Growing up I would lose myself playing Chopin nocturnes drifting into my own inner world while playi
Growing up I would lose myself playing Chopin nocturnes drifting into my own inner world while playing works that my fingers could navigate without any effort. If it was a work I had played thousands of times I could easily switch into the colored glass vision in my cortically blind right eye. I would spend hours playing piano enveloped in my blind vision. It was an escape from the pain of my childhood reality. It was a place to drift into where I could wander through emotions and colors. I would instantly become a far away person consumed by a vast imaginative landscape.Long after I walked away from piano having buried it dramatically in the recesses of memory I picked up a camera. And then I spent 7 years wandering around lost in snowstorms in New York City trying to escape a depressing reality that had consumed me. I repeatedly tried to capture the isolation I felt against a nostalgically tinged backdrop of swirling snow and hazy lights. I spent hours waiting for the right people to walk into my shots to translate how I felt. I was each and every far away person consumed by a vast urban landscape of loneliness.When I walked away from photography a few years ago it was for a multitude of reasons but now I know that one of them was that I no longer needed the escape because my reality finally changed just like when my reality changed when I moved away from home when I was 18.And now I sit here looking at a new piano which I have played a bit (more on this later) and it feels like coming home except home is more of a feeling of having come full circle. I am still the person I was growing up in a less than ideal childhood and I am still the person who got lost for 7 years in snowstorms trying to share with the world the pain and sadness I felt. But I am also the person I am now who just survived being sick and who is in love with someone who is far away and who doesn’t know what is next in life, art, or anything really.That’s a worthy state of being to be in where music can flourish again not from an immediate place of pain but rather from the echoes of all the moments that got me to where I am now. -- source link