SCRIBBLING AT THE PIANO, PEACE IN THE WORLD
by Betsy Bevan

I am trying to paint a beautiful painting. It’s going slowly, with a lot of judgment that is not so nice and very tiring. I sit down, sigh, eat some crackers, put my shoes on, go for a walk, call a friend. Back in my studio feeling tired and weighted down, I ask myself what do I really, really want to paint. If no one was ever going to see it and it didn’t matter what the painting looked like, what would I paint? If judgment was suspended and all previous knowledge kicked out the window, I would...and all of a sudden a rush of energy and excitement answers me...scribble!

Scribble out all this that I’m feeling. Sribble in red and black and large and juicy. I’d scribble wild, like the child I felt in the past; running and humming barefoot all over the horse fields, picking flowers, twirling, doing the me-and-the-sun-and-the-grass dance. Happy-go-lucky, as my Mom would say. I grab the brush, dip it in the paint, and travel to some kind of joy beyond usual. After two hours I step back and look. Powerful, bold strokes and gestures have appeared. I see a pure energy and honesty in the lines, all chaotic and wonderful. Wow! This is me right now! Alive, untamed, uncensored. The deeper core. I had no idea I was capable of accessing this power and beauty. I feel a sense of expansion in me, something bigger than what I thought I was. I am not tired anymore. I’m in love! I’m in love with life, color, sound, everything! I’m uplifted all day and people who see me know it.

Translate to music. I sit at the black and white 88, the keys staring back at me. What, oh what will I play? Will it be good? Will it be good enough? I feel the fear, the saboteur at my ear...“no good, same old, same old, nothing new, not as much skill as so and so.” I grab hold of that dark judgment cloud and wrestle him down into sound. I ask, what would I really, really want to play if I could do anything I wanted? “Crash!” go my hands, full on the keys, as I let the saboteur play his heart out. Up and down the keys, these sounds cry out, SO angry. I should be playing a beautiful melody with neat chords underneath. Oh forget that! I want to bang, bang, bang! I listen...crash, bang! and on and on it goes until...almost suddenly I become aware of the top, highest notes of those wild crash clusters and they are making a pattern. I start to play it over and over, just following the pattern: bo-dee-low, bo-dee-low. I am feeling mesmerized and I can’t let go of this pattern for what seems like a long, long time. I hang there, “scribbling” away with all the intensity and focus of a toddler drawing up and around and down and around on paper. It’s all I want to do. I don’t want to please the imaginary audience anymore. I don’t want to be pleasing to myself. I want to do this back-and-forth, back-and-forth, until it breaks on it’s own or until it doesn’t. It does. The sounds start quieting and thinning to the bo-dee-low melody until it’s just a 3-note solo in one hand.

Very quiet now, listening to the notes, the left hand lifts and adds a note here and there and then I hear more notes that extend the melody. My fingers go there and it is satisfying. The hands are playing lush intervals now, following the melody, repeating, going away from the figure, coming back. There is no more desire to fall on big, crashing chord clusters. I’m totally engaged. The tune slows, my hands slow. I notice my breathing and there is a further slowing into a calm, long ending. I feel like I have just been washed cleaned and have emerged from underneath a waterfall. My aura is refreshed. I feel good and strong. I hear the birds and walk outside to greet the world, feeling blessed. Not because I am good at making music, not because that was a genius of a piece and I can go sell it and people will love me. It is because I feel cleared, like after having a massage or acupuncture, when I feel my chi flowing more smoothly and easily.

I feel blessed because I know how to clear my energy with this rich and powerful tool called the creative process. I am able to turn strong and potentially debilitating emotional energy into an experience of beauty and connectedness with the deeper self, the “big mind” or “flow,” and feel expanded, peaceful and joyful. To scribble at the piano sounds benign and silly to the judgmental and skeptical mind, but to engage fully in this way, through creative process, is potent, large and powerful. It is a healing modality in the world as we continually clear our energy fields and touch into the Divine flow of the universe. This is goodness, truth and beauty. This is release from internal conflict, relief from war. This is peace in the world.

“When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.” Rumi