In June 2013 in Kalk Bay, I wrote…

“I have started to write my ‘memoirs’.

I find myself in a wheelchair with the gift of time and few distractions, having been ‘grounded’ eight weeks ago two days before my departure to Switzerland.

I started to read a couple of works of non-fiction.  The first was Plant, dreaming deep by May Sarton and I immersed myself in this extraordinary, delicate description of establishing home in a place, which would hold the objects and memories from lives in another continent.  This resonated with me as I found the ‘place’ -first the cottage and then the actual position in the rooms of my new home for my grandmother’s Bechstein 1901 piano and alabaster lamp; my grandfather’s chest of drawers;  my mother’s chinese chest…objects and memories which have accompanied me in my earlier life in Switzerland and which have now returned to the southern hemisphere.

The second work was Eloquent Body by Dr Dawn Garisch, my neighbour.  Reading this eclectic and honest work I got a sense of her.  A fascinating and courageous character, and further confirmation that there are treasures on my doorstep.!

Dawn’s memoir writing workshop which I attended in my wheelchair in the last week of May 2013 was perfectly timed and my appetite for memoir, and other people’s stories, has been stimulated.  This is a new interest for me.  Perhaps it has  to do with slowing down.. realizing the importance of taking stock.  The idea that I can begin to take stock of my own eventful life has been seeded, and the form in which I can commit my memoirs to the page has begun to take shape.

I am exploring the relationship with my Self and my Soul through these memoirs… the tender, evolving, remembering – of who I am and what I am part of, and what it means to be embodied at this magnificent time.

***

After the workshop^[1] I have a focus and a sense of the key threads.  I know my life with Ronald will be central and I expect to find scenes springing up to be written.  Particularly as I reflect on the period since his dramatic death on 1 June 2009, our 26th wedding anniversary!

I feel these memoirs will explore my relationship with music.  Music as memoir… memoir through music.  Music memoirs are like individual notes/tones, which encapsulate the essence of my life in that moment or event when expressed.

I believe music was/is the means selected by my Soul to reach me.  And, thinking back, it tried several times.  Of course this is very clear in the ‘Dream’ (See Part 2, Episode 1), which recurred a number of times in the period before I turned fifty.  This was my Soul at play, giving ‘little me’ a taste of the beauty and magic that is the music of the spheres.

It is hard to find the words which do justice to the multi-dimensional gift of sound and vibration, and its interplay with frequencies.  Firstly, I do not have the technical language, having a rather limited theoretical knowledge of music.  I can make out the notes in a sheet of music of course, slowly, but can not play from sight.  My fingers play when I am ‘centered’ and connected at my heart and there is no thought involved.  I am described by myself and others as an ‘intuitive musician’.

But, secondly, there is the metaphysical nature of music and increasingly I feel myself drawn in this direction -towards the role of music in healing and spiritual growth, a huge topic.  Looking at my bookshelves with rows of books on sound and healing, it is clear that I started collecting materials on this subject from 2003 or so when I was trying to understand what exactly had happened to me, with the music coming through me at this time, while recovering from surgery, having not played the piano for some thirty five years.

***

This memoir is not primarily about my ‘professional life’.

However forty years later, as I reflect on these decades, I am amazed at how my professional path has led me through such rich and varied terrain.  I am also amazed at how this path has distracted me, sending me off on tangents and keeping me busy…busy with doing rather than being.  I was so busy doing projects and setting up worthwhile initiatives that I was slowly but steadily losing touch with the essence of my life itself.  And, slowly and concomitantly, I was forgetting my Soul’s real purpose, which is to BE within the music^[2].

It is music which I wish to explore through these memoirs.  Music is the thread which binds the individual memoirs written in subsequent pages.”

Kalk Bay , June 2013

***

And now writing a decade later, about to launch My Listening Heart, the above proves to be an accurate description of what has actually transpired in the writing, and then recording (2020-2024) of these episodes of my eventful life which are contained in My Listening Heart.

Stanford,  October 2024.

^[1] and several subsequent workshops in 2013 and 2014.

^[2] I had been reminded of this in 2006 when John O’Donahue said “May you always dwell inside the music”