Pavarotti and I
Luciano Pavarotti just walked into my kitchen.
He is crying,
not for all those arias that made their way though him
when he was a much younger man,
but for the ones not yet written,
the joy of a thousand composers unborn.
He asks me if I have a clove of garlic,
which I am glad to say, I did,
and toss it to him,
amazed at how large a man he is.
He finds the knife, himself,
humming as he makes his way across the room,
and begins chopping, slowly at first
and then with great abandon,
almost as if the 10 million people he has performed for
were all in the room with us, which they are,
stunned, speechless, hearts bursting,
like unpicked pomegranates beneath a Tuscan sun.
Pavarotti, I am happy to say, keeps on chopping,
even when I think, for the third time,
the pieces are small enough for the sauce
he won't begin to make
until all my neighbors are asleep,
everyone of them.
We ate well that night, Luciano and I.
We laughed a lot and drank a lot of wine.
He told a story about the time
he was way too drunk to sing
in a country he couldn't quite remember.
I think there's a very good chance I may never be hungry again.
Photo by Vlah Dumitru on Unsplash
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 11:53 PM | Comments (0)
December 19, 2019Inspiring Quotes About Music
"Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything." - Plato
"If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music." - Albert Einstein
"Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness." - Maya Angelou
"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music." - Aldous Huxley
"Where words fail, music speaks." - Hans Christian Andersen
"Music is the shorthand of emotion." - Leo Tolstoy
"Without music, life would be a blank to me." - Jane Austen
"I don't sing because I'm happy. I'm happy because I sing." - William James
"Some days there won't be a song in your heart. Sing anyway." - Emory Austin
"When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest of times, and to the latest." - Henry David Thoreau
"The only love affair I have ever had was with music." - Maurice Ravel
"Music is the universal language of mankind." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain." - Bob Marley
"Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable." - Leonard Bernstein
"Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without." - Confucius
"Music is a higher revelation than all Wisdom and Philosophy." - Ludwig von Beethoven
"Virtually every writer I know would rather be a musician." - Kurt Vonnegut
"Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife." - Kahlil Gibran
"Music in the soul can be heard by the universe." - Lao Tzu
"Music acts like a magic key, to which the most tightly closed heart opens." - Maria Augusta von Trapp
"Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music." - George Eliot
"Music can change the world because it can change people." - Bono
"To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the music the words make." - Truman Capote
"If I cannot fly, let me sing." - Stephen Sondheim
One cool way to get music out into the world
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 12:58 AM | Comments (0)
December 16, 2019The Fling
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December 11, 2019ONE OF THE ILLUSIONS OF LIFE
One of the illusions of life
is that something needs to be done:
a field to mow,
a room to clean,
a destination to reach.
Actually, it's quite the opposite.
something needs to be undone,
untangled, unraveled, unmade,
like the spider web I weave each morning
pearled with dew,
to catch what I already have.
Not excerpted from Full Moon at Sunrise
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December 07, 2019Buddha in Winter
TimelessToday
My storytelling blog
The True Fruit of the Spiritual Path
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