Happy St. Patrick’s Day my Darlings!

I have to say, shamrocks are pretty thin on the ground here in Vermont. Spring and Winter are bickering like siblings and yanking the thermostat back and forth from 40 degrees F(that’s when we giddily strip off all the wool and run around in T-shirts) and then back to the tens, where it feels like we shall shiver forevermore. It’s hard not to feel like hapless peasants left to the mercy of the Gods when Apollo’s sun chariot seems driven by a maniacal Uber driver from Boston….

I spent Tuesday pruning apple trees and shuffling from woodpile to woodpile. I think I have enough wood to last through May. I assume it will never be warm again. Ever. Spring lost the latest arm wrestle and we are back to chipping ice out of water buckets and trying to collect the eggs before they freeze. Even the trees are confused—sap is going up and down faster than a Jack Russell’s hind leg. Everywhere I go, I see maple trees with blue tubing running from tree to tree, as if they are all hooked up on life support. Clever Vermonters are siphoning off their blood to be boiled into maple syrup.

The lambs are due any day. My daily chores now include bag, tail, and vulva inspections. (By bag, I mean the ewes’ udders. They will fill up shortly before lambing.) The ewes glance at me coyly, as if they have no idea what I am talking about. Us? Enceinte? Never! They are very sneaky. My friend, whose ram covered all of our sheep during the same time period, has lambs hitting the ground already. It’s just a matter of timing, which is off by an hour on the clocks, some of which I have yet to change. I am on time in the Kitchen and the car but not in the bedroom or the shop. (Perhaps this explains more than it should.)

I truly don’t mind the cold. I live where I do for a reason. (It’s not just for all the groovy tie-dye, good cheese, and Kombucha.) But I do dread the coming Mud Season. We had a taste of it last week when all the birdsong thawed out and the ground melted suddenly into greasy slime. I’m not talking about that brown stuff that looks like cupcake frosting around the edge of a puddle in the park. This is deep and savage stuff. Nothing yanks the steering wheel right out of your hand like hitting a patch of heavy mud. The roads leading home are dirt and look as though mastodons have been rolling and taking mud baths in them. After churning axle-deep through one plot of mud, I got on the highway and discovered that I could not go over forty miles an hour without the whole car shuddering like a woman who has just looked at what’s in the back of the fridge. The wheels were packed so full of mud they were off balance! Sadly, I ruined a bit of the suspension system as well.

Being St. Patrick’s Day, naturally I am thinking about Leprechauns (whom I am convinced live here year round in the form of small dogs), pots of gold (which I will need to pay for the mud damage to the car), and MUSIC. My little tailoring shop is closed because my son and I have eleven on-line school programs scheduled for this week in which we share the stories, culture, and music of Ireland with students Kindergarten through grade 5. Their follow-up questions are charming. Ninety percent of them have to do with playing music. “How do you play that?” “When did you learn that?” “Can anyone play music?” “How do you both know what to play?”

I do not have time to tell them this story, though desperately I want to, so I will tell you instead. I remember the exact hour I learned to play Music. It was more magical than a hundred Leprechaun wishes and the magic has stayed with me evermore, through all the years that have passed since. I was at a summer tune safari for Scottish fiddlers and a young woman, whom I will call Sarah (because that is actually the angel’s name), came all the way from the Western isles of Scotland to teach us. I was in the intermediate group with the rest of the adult learners. The advanced class was learning tunes-by-ear four at a time. At top speed, we could only learn two. One member of our class was chaffing at the disparity. She thought we could learn tunes just as fast if they were just easier tunes. She set up her microphone and recording device and waited. When Sarah came in, this woman demanded to know how many tunes we were going to learn.

“We’ll see,” was Sarah’s demure reply. “Let’s just start with the one.” She invited us to listen as she played it several times. It trickled like warm honey into our ears and stuck immediately. The phrases were identifiable as a “question” followed by an “answer” in which the chordal structure resolved itself. It was an accessible, straightforward, predictable, traditional tune. We all sighed with relief. No weird syncopation. No weird key. We could bag this tune quickly and immediately draw our bows to catch another one, maybe two before lunch.

It didn’t take us long to have all the notes. We smashed them one by one as they marched along our finger boards. It was like whack-a-mole only the moles were polite, orderly, and predictable. “Can we learn another tune?” asked the woman at the front impatiently, “I think most of us have this now.” A look of angelic serenity came over Sarah’s face as she smiled fondly at the woman.

