Living in my canvas

Finishing the hat,
How you have to finish the hat,
How you watch the rest of the world
From a window
While you finish the hat...

--Stephen Sondheim

I completed a violin concerto at the end of last year. It was very satisfying for me to complete something on such a large scale. I picked up on a few composing strategies, and I feel more at ease with the possibility of more projects to come. It was the beginning of the next Thing. Though it didn't win the prize I wrote it for, it revived my desire to create. It represented, in a way, who I am.

I played my concerto for a friend who asked me to arrange a hymn popular to our religion. I sat with the hymn, playing around, thinking about how to incorporate some of what I learned from the concerto. From my heart came an arrangement I would not have created a year ago. I worked carefully on it for a few months. By the time I dubbed the work finished, it truly felt like a polished offering to my friend and to my God.

One Sunday morning as I prepared for church I received a text message: Do I want to sing a duet in Sunday School that day? I've trained to be quick on my feet when it comes to musical numbers, and it had been a while since I sang in public, so I was glad for the chance. The duet was with a nice girl in my ward who dances, so she knew to be expressive with the music. I can not keep a conversation going with her for long, but it was easy for me to match her tone and mood. We connected with music. I may not understand her, but I understand her music.

Friends come and go quickly in my world. I feel as though I run on a different timetable from most people I know, as far as career and family are concerned. While many friends of mine can talk about their houses or children or their ultra high security responsibilities, I can talk about my unpublished compositions or supplementary training to begin the career I took so long to choose.

But in my life, experiences like the ones above remind me why I chose music above everything else I could have done. Something inside me hungers to make music. It's a hunger different from my desire to find all the Poe Spirits in Legend of Zelda. It's why I can barely write a blog a month. I look forward more to writing music than writing about it.

Everyone needs to find out what satisfies them more than anything. Something to make life worth living, or at least not so bad. I understand that not everyone appreciates music the way I do. Heck, not every musician likes it the way I do. I'm not so naive that I think Israelis and Arabs just need to join hands and sing together to resolve their differences. But maybe if they tended a garden. Or read a book. Or learned a sport. I have no doubt my dad's collection of crossword puzzles keeps him out of trouble. Satisfying our hunger for That One Thing goes a long way to lift our spirits.

Whatever heartbreak I suffer, however blocked my path may seem, however isolated I feel, music will always be there. It is often a lonely journey, especially in my community, but it is mine. It is my home, passion, and future. I happily let the world go on while I strive to make music exist. When I do, my world is complete.

There's a part of you always standing by,
Mapping out the sky,
Finishing a hat...
Starting on a hat...
Finishing a hat...
Look, I made a hat...
Where there never was a hat...