“Don’t Give Up On Something You Can’t Go A Day Without Thinking About.”

From VSCO

today's list of classical pieces you need to listen to

rachmaninov vespers/all-night vigil orff the rest of carmina burana not just o fortuna dvorák requiem dvorák symphony 3 cage sonatas and interludes for prepared piano mendelssohn paulus overture stravinsky pétrouchka danse russe ivor slaney non-stop strauss II fledermaus ouvertüre glazunov string quartet 3

Why are you sad?“ "Because you speak to me in words and I look at you with feelings.

Leo Tolstoy (via depressinglysadsociety)

So You Want To Be a Surgeon

(For: Domonique Nichols)

Every surgeon has to learn how to hold scissors without nervous hands, how to break open skin and wound a body just to fix it. How can we mend a broken heart if we’re too afraid of getting its blood on our hands? There will be blood on your hands. If you are going to be something, then you have to learn to kill for it. Every surgeon has the power to kill, however life exists at the cusp of that incision. Look at your hands. There is blood running through your fingers and every line in your palms lead somewhere. Where? to your destiny, where the light shines like a fire burning down forest. 

Be scared, but do not fear. The nervous pounds in your blood are natural stimuli just as the rain that feeds the seeds in the ground that cause the herbs to grow. Fear is created from the voices of question, of failure–waiting for rain. But voices can be silenced like the way a wave rushes in and drowns a ship. Rain will come.  I hope your insides tremble when you whisper your dreams and you awake at midnight hours gasping for air. there is a call for you I hope you answer in passion. So you want to be a surgeon? Your first surgery starts here. Here, in the quiet hours where the world sleeps and darkness swallows you with anxiety…  Make an incision while you are awake. bleed, feel, ache, heal. Begin to remove and sew whatever it is that is holding you back. Release yourself from self arrest; because walls are only walls, they are built with the same hands you have to cut away. Get away, pull apart the jail bars, diseased parts and set yourself free. Look at what your hands can do.

Your hands can sew and mended a heart, remove cysts that grow in the mind of emotional hurt bodies, cut away fears and tumors of the past. You can leave a body working like an unbreakable machine.  Your hands can bring life. Your hands can fight back, your hands can love better, Hold tighter, and let go easier. So you want to be a surgeon? Have faith. Kiss your hands with belief, and hold your dreams like a trophy you haven’t seen yet. Hold on to your hope, cradle dreams, sew wounds, and love is always a scar on the body like a piece of art. So love like a heart beat at the will of your hands on an open operating table.  Throbbing, breathing, beating.

Your hands they are warm and loving as the sun even when winter digs up goose bumps on the skin. You’ll spend time planting gardens just to see its beauty. Loving like petals but I hope you love like a rose thorn and pierce someone’s side so much they wail out in pain but are still strong enough to kiss you like a ticking time bomb just went off. Every surgery you will ever have to perform begins now. It begins with you. And if you’re too afraid to cut off people like snapped branches or too in love to let go as the leaves leave the trees in winter then you will never be able to save a life. Spring will never come. So walk with your hands wide open, walk ready to give. Give, give yourself. Surgery begins with saving your own life. Your life lived is a fountain of beauty awed by the eyes of another. You keep giving and they live from your waters.

You are herbs in a bush, a twinkle in the sky and one day someone’s body will pray for your hands. Somebody’s body will thank your hands. You are beauty in flaw and an ocean that refuses to stop waving even in winter when no one visits the beach. Your smile is a candle in a cave, your laughter a soothing anodyne in the moment of pain. Breathe and let be. Your hands can move an orchestra so beautifully tears fall without notice. And when the song is done, the score keeps singing in the soprano whisper of hope. So you want to be a surgeon… make an incision down the middle of your own heart and carry it in your hands. Give it away. So you want to be a surgeon… cut the world in half and let the light in. Die for this, breathe for this, shine for this, live for this. And your very hands that cut the world open will sew the world back up. 

pro tip kiddos

take the time now and become so fucking good. practice; constantly, everything. learn everything you can. get upperclassmen, staff, anyone you can, to teach you. learn from your own mistakes, learn from the mistakes of people around you. learn from every source you have at your disposal. get creative. play easy songs you enjoy, because they will motivate you to practice. practice hard exercises that make you want to give up, because they will make you better. take the years you have now and become the best you can be, because regardless of what situation high school lands you in, you will be so good your chances at become better will soar. your peers will look up to you, because you have so much to teach and share. your superiors and staff will look up to you, because you have developed habits and skill and that are invaluable and have so much to give. you will have so many doors open to you, because you took the time to open them before you knew they existed. and finally brother, you will have learned, before your time, the most important lesson of all; what it truly means to be a musician, and that there is still so much more room to grow

to @recorder-jesus, on looking forward to moving up a level

Jack Vanzet

some poetry for your evening :)

No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached

Edward Sapir (1929), “The status of linguistics as a science”, Language 5 (4): 207, doi:10.2307/409588 (via linguisten)