currently listening to:
Barber's Agnus Dei, Op. 11 (1967) - based on his Adagio for Strings (1938)

In what sort of affairs were your hands engaged today? What would they speak of, if they could?

MY HANDS | The most immediate connecting-agents to the worlds I perceive. And when they meet with the achromatic semitones, electricity fires into my brain and races through my skin. Sensations and environs so familiar generate a quiet, rooted confidence not unlike linguistic fluency. In a sheer second's time, a new idea forms -- then informs my heart. Pulses respond, incitement ensues and at once doubles, beating blood-rhythms into a spate of cadences. And if my spirit arrives to this moment amply nurtured and freed of pretense... what follows I can neither foreknow nor control.

This, my hands do.

Earlier today they hoisted 100 lbs at the gym, then did it again. They pointed toward approaching turns for my Über driver. They greeted another man, and I remarked inwardly how firmly our grips had locked. They dialed my mother's number by "muscle-memory". They signed a document. They ground and brewed fresh C. arabica. They packed new Christmas CDs and LPs to ship out to fans. They performed a personal arrangement of the Marine Corps Hymn (Offenbach) in tribute to a good man - a WWII vet who passed at 91 years of age. His worn hands had completed their lifetimes of deeds, and now lay folded together at rest in the open casket.

These, our hands do.

Ostensibly, mine are halfway thru their statistical lifespan. Yet for all the confident fluency they showcase at the musical keyboard, they are naïvely virgin in regard to another. In this instant, they are touching -- for the first time -- a canvas commonplace with our current generation -- but one prickly and dangerous and heretofore personally sidestepped. After all, 'tis a 4-letter word, this bee-, ell-, oh-, djee... blog. Unfashionably late to the blogo-party, I've long felt that my music contains plenty of noise; so why would I further subject the digital ether to my verbal soundings-off. And what more could I contribute, that greater men and women have not already handed down?

But you, my friends and colleagues, have challenged me as you often do. Toward the intrepid and even the reckless. To remove the outer cloaks. Crack ajar the doorways and invite you further in. So here I am, hands down. At this breed of keyboard, I possess neither mastery nor great confidence. I am unaware of the rules, if there be any. You could say I "don't know the notes." But as I look down at these typing digits, I recognize them. They've served me well. And now they've led me here. To you. So, I shall follow them forward. And perhaps you'll follow me. I do love a good challenge.

Happy December, fair people. Our world is alive. More to come...

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