“We aren’t finished with this one yet,” she said softly. Instantly, I felt protective of Sarah. She seemed far too young to be in charge of a group like us. How could she know the pressure we were under—that middle-aged pressure to be better fast, because Time was running out for us and we had to grab and squeeze and make haste before someone reminded us we were adults responsible for Other Things. We had arrived late to this game and each endured the private envy, born of poverty consciousness, of talent, tunes, of Youth itself. We needed tips, hints, and short cuts. SPEED. We were like marauders on a beach, trying to stuff as many shells in our pockets as we could—we would take them home and polish them later. Right now, we just wanted to grab enough notes to hang on to the tunes before they wriggled out of our fingers.

But Sarah wasn’t having it. She went over the finer points of bowing. She made us polish as we went. “Are we done yet?” we wanted to know. No. Then, she taught us a harmony to the tune. “Are we done yet?” No. Then she taught us the chords. “Now, we are probably done,” we thought, “what else could there be to learn about this bloody tune?” No. This sweet and clever teacher knew damn well we had all forgotten the original tune so she made us review it again. Patiently, with soft stubbornness, she made us carve and scrape and shape that simple little tune—to make sure the melody and harmony were distinct and separate. A wave of vexation rippled silently among some of the members of the class as they surreptitiously checked their watches. There might not be time now to learn a second tune!

At this point, Sarah motioned for us to leave our chairs and stand in a circle at the front of the class. “I invite you to close your eyes now,” she said. “You know the melody, the harmony, and the chords. I want you to play whichever one of those you choose. Try not to play what the person next to you is playing. Try to hear what is happening across the circle. If you get stuck, go into the center of the circle and just listen.”

Grudgingly, we obeyed. We stood shoulder to shoulder and began squishing the notes as they started to trickle around the circle. I think most of us started with the tune. Gradually, we heard the harmonies coming in, followed by the chords.

Somehow, I’m not sure exactly at what moment, I stopped smashing notes. I stopped following the tenuous mental grooves of a quickly memorized pattern. I started feeling the tune coming from somewhere in my toes, working its way up like living sap in a tree. I swayed in time on my bare feet. Part of me stepped back to watch myself, then Snap! My attention went suddenly to my fingers and they forgot everything and stumbled. I panicked. Then I remembered I could find my way back home in the center. Cautiously, I opened my eyes and stepped into the circle. My classmates were starting to sway too, like algae, letting the tide take them. The wall of sound coming at me in the center was gentle, palpable, yet slightly incoherent. Then something just clicked, like a photo coming into focus. There were the chords—the strength that marched beneath, carrying the tune on their shoulders. There was the tune, relaxed, lying resplendently on the litter being carried by the chords. Here was the harmony, draping itself luxuriantly over the recumbent tune like purple silk. I could single out each part or blur them into a whole. I stepped back into my place in the circle. Now I could “lock on” to my target, like radar for a missile strike, and hear clearly the part I wanted to play with someone across the circle. To my astonishment, as soon as I could hear a part, I could play it. Others felt it too. Our ears were connected to our fingers! Who knew? The energy changed dramatically.

Long moments passed in dizzying bliss as we dwelt together at the center of that tune. No one rushed or hurried. None of us wanted this to end. (Some days, in my mind, I am there still…) We stopped playing “notes” and began to play our parts. We listened. We adapted. We corrected. We kept playing—more and more together with each phrase. The sounds wrapped around us from the ankles up and bound us together. Then, without knowing it, we stopped playing “parts” too.

We just played MUSIC.

We just PLAYED.

We JUST

WE…

When we finally opened our eyes and the last strains of the music drifted out the open window and returned to their place in the cosmos, we found Sarah, standing in the center of the circle with a tear-streaked face, head bowed, smiling. No one spoke.

“Now,” she whispered. “Now, we are done with that tune!”

That was the very first time I ever played Music. That was the time I realized it is actually both a toy and a language. It’s how we share without words about what is essential about Life. And it’s fun.

Knowing one tune well can give us an entry point to All the tunes. Knowing how to play a lot badly, and in poor taste, serves no one. We are not here to serve ourselves. We are here to serve the Music. Practicing “technique” is what enables us to remove “all that is not music” from our playing but sometimes we can have “all the notes” and still not make any music. Sometimes, having only a few notes enables us to hear it fully—to feel with all our senses the Pulse of something grand and eternal coming through us for a moment.

Whatever we do today, may we hear some good Music. And not just hear it; Become it—in our homes, our shops, our gardens, in the silence of our hearts. I know the Music is listening too, to hear what we bring.

Happy St. Pat’s!

With Sew much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy