Years ago i learnt to play the clarinet........This was an answer to a desire that i had to learn a musical instrument..(my bro had learnt the piano and the trombone , whilst he was younger , but there wasn't always money for two lots of lessons, so because i was the youngest and because he was already learning both these instruments ...mine was put on hold.)
My parents had guests to stay at the farm where we grew up and one of these came back every year, and was the conductor and leader of a band that played for a local theatre near us. He played among other things a saxophone and a clarinet... and i fell in love with the way he made it almost sing, and talk, through the notes that he got out from it. He encouraged my parents to allow me to learn to play (or i may have never have learnt) and i was the proud owner of a black b flat clarinet.
Reading music and such like did not come natural to me , and i very often would play by air rather than follow the music that i was meant to be reading . The music teacher that i had was very talented, but said because i continued to do so that my parents money would be better spent on other things, as i was playing by air rather than reading the music and although this was not a bad thing , he was honest enough to say that he felt a fraud taking my parents money.
Time passed i learnt to read the music whilst i was playing (well at least until i had learnt the notes) and i spent many hours escaping with trusty musical instrument. Until i had the wrong choice in my life and that person did not understand my choice of escape and so he sold it to fund a gambling addiction, i protested...it was after all a key of escape to a very negative part of my life, and he responded to those protests with his fists and by violence. I didn't protest any more.
A few more years past and one of my aunts died. She left me some money, and when i went to buy my son a classical guitar , there in the sale items was a clarinet.. and that day i was selfish and replaced that musical instrument that was sold , with a new one. More years followed and my young daughter and i got to learn new bits of music together , ( for she played her trumpet). This changed the day she left home , without telling us where she was going, because we had told her she was not allowed to go out during the week , she had gone from a straight A student to failing her mock exams.. but she was over 18 and there was nothing Master and i could do about it. The clarinet suddenly reminded me of her and of the beating and my voice and mouth stopped singing and playing the music. She came back into our lives later on ( three long months) she had got in with the wrong crowd of people................. but this post is not about her and the past this is about music.
Still i could not sing and i could not pick up my clarinet..... It had to many associations.. and in my mind it could have stayed in its case ... but Master, being Master, had noticed that i didn't play it any more and in my revised rules it had this one that said, 40 mins practice on a Tuesday. i badly wanted to get angry with Him . i badly wanted to scream and hide all the reeds up .... but i knew i had to try.....i knew that this was an order and i didn't want to let Him down either.
Well today is Tuesday.. and i have done over 40 minutes clarinet practice.... i can not control my breathing so well as i could before and therefore i can not play allot of the tunes that i used to be able to play. However during that time that i was playing it , it was like someone switched on a light again and part of my soul lit up. It made sense to alot of things that have been bothering me, and showed me a valuable lesson.
It explained to me that if you don't keep up with a thing, no matter what it is, you can not maintain the balance of the expertise that you have achieved. It explained to me why i was in the past as a slave such a brat, and had trouble following orders , because this what had started of as natural before had been removed by inconsistency and negativity . The boundaries of discipline had been removed and i had been like a child in some ways running free but lost at the same time.
i know from who i am that i need a routine and boundaries even now... because of my genetics and because of who i am, these keep me safe. Discipline is needed whilst playing a musical instrument ...and consistency and without these i set myself up to fail. Luckily i have a Master that is not afraid to remind me ... Hopefully with these structures in place, of practice, and consistency, i will become the clarinetist that i was before...
Thank you Master for this new guide line .. i didn't understand it but i believe in a way i am now beginning to.
hugs
saffy xx
the light of a candle is never lessened by lighting another .
