Mindfulness

This week at work I overheard a customer telling a story of Joshua Bell, child prodigy turned internationally renown violinist. Bell, winner of the Avery award at 39, sold out Boton's Symphony Hall, where "merely pretty good seats" went for $100. It is estimated that while playing at Symphony or Orchestra shows solo, Bell makes as much as $1,000 a minute. Bell plays a Stradivari violin handcrafted in 1713 by Antonio Stradivari himself. Stolen 2 times from the previous owner, Bell bought it for a cool $3.5 million, which served his career well as, " no violin plays like a Strad from the 1710s." Meanwhile, Gene Weingarten, a writer for the Washington Post was leaving the subway station on morning and passed a raggedy man playing a keyboard who Weingarten said was quite talented, but his music was lost on the masses in the rush of the morning Subway. The reporter walked away and wondered if even YoYo Ma himself standing in this subway could cut through the crowds. Weingarten even he went into his office that day and tried to contact YoYo Ma's agent but nothing came of it. The music critic for the Washington Post later suggested Joshua Bell for the idea who agreed to participate in the experiment. So on a Friday morning in January, Bell, the world class violinist, put on jeans and t-shirt and took his place beside the metro trashcan with his Stradivari and played classically composed pieces to Washington's morning metro station. Weingarten writes that Bell started with Chaconne" from Johann Sebastian Bach's Partita No. 2 in D Minor. "Bell calls it "not just one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, but one of the greatest achievements of any man in history." In the time that Joshua was playing, 7 people stopped, 27 gave money and he made $32. More important than the change people flipped into his open case, was the lack of attention to the music and the amount of people who not only did not part with their pennies, but did not even notice the music. Bell later said, "I'm surprised at the number of people who don't pay attention at all, as if I'm invisible. Because, you know what? I'm makin' a lot of noise!" This is a great experiment and great article written about it; The question that Weingarten's article clearly asks is, are we conditioned to stop and notice something beautiful if we aren't told to be looking for it? This what music, whether in the subway or in the symphony, and poetry and art of all kinds have to offer: Something beautiful, just because it's beautiful. This, in a nutshell, is what I have found to be beautiful in Mary Oliver;s poetry. All of her poems are just little nature journals that records perfectly ordinary old beautiful things on a regular day. She has deep reverence and a real ability to communicate what she finds in nature, which is a great capacity for God.
And also, for the record, a few weeks ago someone said something about this blog that made me feel silly for doing it. I felt like I was very small and this blog was very small and altogether silly. And maybe it is silly and smallish but the thing is, is that this silly small thing has made me read more poetry and I have loved it. Some of Mary Oliver's poems are making more sense to me right now than almost anything else I read or hear or know about; This small little poems have made me stop and want to listen to men busk in Market Square and notice other small, silly things. So whether this is small or silly or not, Jonathan Bell or any other subway musician, three cheers for mindfulness and Mary Oliver and art art art.


Mindful
By Mary Oliver

Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less
kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle
in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for--
to look, to listen,
to lose myself
inside this soft world--
to instruct myself
over and over
in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,
the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant--
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,
the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help
but grow wise
with such teachings
as these--
the untrimmable light
of the world,
the ocean's shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

from Why I Wake Early

Why I Wake Early by Mary Oliver
Hello, sun in my face.
Hello, you who made the morning
and spread it over the fields
and into the faces of the tulips
and the nodding morning glories,
and into the windows of, even, the
miserable and the crotchety –
best preacher that ever was,
dear star, that just happens
to be where you are in the universe
to keep us from ever-darkness,
to ease us with warm touching,
to hold us in the great hands of light –
good morning, good morning, good morning.
Watch, now, how I start the day
in happiness, in kindness.


All information about Jonathan Bell stuff found at :
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html