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Holding Onto the High Moments

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When I was a child, I wanted to be a Broadway star. I’d been on raised on musicals and nothing made me happier than singing and dancing in the living room while belting out the entire sound track of Mary Poppins or The Sound of Music. In my fantasies, I sounded fantastic, totally ready for the special day I’d be discovered and spend the rest of my life singing on stage.

Disney-Grandpa https://www.flickr.com/photos/8674970@N04/ modified by Dr. Disney Wizard https://www.flickr.com/photos/disneywizard/, CC BY-SA 3.0 US <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/deed.en>, via Wikimedia Commons

Sometimes I still feel this way—not as a singer, or a pianist, but in my writing, which ended up being the creative channel I pursued the most seriously. I’ll draft a poem, or a story, a blog, or an essay and say to myself, Wow, this is fantastic! This is the best thing I’ve ever written! It’s such a buoyant and exhilarating feeling, the sheer joy, the high, from having created this precious piece! And there are even times I feel a similar high when playing the piano—for a brief phrase or two, where I’m playing smoothly and I’m really down deep in expressing the music—or when I’m singing exuberantly in complicated harmony with a chorus of uplifted voices.

But, alas, the high moments fade. The next day, I look at whatever I’d written that I was so excited about and think…Hmm. I think I need to …

 This isn’t a bad thing. As a professional, I know that writing needs polishing, and I actually enjoy the revision process and discovering what a piece can become. I’m sure it’s the same for musicians, artists, dancers, actors, etc. to see where they can take their art as they continually hone their skills.

As a perfectionist with a ruthless inner judge, I need to be careful not to let the high moments sink too deep and transform into the low places. We all need to find ways of holding onto that initial joy, even when those moments continue to hold some unrealistic fantasies about outcomes. Chances are this poem will never make it into Poetry, no matter what I do to it. And nope, I’m not going to be a Broadway star. But that doesn’t mean my little joyful fantasy was a bad thing, as long as I don’t fall into the either/or trap of labeling something as awful that I once thought was fabulous.

According to the Mayo Clinic, people who think positively, even when faced with obstacles, are happier and healthier. Experts suggest vigilance in converting negative self-talk to positive self-talk. So, instead of thinking about your revision as something you’ll never be able to do successfully, think of it as a positive challenge, and affirm how much you’ve already accomplished.

And next time you’re in that high moment of feeling fabulous, write down the feelings and decorate them in bold and bright colors, paste them on the wall so you can see them while you work on your revisions. Or record yourself talking about how you’re feeling when you’re in the high time. Your recording could include a little dance or a bursting into song, if you feel like it. When you get stuck, play that back.

Chances are your inner judge will not let this go without objection. Boy do you look/sound like an idiot! It might say. You were so stupid to think this was good. But just be prepared for that and mentally pack that nasty voice away. Stuff it in a box, dig a hole in the earth, then rain the dirt on top of it.

Remember, the goal isn’t necessarily to feel 100% in the high place, just to capture a spark of it, like a memory of being at the ocean. Close your eyes and listen to the waves rolling in.

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Grandmothers, Chopin, Cats

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I’ve been back at the piano nearly four years, and lately I’ve noticed that occasionally I can zone into what I want to express in a piece, rather than flounder around in the notes. It’s such a liberating feeling–like I’ve finally acquired some basic tools in my kit that I can use to deepen my experience of playing. I’m trusting my fingers more to do “the right thing,” giving my heart an opening to put in its own two cents.

Grandma Jeanne with baby Alana (my daughter) 1989. Photo by Shel Horowitz

This got me to thinking again about my Grandma Jeanne, who, in her eighties, still played the piano for at least three hours every day, re-visiting old pieces and learning new ones. In the hot, flat days of her retirement, where she rarely left her Florida condo, itt was piano that gave her days shape, made her life matter–until she developed severe arthritis and couldn’t play anymore.

One of the last times I visited her, she tried to play for me, anyway. Her face was hopeful as she positioned herself on the piano bench, set her hands with their bright red nail polish, straightened her back, took a sweeping glance at the music, a large breath, and placed her hands on the first chord. I watched her wince, as she tried to push through the pain. A few more chords. A run, and then she stopped. Banged her hands down on the piano. Closed the lid.

“You play!” The bark in her speech made it clear this was not a request. It was an order.

At the time, I didn’t have much in my repertoire, but I found her copy of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and began to read through it. She stopped me somewhere in the third line.

