Posts by Heart Hand
More Solitaire, More Mozart
I wrote earlier about playing solitaire on Jacquie Lawson’s website. I was basically playing the easier of her two games, the one called “Spider.” Recently I have explored the more challenging game, “Klondike,” shown above. According to her notes, the game is named for its popularity among miners in the Gold Rush days along the…
Read MoreKairos and Chronos
The Greeks had two different words for time as they perceived it. Kairos meant the eternal present moment. God’s time. Chronos was linear time, the way we mostly think of time as passing from past to future. Chronos is a human construct. As far as we can tell, animals live in the present moment with…
Read MoreMozart and Me
I know this will sound like blasphemy to much of the classical music world, but I have not adored the music of Mozart or considered him a genius. Precocious, yes; child prodigy, yes. But genius? As a young piano student, I played a few of his piano sonatas and found them tricky with all the…
Read MoreArtmaking as Soulshaping
Visual art can be made for its own sake. Using line, form, color, composition, texture and all the other artistic elements to create a piece of art is a satisfying engagement for the artist and for the viewer. Visual art can make a political or social statement through the subject matter and the manipulation of…
Read MoreCancer and Karma
The intake person at the hospital was looking down at the sheet of paper with my statistics on it, including my age. Without looking up, she asked,” What prescription meds are you taking?” Her pencil was poised above the blank lines, ready to record my answer. “None,” I responded. Perhaps thinking I hadn’t heard her,…
Read MoreSolitaire
I play a lot of solitaire on the computer these days of restricted activity, mostly due to the pandemic. I use Jacquie Lawson’s website as the source for two different games: Spider and Klondike. Spider is the easier of the two; Klondike seems to depend even more on the way the cards are dealt, and…
Read MoreSoundtrack
Sometimes a piece of music seems to characterize a period in one’s life. During the hospitalizations for nausea and vomiting that characterized my first weeks of cancer treatment last Fall, I listened over and over again to Mozart’s Requiem. There was a particular performance that I streamed. It was a recording by Sir Neville Marriner…
Read MoreLoneliness or Solitude?
I have lived alone for the last twenty years, and mostly it has suited me. I seem, as a woman of mature years, to need, in equal measure. times of interaction with others and times by myself to recharge and reflect. I still teach college students and adults of other ages, so that stimulus is…
Read MoreSurviving sequestered life in the pandemic
Life as we have known it before the World Health Organization declared the spread of the coronavirus a “pandemic” on March 11, 2020 has changed utterly. Coping with the stress of all this change— this isolation, this upheaval— can be a challenge. The Alexander Technique can help with this because it centers us in our…
Read MoreThe Enemy of Creative Expression in Musical Performance
I love working with performing artists of all “stripes,” but especially musicians. In the classical music world—where I have spent most of my musical life—the discipline is often arduous, and sometimes musicians can lose their dream, their passion for making music, in the task of acquiring a technique adequate to play very demanding works in…
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