In My Mind’s Zen Garden

my first love has always been music. i think my wife gets jealous of this fact.

anyways, i love the internet and its power to connect real lives across physical as well as virtual boundaries. the more i think about the internet being a beautiful, wonderful shangri-la in cyberspace, i think about all the people i’ve met and all the things i’ve done here.

this morning i had this epiphany, that it’s time to refocus my energies. directly away from the internet and more toward my musical endeavors. i guess getting back to actually practicing piano made me realize that i do have a gift, an ear for music, but i need to practice hard… woodshed, that’s the word.

in the mid-1990s i practiced my ass off on drums. some days i practiced 6 hours, practiced salsa grooves, jazz grooves, drum solos, fills and so on. i bought several videos of drummer buddy rich, much of the old film footage, and i watched and studied his solos with much dedication. i practiced very hard and was able to learn how to do some serious big band drumming. and it paid off by being able to perform in a big band that toured a good part of the country.

i just need to get that back and re-focus on what i want to do right now, which is to focus on piano. i’ve always considered myself a second-rate pianist. and i want to change that. continue the drumming but get my piano playing up to speed. and i swear up and down that yoga directly improves my musical abilities, and i have to continue toward a healthy vegetarian diet because it gives me more energy and cleaner ‘fuel’.

i have a great ear i feel. i can hear things in my head and play them, which allows me to improvise effectively. sometimes i surprise myself, like the night this young blonde lady came into the bistro and wanted to sing norah jones’ ‘don’t know why’. i had never played the tune in my life, but i had heard it enough on the radio. so, i just followed her voice and i somehow knew how to play the song.

anyways, i realize i do have a gift that i’d been neglecting, and i just need to practice… seriously practice and get better… and thus, i will have to sacrifice some things, like re-focus my energies away from the internet and concentrate on music. it will be very hard for me but it’s something that has to be done. i’ve been really getting burned out being online anyways. but i will try to maintain things like rice bowl journals at a minimum level. and there will most likely be a minimum amount of interaction as well.

wish me luck on my endeavors. i don’t expect great things to happen overnight. but i do expect to develop and continue my appreciation and love for music because… well, i’ve always loved it at a most intense level. it has always been an obsession… a passion… a one true love that has never failed me… i just don’t want to fail it!