slightly less related note, but a new beginning all the same, I got a new camera today. The "new battery" idea didn't work. So now, a whole new challenge of photography with a whole new camera.

Spring

Somewhere

a black bear

has just risen from sleep

and is staring

down the mountain.

All night

in the brisk and shallow restlessness

of early spring

I think of her,

her four black fists

flicking the gravel,

her tongue

like a red fire

touching the grass,

the cold water.

There is only one question:

how to love this world.

I think of her rising

like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against

the silence

of the trees.

Whatever else

my life is

with its poem

sand its music

and its cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness

coming

down the mountain,

breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her –

her white teeth,

her wordlessness,

her perfect love.

~ Mary Oliver ~

(House of Light)