“Listen to the melody. These are the important notes. Play them with everything you’ve got! Everything!” Her thinning voice rose to a crescendo, as if she were my coach in one of those Hollywood sports movies, giving the Oscar-moment speech in the scene before the perpetual underdog was about to emerge victorious.

How much did I have to give these notes?

That’s what I think about now, as I play a Chopin Prelude. Instead of worrying so much about the individual notes, I’m focusing on the shapes of the phrases, the interplay of loud and soft. It’s kind of like thinking about the arc of a story. And I’m also thinking, as I often do when playing, about my grandmother cheering me on. “Yes, like that!” I could hear her exuberance as she leaned over close that day, marking the important notes.

I had a cat, Fudge, that died under the piano–a metaphor that seemed more than coincidental, though at the time of his life (and death) the piano was my daughter’s domain more than mine. But he clearly liked music and always seemed to slink into the living room whenever either of the kids were practicing. And while he has no connection to Grandma Jeanne, they somehow both ended up in a poem, that was recently published in Humana Obscura. Even more cool–someone I don’t know read the poem and made this video. (Not exactly what I might have done if I made videos, but I’m extremely touched that the poem affected her enough to do this–just more evidence that our creativity matters!)

 

 

 

 

 

 

My Whirl Into Immigration Activism

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In November 2016, waking up to the dystopian reality of Trump being elected, I told myself: complacency is no longer an option. I’ve been an activist all my life, though in the years leading up to 2016, I hadn’t done that much. But all of a sudden, everything took on a new frantic urgency.

 

Of all the horrible things Trump was doing, the issue that spoke to me most was immigration. While the babies in cages broke my heart, what scared me even more was the way Trump continues to talk about immigrants—as “invaders poisoning the blood of America,” language which edges far too close to my Jewish roots and the collective generational trauma we carry from the Holocaust.

 

So, when volunteers were needed to spend time at a local church that was harboring a man in sanctuary, I signed up. And this was where I saw the note seeking people interested in traveling to Florida to witness at the children’s detention center in Homestead, a horrid converted air force base, whose fenced boundaries were now lined with black paper to keep on-lookers from seeing what lay within.

 

For three days in June 2019, the eight of us who made the trip stood on ladders in the heat so we could look over the barrier at the children. We held up paper hearts and waved at them when they came out in their bright orange hats for 15-minute stints of exercise. Te amo (I love you) we shouted. Occasionally the children would take off their hats and wave them at us, though they were always reprimanded by the guards when they did.

 

When we came home, we spread the word about what we’d seen in speaking events with a variety of community groups. We also organized our own educational events and demonstrations, and started planning a trip to the border. This involved working in conjunction with a number of immigration support groups based in that region, including Witness at the Border, Team Brownsville, and the Resource Center of Matamoros. We prepared and served meals, observed the infamous tent courts, stood at the bridge with signs, and spoke to many of the people who were stuck in Mexico as they waited for their turn to apply for asylum, which they had an extremely low chance of getting. We also led a writing/drawing workshop for children to express their feelings about leaving home and a similar workshop for the women in the camp in a room filled with tears as each woman shared stories of loved ones killed by gangs or children left behind.

 

On the morning of Valentine’s Day, we woke before dawn to stand at the fence and stare at the wing of the deportation plane, (the only part not purposely blocked by a truck). Then we linked arms and headed for the parking lot, trying for a few moments to block the bus of deportees from arriving until we were warned by the cops to disperse or get arrested. Unfortunately, we were not in a position to engage in civil disobedience, so we had to settle for supporting the people on the bus with hearts and words of encouragement as they walked shackled into the plane’s belly and departed under the cover of the night.

 

The cover Here in Sanctuary—Whirling is from a photo taken at the refugee camp, where children followed us through the maze of crowded tents, as eager as their grown-up counterparts to talk to us.The poems in the book were born directly from our experiences. While I’ve written the occasional political poem over the years, this type of writing was a departure for me. For most of my life, my writing and my activism were separate. But my writing has always come from my heart, and my heart is now intrinsically linked with these people who are far braver than I am. While I recognize that their stories ultimately belong to them and not to me, I’m glad they gave me permission to share these hard truths about their lives, which counter the rhetoric of even the supposedly liberal people in our government, because these stories need to be heard, loudly, by as many people as possible.

(Originally posted on my publisher Querencia Press’s Blog: in response to why I wrote this book. )

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