When words fail, music prevails

Literati

Usually, at five in the morning, I meditate for half an hour in silence before I begin my day, but today, by candlelight, I listened to the Koln concert of Keith Jarrett. I want to try to explain its importance to me.

The piece is a metaphor for my life.  It struggles, it has stops and starts, it has false avenues that are often dead ends, yet each pathway it explores has intensity and beauty and pain, and after all the struggles, it is triumphant.  Have you ever witnessed a horse before a thunderstorm?  It can sense the change in the air.  When I attach something visual to the music, I imagine a horse confined within a corral, running in a circle, imprisoned, feeling its energy hobbled, but swelling within its breast, and then, when it can control itself no more, it leaps over the fence and runs free through a meadow, unstoppable.  Feeling joy and freedom and joy and freedom, kicking up its heels and celebrating the joy of its existence, the joy of life… and concurrently, at the risk of mixing metaphors, I visualize as each note is struck on the keyboard, it morphs into a butterfly, and flutters into a limitless sky.  Such is the beauty of this piece.

https://music.youtube.com/search?q=koln+concert+keith+jarrett

I hope you find a quiet moment to listen to this extraordinary piece that is almost 50 years old.

Love and abundance to all of you from my home in Prague

thorn