Skip to main content

Creating Ritual

Today I’m thinking about Ritual.

This year, 2018, I have called my Year of Temperance, because my project is to find and feel more balance in my life. So I’m not just running from one thing to another all the time. So I’m not glossing over crucial moments in my life, always focussing on other tasks. So I don’t feel so frantic, and I have more white space in my mind to dream bigger and build bigger.  I like the concept, and the intention.  Five months in, I can't say I'm all that Temperate yet.  But I'm working on it.

On Wednesday I drew the Page of Pentacles as my Crux Finder Card of the Day.  I suggested to my community that we LOOK at our money, and our income streams.  On Thursday, by and for myself, I drew the Daughter of Discs.  Different deck, same card.  What exactly am I supposed to look at, Tarot? What is the message I need?

This card shows a young girl holding a coin up before her.  Gazing at it, exploring it, wondering at it, seeking to understand it.  The image in the card appears ceremonial, ritualized, but the child simply looks curious and interested.  I decided that I wanted a ritual to connect me with money and foster an abundance mindset.

It's not that I need to make more money - though I wouldn't say no - but that I would like to feel more at peace with the income streams I have and their overall continuity.  Musicians - freelancers in general - bring in money intermittently and from a wide range of sources.  Some weeks my income is primarily from performance, sometimes from teaching, sometimes from my reed business.  Some months are exceptionally lucrative, some nearly barren.  The money always comes from somewhere - that's my mantra - but sometimes it can be hard to trust in it.  The older I get, and the more responsibilities I have in my life, the more I need, right? So the flow of money through my life is important and relevant.

So on Friday I went into my journal, and I ceremonially wrote down all of the money that came in that day.  I had a number of checks and direct deposits.  I  thought about each of the people and organizations that had paid me, and about what I had done to earn that money, and I felt grateful for each check and for each gig and each reed and each lesson. I wrote down my feelings of gratitude, and honored the work I had done and the people who had trusted me to do it.

And I loved this.  I felt better when I had done it.  I felt more confident about the future, remembering how many different things I do and do well.  I felt more connected to my customers, students, employers. I felt more connected to my money, in a good way.  This is a Friday ritual I will keep.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

IDRS 2014 - Day Two and OUT

I'm writing my Day Two report while all of my colleagues and friends, new and old, are well into their Day Three experience.  I was terribly sad to leave NYC, and IDRS.  In past years I've found myself sort of oboe-ed out by the third or fourth day, but I was nowhere near that point last night when I had to begin my schlep to the airport.  On the up side, I am home and spent the morning with Zoe and Steve, and I'm safely on the correct side of Lake Michigan well before my concert tonight, which was the important purpose of my travel plans - but there are SO MANY MORE great events happening at NYU.  Best of luck to everyone performing! Yesterday, among other performances, I enjoyed THREE recitals featuring music for oboe and bassoon.  Be prepared for a husband-wife recital coming down the pike in the next year or two, as I loved much of the new music that I heard.  First I enjoyed hearing ToniMarie Marchioni and two of her colleagues from the University ...

Practice+ App - and my FIRST EVER GIVEAWAY

You know how, when you are practicing, you need to have your metronome on your stand and turn it constantly up and down as you work through a technical passage?  And you also want to play in tune, and make sure you are staying consistent with your pitch.  So while your metronome is clicking away on your stand, you also have to turn half-way around to look at the screen of the big tuner which has to be plugged into the wall because it eats batteries otherwise.  And if you also want to record yourself to listen to your progress, you have to have your laptop on with the big mic plugged into it, and that’s on still another surface, so you have to move your stand around so you can orient to all three, and then your giant stack of music-in-progress falls off the stand and onto the floor and out of order and the next ten minutes are spent not practicing at all but just trying to return to normalcy. Does this sound familiar? I was sent a free promo copy (full disclosure) of an...

Beauty of Sound

In our dress rehearsal Saturday afternoon, the conductor did exactly what I often do to my students - he asked the violins to play more beautifully, and they did.  He didn’t tell them how, or give them a flowery expressive speech, he just asked for more beauty of sound, and they immediately gave it to him.  To a great extent the sound we produce is set, based on our equipment and the shape of our mouths and our bodies - but it can be altered, too.  Adjustments in reeds and instruments can go a long way, but the key change we can make is in our own minds. I don’t know how to explain it physically, but if you determine the sound you want to make you can produce it.  Or at least you can lean in and approach it.  This is something I’ve been paying a lot of attention to lately in my own playing.  As I prepare the Saint-Saëns Sonata to perform on our Oboe Studio Recital (tonight at 7 - details HERE ), my approach is largely about beauty of sound and vibrato....