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The doctors seem to have hit upon the right combination of prescription drugs to keep the arthritis pain at bay long enough for me to comfortably play the scales on my digital piano again. The longevity thing is popping in once in a while to allow me to feel like missing a few days hasn't kept my unconscious mind from processing the benefits. One benefit is that the longer I work at this, then the more lightly I stroke the keys, and that takes less physical energy and sounds better.
The fact that I taught myself the major and minor scales and kept practicing until I memorized them makes me pleased with myself. Its not so much that I wanna be able to play a lot of music on the piano, but rather that I did something I knew would be good for me in lots of different ways. I sing more accurately now. At least I think I do. YMMV
I keep considering what I need to do about learning to play up and down the keyboard more playing triad chords as they appear in the Circle of Fifths. Since I don't have a piano teacher I have to take the attitude of "steady as she goes" in the sense of feeling my way through playing the piano.
For instance, tonight after I finished playing the scales I tried to play the major scale triads around the Circle of Fifths, and I soon got confused about which chord came next. I could write this down on paper and just follow the instructions on the keyboard, but somehow I think I have to do it by memory. Maybe tomorrow I'll remember a few more chords than I did tonight.
The water colors and acrylic paints I bought aren't getting used as much as I'd hoped when I bought them. I bought some terra cotta flower pots to have something round to paint on, and discovered I need to buy some white gesso to coat the pots with so they wouldn't absorb so much paint that the colors looked flat and weird.
I couldn't think of anything in particular I wanted to paint on the flower pots, so I painted a zodiac of all the astrology signs. I didn't think it through and I got the spacing wrong. I started over by painting over the symbols with the gesso, and taking a compass to figure out the twelve spaces I needed for the symbols to come out evenly spaced.
The point of buying these pots was just to have something to use the colors to see what they looked like. I used the various paint brushes I bought at the same time for the same reason. Just to get some familiarity with how the brushes move. I'm not mixing any colors, just using what comes straight out of the tube.
Primal colors are fine with me. It's not like I know them by name even. If I can just paint anything on those pots and learn what the names of the colors I'm using that might be progress of some sort. I'm beginning to "see" the future a little better, and it's not hunky dory.
The more I think about the three puberties that are associated in astrology beginning with the first pubescent period at the age of twelve that involves the ability to physical procreate children, and the second one at the age of forty-two that concerns mental creativity, and the third one at the age of 71 that evokes spiritual creativity, the more I look for signs of what spiritual creativity is about.
When I moved from the physical stage into the mental stage of life at the age of twenty-nine and a half into the mental third of life I eventually stopped looking for physical solutions to my problems, and took up figuring mental ways of accomplishing the same end. I was literally thirty years old when I started studying astrology and the various vegetable oracles such as the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching.
How was I to know I was preparing for the second puberty at the age of forty-two. That's exactly when my second wife loaded our children in the new car I'd bought with her and went to live near her mother and siblings in California. By then, however, I had a clear mental picture of why it had to be that way, but the emotion of breaking up was horrid.
Presently, I'm right at the age when the third puberty arrives astrologically, and my previous experience has informed me that anything goes when it's time for major changes to matriculate. Changes as drastic as losing my second family. For all I know it could be sickness or death. I don't know what to expect. Oddly enow, I'm sorta okay with that.
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I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
