Hello, Morning. My name is pain.

I had a sad thought last night. I can't remember not feeling pain.

It waxes and wanes. Sometimes it is just there and doesn't really bother me. Other times, like today, pain encompasses my whole being making it difficult to think of anything else.

I'm supposed to tell myself that it won't feel like this forever. I know that statement is true, but in these times when every inch of my body hurts, it's very difficult to believe. It's much easier to remember pain than to remember no pain. It's easier to remember hunger than comfortably stuffed.

I try to reconnect to possitive feelings, but even the joy on my wedding day is like a screen at arms length. I see the joy, but my current pain inhibits me from feeling it. Just as the image of singing to my husband during our first dance makes my chest fill full and free, sharp pain shakes me back to the present.

In my yoga class this weekend the teacher instructed us to breathe into the location where we have pain. "Location singular?" I asked in my head. "I couldn't possibly bring in enough air to direct to all of my locations of pain!"

But "this too shall pass." And some day I'll feel the absense of pain. Right?

To choose or not to choose?

We don't get to choose where we are born, who our parents are, what our station in life is (at least at the beginning), but we are told that we choose our career.

I'm not so sure, however, how much of a choice I have. I believe that being a musician was chosen for me. Not that I have overbearing parents who decided when I was born that I would be a doctor because they didn't have the opportunity. Goodness, what parent would chose for a child to be an artist of any sort? Thankfully, my parents did not get in the way at all, but something must have.

I have often thought about how much easier my life would be if I were content with being an administrative assistant, a limo driver, a sand and gravel salesman, a house cleaner... There are those, you know. Then I wouldn't have to sing my daily chorus, "I don't wanna go to work. I don't wanna go to work..." But that's just the thing-- even my whine is musical!

The several major fibromylgia flare-ups this past year or so have made me look at my career closely. Until this summer I didn't know what was causing me so much pain that I couldn't hold music, drive comfortably, sleep comfortably, play the piano, hold a pencil. It really put music as a career in jeopardy. I'm neither a good enough composer to work without the piano (much less a pencil), nor a good enough conductor to conduct by hardly moving. Learning the music to conduct still requires the use of a piano, anyway!

When I complained of hand pain in high school, the doctor suggested that I not play the piano, use the computer and sew. So I tired putting my needles away-- it didn't work. This past year when I considered putting music aside it didn't work either. I couldn't imagine my life without it. Not only that, though, music wouldn't release it's hold on me!

I didn't choose this profession; it chose me. It chose me when I was 4 years old dancing in the living room while my father played the piano. (Grieg was my favorite.) It chose me when I wrote my first song at age seven, "Mary will you marry me?" (whatever!) and conducted The Orchestra of my Stereo playing The Pines of Rome. (When I was little I thought there was a tiny orchestra in the radio, and I always marveled at how they knew when to start!)

Thankfully, now I know "from whence cometh" my pain, and how to manage it-- at least to a degree. I no longer think of abandoning my life force- music. It is somewhat humiliating, though, to be 28 and unable to hold my own music in a choral concert-- much less have to sit for it. I wish I could abandon music and all creative drives, so I could be satisfied being an administrative assistant (the day job that pays the bills, and gets me and my musician husband health insurance). But in the exuberance after a performance well done, the bliss of a creative high, and even when it feels as though my body is falling apart all over, I am glad that music chooses to stay with me.

Dying House

On my way to work I pass a sad patch of land that used to be fertile farmland. A couple of months ago I noticed that it had become over-run by weeds and tall grasses. Then the large equipment came to clear the land. I was pleased to see the elimination of weeds, but then more equipment arrived to move around the dirt.

“Oh,” I groaned. “Not another new housing development!”

Day by day the machinery changes the landscape of the vast field. New trucks, stones and port-o-pots arrive daily. It grieves me to see the beautiful open land turned into yet another cookie cutter community.

Perhaps the saddest part, though, is the old farmhouse at the edge of the field. I had not noticed it before the beginning of the development. Now it stands alone as a reminder of what used to be. It must be old, but how old I cannot tell. It appears to have been abandoned for years. The paint has all but fallen off the wood slats. A window or two is broken. Ever so slowly the face of the house slips overcome by the grayness of despair.

What a lonely state for a house.

“Why do they let it suffer like that?” I wonder on my way to work.

“Why not take a wrecker ball and put it out of its misery?” I ask on my way home, when I notice that half of the porch now hangs as if by a thread and I can see the storm clouds through the cracks in the walls.

The whole world goes on around it. Cars race passed; trucks move dirt around it in preparation for new houses, but the farmhouse remains-- dieing a little more very day with no one except for me to notice.

Sometimes I feel like that house.

I drove by the house yesterday. It was with mixed emotions that I discovered it leveled to the ground-- relief for the end of its suffering, yet a sadness for the loss of a friend. All that remained by the end of the day was a pile of old stone foundation. Its face had already been carted away.
I feel a place of emptiness where the old farmhouse once stood. I wanted them to tear it down to put it out of its misery, but now I wish that they had nursed it back to life instead. A lump rose in my throat for I could not stay to mourn. But as a ship passing in the night continued down the road%