When I decided to purchase a Golden Age Grand Piano I visited piano restoration workshops in Virginia, Washington DC, Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey. Each craftsman taught me something about grand pianos and the process of restoration, but not one piano was 'it'.

So I tuned for 'it' to find me. And it did. I had the confidence to say yes to a dusty, rusty 1928 Mason & Hamlin A that required a new soundboard, new pinblocks, new bridges, new action and restringing. The rim was refinished, the harp redipped and the ivory keys cleaned up.

After three months she (because she's a she, no doubt about it) was ready for me to see and play her. Gorgeous. Simply gorgeous! Pure cream. Elegant. Refined. No break between registers. And she gets better with time.

Tuning the space that was the energy of music, of the piano I wanted in my life that was perfect for me, provided the confidence to say yes to something unseen and unheard. The piano received that energy, everyone involved in the rebuilding/refinishing process received that energy and the final product was one very happy piano.

Sound/space/vibration/energy can be re-engineered to create something more whole, more rich, more complete and more complex than was previously available. HARMONIC TUNING goes right to that space to make MORE than it was.

KINDNESS

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.

Naomi Shihab Nye

MADONNA AND CHILD
Fra Angelico
1417-1455
A Christmas card from a friend.

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don't open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
Rumi

The Annunciation, circa 1438-45
Fra Angelico

Cimabue
Madonna of the Holy Trinity, Painted Around 1260 for the Church of the Trinity in Florence
Tis the Season.

The minute I heard my first love story
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.

Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.
They're in each other all along.
Rumi

Mourning
Heart, whom will you cry out to? More and more alone,
you make your way through the ununderstandable
human beings. All the more hopeless perhaps
since it holds to its old course,
the course toward the future,
that's lost.
Happened before. Did you mourn? What was it? A fallen
berry of joy, still green.
But now my oak of joy is breaking,
what is breaking in storm is my slowly
grown oak of joy.
The loveliest thing in my invisible
landscape, helping me to be seen
by angels, that are invisible.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Buddha Inside the Light

The core of every core, the kernel of every kernel,
an almond! held in itself, deepening in sweetness:
all of this, everything, right up to the stars,
is the meat around your stone. Accept my bow.

Oh, yes, you feel it, how the weights on you are gone!
Your husk has reached into what has no end,
and that is where the great saps are brewing now.
On the outside a warmth is helping,

for, high, high above, your own suns are growing
immense and they glow as they wheel around.
Yet something has already started to live
in you that will live longer than the suns.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Gorgeous. Working on this . . .

TIRED OF SPEAKING SWEETLY
Love wants to reach out and manhandle us,
Break all our teacup talk of God.

If you had the courage and
Could give the Beloved His choice, some nights,
He would just drag you around the room
By your hair,
Ripping from your grip all those toys in the world
That bring you no joy.

Love sometimes gets tired of speaking sweetly
And wants to rip to shreds
All your erroneous notions of truth

That make you fight within yourself, dear one,
And with others,

Causing the world to weep
On too many fine days.

God wants to manhandle us,
Lock us inside of a tiny room with Himself
And practice His dropkick.

The Beloved sometimes wants
To do us a great favor:

Hold us upside down
And shake all the nonsense out.

But when we hear
He is in such a "playful drunken mood"

Most everyone I know
Quickly packs their bags and hightails it
Out of town.

HAFIZ

My 'New' Piano! I play this piece for my friends.

And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

William Wordsworth

Gentle eyes that see so much,
paws that have the quiet touch,
Purrs to signal "all is well"
and show more love than words could tell.
Graceful movements touched with pride,
a calming presence by our side
A friendship that takes time to grow
Small wonder why we love them so.
Elsie Tate
10/9/09
Rest In Peace

Some Kiss We Want

There is some kiss we want with
our whole lives, the touch of

spirit on the body. Seawater
begs the pearl to break its shell.

And the lily, how passionately
it needs some wild darling! At

night, I open the window and ask
the moon to come and press its

face against mine. Breath into
me. Close the language-door and

open the love-window. The moon
won't use the door, only the window.

Rumi

THE HEART IS RIGHT

The Heart is right to cry
Even when the smallest drop of light,
Of love,
Is taken away.

Perhaps you may kick, moan, scream
In a dignified
Silence,

But you are so right
To do so in any fashion

Until God returns
To
You.

Hafiz

All your images of winter
I see against your sky.

I understand the wounds
That have not healed in you.

They exist
Because God and love
Have yet to become real enough

To allow you to forgive
The dream.

HAFIZ

WIND THAT TASTES OF BREAD AND SALT

There's no more wine; my bowl is broken;
I am terribly sick, and only Shams can cure me.

Do you know Shams, the prince of seeing,
who lifts the utterly drowned up out of the ocean
and revives them, so that the shore looks like
multiple marriages are going on at once,
easy laughing here, a formal toast,
a procession with music.

Shams is a trumpet note of light
that starts the atoms spinning,
a wind that comes at dawn tasting of bread and salt.

Move to the edge and over. Fly with the wings
he gives, and if you get tired, lie down,
but keep opening inside your soul.
RUMI

"By the sea, by the sea
by the beautiful sea . . ."

The Friend comes into my body
looking for the center, unable
to find it, draws a blade,
strikes anywhere.

RUMI

My dusty old new piano. To be rebuilt.

THE MUSIC

For sixty years I have been forgetful,
every moment, but not for a second
has this flowing toward me slowed or stopped.
I deserve nothing. Today I recognize
that I am the guest the mystics talk about.
I play this living music for my host.
Everything today is for the host.
RUMI

HARSH EVIDENCE

What sort of person says that he or she wants
to be polished and pure, then complains
about being handled roughly?

