atrophy
every august for at least a week i don’t practice. this typically coincides with my husband’s vacation, which in turn becomes my vacation. a sort of atrophy happens in my hands. i feel them stiffen, or at least they seem to stiffen. i stretch and massage and crack and contort them in all sorts of ways, at all hours, and they seem to change in their makeup. i rationalize this feeling as a kind of yogic savasana at the end of a busy summer, season, year (though last summer’s vacation came later, and followed busier weeks).
something else happens, like what occurs when one does a fast or a cleanse or an elimination diet, when (not to get gross, but) weird stuff just comes pouring out of the body, like the digestive walls peeling the wallpaper of a million meals, and it’s like, “woah, where did that come from? and where did that come from?” during a so-called cleanse or elimination, sleep changes, too, its depth and its dreams.
so do my dreams change when my body goes on practice break. for consecutive nights now, my dreams have purged varying performance nightmare scenarios—arriving unprepared, playing poorly, beginning late as a restless audience waits (a few of these). every night, a variation on the same theme. my subconscious, in the face of physical practice inactivity, seems to have taken the opportunity to purge its nightmares, my insecurities.
in the meantime, i feed something inside, reading bout visual art (researching for an upcoming project) and planning and plotting for the season ahead. i enjoy this stuff. on vacation, away from practice, i finally have the chance to think, to remember, and ultimately to miss the act of connection with an instrument.
conflicted though, because unlike last year when we found ourselves in africa, this year we find ourselves at my parents’ house in vermont, with a piano just upstairs. so the whole thing feels very much like a choice, a guilty choice maybe. actively ignoring. hence perhaps the dreams. i could, after all, just go and touch that instrument, the one i grew up playing. my first.
