I pull her off her stand and say hello in hushed tones. Tune her up, tighten the bow and rosin it a little. Sit on my chair and pull her close to me, run the bow slowly across the C string. Work my way slowly up three octaves of a C scale, and back down again. On to the F scale. On to some Schroeder’s exercises, starting at 10. I love 10. I pull out my xeroxed sheets of thumb positions and look at the treble clef. I’m now used to reading bass clef, as most of cello is lower, but now I’m working with harmonics.
I sat in Elise’s lesson room at MSUM last week and she said, “Now put your thumb lightly across the A and D strings like this.” She bowed and I could hear those magical harmonics - an octave higher, with just the lightest touch. A thumb across and now fingering as usual gives me the F scale - up an octave higher. I sound squeaky and unsure as I scratch out the notes - some flat, some sharp - the higher up you go on the strings, the shorter the distance between the notes. But I get goosebumps and am embarrassed that I have tears in my eyes. I look at Elise and say, “This is just MAGICAL.” I know she gets a kick out of my wonder - a 49 year old just starting up. I’m sure most all of her students are college age and have been playing for 15 years or so.
Not only had I never played cello before, I’d never even touched one. I didn’t know ANYTHING about stringed instruments. I didn’t know about different hand positions, or harmonics. I thought it was maybe like playing a piano. Straightforward. You move up and down the strings with certain fixed fingers, but no - there’s no such thing as certain fixed fingers, except maybe in first position, but that only gives you a certain number of notes. So that’s like writing - you’ve got your basic alphabet and vocabulary, but now you can put them together in a lot of unique and varied ways, like playing Mozart or Chopin or Metallica. But the kicker for me, as I sit here today, are those harmonics. Not only do you get a haunting octave halfway up the string, you get ANOTHER octave another 1/4 of the way up the string. But you only get the sound when you touch down lightly with your finger, barely touching. That’s my Work. That’s what I do. Get the notes, get the words, by touching lightly halfway up the string/my awareness. The distance is shorter between the notes, between the words, as the information downloads in complete thoughts and feelings. It’s up to me to keep my light touch and pull the notes/words out as I bow across with my consciousness, bringing that which is unmanifest into manifestation. Magic.
I named my cello Celeste, because that means ‘heavenly.’ I named my bow ‘Ed’ because it’s a Hill bow, and Sir Edmund Hillary was a mountain climber, so with Celeste and Ed I’m climbing up to heaven. Am I good? Well, I don’t totally suck. I’m past “Hot Cross Buns” but I’m not to Vivaldi as yet. But I will be. Because I keep climbing. I keep coming back to my cello and to my Work every day, knowing that it takes presence to grow and expand. The rewards? Heavenly, heavenly. If you’ve never pursued a dream, I highly recommend it. Then you wake up, and find that it never WAS a dream - it was just another part of you that was sleeping and now is awake. And that’s when the party begins. Heavenly.