24/11/2020
These are not my students. These are sheep grazing on a hillside just outside of Freiburg. Watching them—the sheep, I mean—gives me the opportunity to reflect on the work we do down there in the valley, which sometimes doesn’t feel like work. It’s been difficult to focus on art sometimes lately, because creating it doesn’t produce any immediate results. It won’t directly bring about change in any of the areas where our world so desperately needs it. It won’t make the virus go away and it won’t put a bandage on climate change or social injustice or any of the other ills we’ve caused.
And breathe.
Once in a while, students graduate, and that gives me the opportunity to marvel at how these young people have shaped themselves and their worlds, to imagine how they will continue to do so as they go back to their home countries, to envision those hours spent together in intense concentration as the center of an outward rippling, affecting so many more lives in concentric circles of love.
Sometimes, in the middle of a teaching marathon, it’s easy to forget what it is we are actually doing in closed rooms with these analog, unfashionable old instruments for hours on end. We are observing something together—a desire, an idea—and watering it, tending it, giving it sunlight and water, standing back to let it grow.
Real growth takes time, but there is no substitute for it, and no limit to what it can in turn heal and create. I am inspired and humbled by being witness to this process again and again. Enormous congratulations and gratitude to and Clara Muñoz del Guayo for mining and cultivating that most precious gift we have, our artistic selves, and for reminding me how important it is to go on doing this for as long as I am among other humans... and sheep.
And please forgive me, I didn't have good pictures of us together. The sheep will have to do.