Love is a lawsuit where harsh evidence
must be brought in. To settle the case,
the judge must see evidence.

You've heard that every buried treasure
has a snake guarding it.
Kiss the snake to discover the treasure!

Don't run from those who scold,
and don't turn away from cleansing conflict,
or you will remain weak.
RUMI

Submit to a daily practice.
Your loyalty to that
is a ring on the door.
Rumi

THE QUINTESSENCE OF LONELINESS
I am like a heroin addict
In my longing for the sublime state.

For that ground of Conscious Nothing
Where the Rose ever Blooms.

O, the Friend
has done me a great favor
And has so thoroughly ruined my life,

What else would you expect
Seeing God would do!

Out of the ashes of this broken frame
There is a noble rising son pining for death,
Because,

Since we first met, Beloved,
I have become a foreigner
To every world
Except that one
In which there is only You
Or - Me.

Now that the heart has held
That which can never be touched
My subsistence is a blessed
Desolation

And from that I cry for more loneliness.

I am lonely.
I am so lonely, dear Beloved,
For the quintessence of
Loneliness,

For what is more alone than God?

Hafiz,
What is more pure and alone,

Magnificently Sovereign,
Than God.

Hafiz

It doesn't matter that you've broken your vow
a thousand times. Still come,
and yet again, come.
Rumi

LONGING

Longing is the core of mystery.
Longing itself brings the cure.
The only rule is, Suffer the pain.

Your desire must be disciplined,
and what you want to happen
in time, sacrificed.
Rumi

from Fidelity

Man and woman are like the earth, that brings forth flowers
in summer, and love, but underneath is rock.
Older than flowers, older than ferns, older than foraminiferae,
older than plasm altogether is the soul underneath.

And when, throughout all the wild chaos of love
slowly a gem forms, in the ancient, once-more-molten rocks
of two human hearts, two ancient rocks, a man's heart and a woman's,
that is the crystal of peace, the slow hard jewel of trust,
the sapphire of fidelity.
The gem of mutual peace emerging from the wild chaos of love.
D.H. Lawrence

MY EYES SO SOFT
Don't surrender your loneliness so quickly.
Let it cut more deep.

Let it ferment and season you as few human
or even divine ingredients can.

Something missing in my heart tonight
has made my eyes so soft, my voice so tender,
My need of God absolutely clear.
Hafiz

WHO MAKES THESE CHANGES?

Who makes these changes?
I shoot an arrow right.
It lands left.
I ride after a deer and find myself
chased by a hog.
I plot to get what I want
and end up in prison.
I dig pits to trap others
and I fall in.

I should be suspicious
of what I want.
Rumi

The painter inside the painting.
Picasso

Take all away from me, but leave me Ecstasy,
And I am richer then than all my Fellow Men—
Ill it becometh me to dwell so wealthily
When at my very Door are those possessing more,
In abject poverty—

Emily Dickinson

Which is worth more, a crowd of thousands,
or your own genuine solitude?
Freedom, or power over an entire nation?

A little while alone in your room
will prove more valuable than anything else
that could ever be given you.

Rumi

"It is so truly the mystery of the kneeling of the deeply kneeling man. With Rumi the scale is shifted, for in following the peculiar weight and strength in his knees, he belongs to that world in which height is depth. This is the night of radiant depth unfolded."

The spiritual poet Rainer Maria Rilke said the turn of the dervish was a form of kneeling.

BIRDWINGS
Your grief for what you've lost lifts a mirror up to where you're bravely working.

Expecting the worst, you look, and instead, here's the joyful face you've been wanting to see.

Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed.

Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birdwings.
Rumi

DARKNESS AND LIGHT
The lantern that I carry in my hand makes an enemy of the darkness of the farther road.

And this wayside becomes a terror to me, where even the flowering tree frowns like a spectre of scowling menace; and the sounds of my steps comes back to me in the echo of muffled suspicion.

Therefore, I pray for Your own morning light, when the far and the near will kiss each other, and life will be one in love.

Tagore

http://www.jacquielawson.com:80/viewcard.asp?code=1761535693029&source=jl999
(Copy and paste to see this musical card.)

Thanks Sara. Much love, Lisa

Lisa Tate is celebrating her birthday today! Thanks Mom and Dad. All my love.

WHEN THE HEART IS HARD
When the heart is hard and parched, come upon me with a shower of mercy.

When grace is lost from life, come with a burst of song.

When tumultuous work raises its din on all sides, shutting me out from beyond, come to me, God of silence, with Your peace and rest.

When my beggarly heart sits crouched, shut up in a corner, break open the door, my God.

When desire blinds the mind with delusion and dust, O Holy One, come with Your light and Your thunder.
Tagore

Jill Bolte Taylor, a brain scientist, experienced a massive stroke. And recovered. She speaks of her experience and recovery. It's startlingly similar to the experience of the mystics.

A KING INSIDE WHO LISTENS

There are many people with their eyes open
whose hearts are shut. What do they see?
Matter.
But someone whose love is alert,
even if the eyes go to sleep,
he or she will be waking up thousands of others.

If you are not one of those light-filled lovers,
restrain your desire-body's intensity.
Put limits on how much you eat
and how long you lie down.

But if you are awake here in the chest,
sleep long and soundly.

Your spirit will be out roaming and working,
even on the seventh level.

Muhammad says, I close my eyes and rest in sleep,
but my love never needs rest.

The guard at the gate drowses.
The king stays awake.

You have a king inside who listens
for what delights the soul.

That king's wakefulness
cannot be described in a poem.

Rumi

Blessings to you, President Obama