Constellations No. 15

Earlier this winter, I started playing the piano for the first time since I was a teenager. I tag along with my ten-year-old daughter for weekly lessons with her patient teacher. Learning to read music and play the instrument again has been admittedly vulnerable and clumsy at times. Each time I sit down to play, my brain gets exercise in a tingly new way as I work to connect the musical language on the page with what my hands are doing. What I have learned is this: being a beginner is fun.

Since I reacquainted myself with the piano, I noticed that what starts as uncomfortable becomes less and less so each time I sit down to play. Playing the piano requires a specific type of concentration and communication between my mind and body, and makes my brain and hands focus on something entirely different than what they normally do. I am not particularly skilled, and the music I make is decidedly not transcendent. But it feels exciting to be challenged and curious, and to grow my appreciation of this instrument.

Being a beginner has, notably, refreshed my sense of wonder. I recognize the huge gap between the masterful artistry of professional pianists and what I am doing when I awkwardly stretch my fingers across an octave. To practice without a particular goal or destination shifts my focus from performance to process. I am playing for myself. The more I learn, the more I understand there is to learn.

During today’s spring equinox, as I look back at the winter, I realize that this small shift in focus helped sustain me through the long, snow-capped, stormy months. The practice helped me retain hope and respect for the timeless and enduring capacity that humans have to make beautiful, wondrous pieces of art— even amid the backdrop of geo-political chaos and cruelty like we are experiencing in the world right now.

Yesterday we were hip-deep in snow, digging ourselves out from a wild blizzard that swept through Northern Michigan. Today’s spring equinox ushered in some sun, and the giant piles of snow that accumulated are quickly turning to slush. The season is changing erratically as always, with one step forward and two steps back, but winter’s lessons will stay with me.

-Lindsay

Since the middle of last year I have been building myself up to painting again, a desire and goal that became exquisitely, and often painfully clear, as I experienced cancer treatment and recovery throughout the last several years. I find myself in the messy thicket of learning about what my art practice looks and feels like in this (new) body, knowing everything I know now. My work is changing, and I am trying to approach that change as an opportunity, while I mine images and ideas that have been accumulating in my mind for years. It is a beginning; I have been here before and I’ll be here again.

I am painting and drawing, working in oil for the first time since graduate school, and a few other materials that are newer to me. I suddenly feel as if I have never touched a paintbrush in my life. I am swimming in a sea of questions about painting and art, and how my existence is related to it all. And I love it.

At the moment, it is my goal to stay in this feeling of newness, for when that is possible, I am curious without self-judgement, open to exploration and possibilities, and genuinely connected to figuring out what, specifically, I like and do not like as I stumble along. It is often uncomfortable, as I do not know what exactly is going to happen, or where it is going. If I get too far ahead of myself I easily become lost in questions that pull me away from working my way through it. Progress is slow, and sometimes I feel overwhelmed with worry and self-doubt. Then I remind myself that the most important thing is that I keep showing up.

Here’s a glimpse at various work in progress in my studio from the last few months.

Martha Argerich

Not long after I started playing piano again, I learned about the life and work of classical pianist Martha Argerich. The octogenarian is regarded as one of the world’s greatest living pianists, famous for her virtuosic performances of Chopin, Schumann, Revel and Rachmaninoff.

In 1965, Argerich won the prestigious International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, which quickly launched her international notoriety. Since then she has continued to astound audiences with the dextrous speed of her hands, and the emotive power she draws from the piano.

Lately, I have found myself lost in footage of her mesmerizing performances, and inspired by her long life of playing music.

Here is Argerich performing Chopin in the 1960’s:

And here she is playing Schumann, 60 years later in 2025:

And, just for kicks, here I am, fumbling my way through Chopin’s Waltz No. 19 in A minor on our wobbly keyboard:

The Doorway
by Louise Glück
I wanted to stay as I was
still as the world is never still,
not in midsummer but the moment before
the first flower forms, the moment
nothing is as yet past–
not midsummer, the intoxicant,
but late spring, the grass not yet
high at the edge of the garden, the early tulips
beginning to open–
like a child hovering in a doorway, watching the others,
the ones who go first,
a tense cluster of limbs, alert to
the failures of others, the public falterings
with a child’s fierce confidence of imminent power
preparing to defeat
these weaknesses, to succumb
to nothing, the time directly
prior to flowering, the epoch of mastery
before the appearance of the gift,
before possession.
From The Wild Iris, by Louise Glück, Ecco (1993)

The Quiet Machine
by Ada Limón
I'm learning so many different ways to be quiet. There's how I stand
in the lawn, that's one way. There's also how I stand in the field
across from the street, that's another way because I'm farther from
people and therefore more likely to be alone. There's how I don't
answer the phone, and how I sometimes like to lie down on the
floor in the kitchen and pretend I'm not home when people knock.
There's daytime silent when I stare, and a nighttime silent when I
do things. There's shower silent and bath silent and California silent
and Kentucky silent and car silent and then there's the silence that
comes back, a million times bigger than me, sneaks into my bones
 and wails and wails and wails until I can't be quiet anymore. That's
how this machine works.
From Bright Dead Things by Ada Limón, Milkweed Editions (2015)

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