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When I read The Music Lesson - A Spiritual Search For Growth Through Music, by Victor Wooten, I saw parallels between music, painting and life. He writes: "We think that Music stops at the ears. That is a mistake. Vibrations can be felt in all paces and at all times, even with the eyes." 

In his book Victor reminds us Life is our teacher. To learn from her we must listen. We must listen very carefully to the 'Music' and to hear the music we listen to the notes, to the pitch, the vibration, the duration, and most of all to listen or feel the groove before even playing a single note. We do this by listening to our gut, reading the room, assessing the music before making a decision, before speaking, before reacting or acting, before assuming and judging, before doing what we do out of habit. We pause, listen, feel, wait and listen some more.

To find the groove in painting I look at the canvas, listen and wait. If I jump in too soon or without knowing why I'm doing this thing, everything goes sideways. I listen, pause, listen some more, feel, and wait. When I start to paint I'm in the groove and everything seems to fall into place.

Victor's mentor tells him he is a bass player because he plays bass, but that he himself (the mentor) is a musician and plays music. I label myself a painter yet in Victor's parlance I would be an artist who creates. When I paint, I mix colours and make marks on a surface, these are the notes. The canvas, brush, paint and so on are the tools or instruments for making the painting. The way the marks are made is the groove. The painting is the music. The sculpture is the music. The costume is the music. My medium and subject matters not, I am an artist.

No matter what I engage in, I endeavour to listen to the groove with all my attention, with an open heart, to listen to all the sounds and to learn from the music.

Thank you for listening and grooving with me.

Hugs,

Elsa

PS (If someone is singing a song, rather than jumping ahead to the next verse, listen to the groove, and join them in harmony.)

Ponderings -- "Speech is Silver, Silence is Golden" a proverb commending the value of silence over speech, its origin is inexact.

At times in conversation, we think of something to share and we don't because there are no rests, or we've forgotten what we were thinking of saying, or we do and it's lost in the clamour. I've been thinking about this and I believe this happens possibly because we are not hearing the groove. What are we listening to or for? When we listen with our whole being we hear and learn something new. When that happens, the experience alone is wonderful. We don't need to say what we thought we had to say because it's no longer pertinent. The conversation moves along and we contribute only if we have something valuable to add. This is grooving in conversation. Go with the flow. If the conversation is not interesting to us, it's food for thought and we can ponder why we decided it's not interesting or we can just listen the sounds of the words, the roll of the r's, the punctuation, the rhythm, the loudness and softness, the pace. We can learn to like the conversation, in the same way we can learn to appreciate a piece of music. We don't need to play the music to enjoy it.