practice | sarahscapes

Credit: magnitudemedia

Surrounded by abundance sometimes
I forget to balance my own needs
with all the others that move in
and around my just-full-enough life

wrapping their tendrils around fragile
lessons learned through lean and bend
or occasional SNAP! of the too-long held
whose growing time is passed, yet clings

as if tenacity might bring renewed growth
to the vine yet instead, crowds out
young energy sprawling itself greenly
into tomorrow. Today it’s balance I want

to re-member as I mold my pieces together —
old, new, not-yet-become or even imagined . . .
How one plucked blossom emerges again
and again into ongoing abundance, season

upon season! Love is like that. Balance, too.
The more we practice, the easier it becomes.
The more we have, the more there is.
The more we give, the more we get.

I strive to recall the simplicity of this knowing
that balance is a practice like writing, love –
not a cancellation of one extreme
for the other. No erasure, just active paradox

reaching a shared sense of purpose,
achieved with intention and focus
looping and turning to create a whole
of otherwise disparate parts.

With time.
With practice.
With patience.
Balance.

swb
2-25-13

Practice room with upright piano. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Übung – German for ‘practice’ – is both one of the earliest words I learned in German, and perhaps the first time I consciously heard the concept of regular, focused repetition as the means to an end. In this case, the means to playing a simple tune on the piano. I can’t recall just WHAT I practiced and eventually played. I do, however, clearly recall the circumstances that motivated me.

I was living in Germany, just turned 9, and the two girls of the family I stayed with both took piano lessons with Fräulein Weniger. She was lovely, the kind of European woman I since came to admire greatly: hearty, demanding, attractive in a firm no-nonsense kind of way – and smelling deliciously of a particular perfume that will always conjure this memory. As for practicing: the old upright piano resided in the parental bedroom, which meant practicing by day when Rolf was at the chem lab. Anytime he was home there was strict silence, strict adherence to his schedule and needs, strictness, period.

So perhaps my earliest associations with practice align with strictness, a certain harsh rigidity alongside a certain soft femininity that co-existed silently, secretly, securely in my heart. Another prompt, that. Continue reading →