Why the Gypsy Apprentice? The autodidact? The pilgrim? It’s because I believe in the quest to feel life, so I can live it better.

For me, it’s not gut feelings that influence my decisions or processes. I’m more mindful of the feel of a shine to the heart, or a surge through the head. If I’m trying to learn something or trying to improve existing skills, or if I’m trying to care for relationships, or believe in myself–I want to replace fear, vulnerability, shame, and humiliation, with something better. Something that feel good. I seek the shine and the surge of elation, but I also know that I have to journey through the fundamentals in order to arrive at the shine. So there’s a kind of faith I believe in–it’s a promise–that if you keep trying, you’re going to be jumping for joy at some point. And, it will start out to be just a point, so brief–but memorable enough to hold your attention and make shame, humiliation, and frustration more bearable, more humorous, and more useful as you get better and better at living and learning.

We are born knowing how to breathe, our hearts already work, but we have to learn how to eat. We try drawing, reading, and writing. Then someone else shows us other ways to draw, read, and write. We observe, we self study, we copy, we practice, we ask for help, we are judged good and bad, we experiment, we fail. Then we try again. Or we don’t.

Once, my mother put a small clump of flowers–sweet alyssum–into my hands and told me to plant them in the garden. I was little and I didn’t know if I could do it. As my mother kept working, I kneeled nearby, watching her. I cradled the plant like a little fledgling that had fallen from a tree, afraid I would kill it and cause my mother to stop loving me. By mid-summer, the plant was blooming in the garden, saturating the breeze with its distinctive perfume every time I visited it.

There was the time I came upon the studio of a woman in Maine whose weaving and chair-caning skills mesmerized me. I asked her, “Where did you learn your art?” She said, “I taught myself.” It’s so hopeful, whenever I hear something like that. There is desirable prestige in being able to study with great masters and being able to attend great schools. But finding your own way to skill and knowledge is another excursion all your own. I am drawn to the wabi-sabi spirit in life, the perfect imperfections, the shine of a unique heart, revealed.

In Argentina, my husband and I were copying the patterns of other tango dancers in a dark and sultry warehouse in Buenos Aires. We danced around and around in a circle with everyone else, our bodies succumbing to shame, humiliation, fear of failure. And then, a teacher danced into our embrace and said to us, “Feel the music.” She stayed with us, holding us up, showing us how to believe in the music. The tango in Argentina is improvisational, you must feel the music.

This week, my son texted me: “How’s the blog going?” I texted him back: “Fun. I like practicing my writing skills.” He replied: “Good. It’s all about the feel.” It feels fun. Good. Like. Definitive words.

Today is Friday. The end of another week writing down words I don’t know, or words I liked, that I came across in my travels: scabrously, temerity, ableist, putrid and pitiful, caper about, baseness, slatternly. The week was not a bust.

I watched snow fall.

I made a good meal.

I began reading a new book.

I wrote letters and put them in the mail.

I called my mother and father.

I text chatted with my little niece–her incoming texts are so funny, not annoying at all. They are arrivals of shine and surge.

I blogged. What an ugly word–blog. I am a blogger I said to my daughter. A blogger. The word is ugly like booger-(which should be spelled like bugar, rhymes with sugar).

And–there was a day when the house was empty and cavernous and into that vast void flew the bedeviled foul breath of remembered shame, humiliations, vulnerabilities, and failures as I tried to work. I sat down at the piano. There has been a piano in my home since the year 2000 when my husband’s parents gave us $1,000 for Christmas to celebrate the new millennium and we used the money to buy a piano for our children. My husband, my son, and my daughter are all musicians. I am not and I have never played piano in all of my life. But I sat at the piano that day. I put my right hand on a set of keys. And then, I played a note. I don’t know what the note was, but I played another note and another and it sounded enough like Kumbaya that I kept pressing down keys in all the right orders until I had played the song. Then I played it on other positions on the keyboard. I loved how long the music from one tap of a piano key would linger and rise up, sounding so sweet, coating all the remembered ickiness in my mind with the bright yellows of corniness. I don’t think anyone has ever played Kumbaya on our piano. I am sure of it. Whenever streams of children sat at our piano, they played Mary Had a LIttle Lamb, or Jingle Bells, or Chopsticks, or Smoke on the Water. I remember how my son, during the bedeviled days of his adolescence, played Clapton’s Layla on that piano. We’d all jump on board his ship when he did it, happy to escape into the passionate anthem to angst.

The whole little foray in my home, the excursion to nowhere that ended up at the piano, put a shine to my heart.

And a surge through my head. I moved on through the day, the romance of my life restored.