Naples.

Wednesday, November 5, 2025. Above, the bedroom of our apartment.

We actually slept well, and for nearly nine hours, according to my new $39 Chinese smartwatch, which also keeps track of body temperature, heart rate, blood pressure, blood oxygen, steps, calories, and other things I haven’t explored, as well as being waterproof, which is quite a bit more than my original FitBit, now defunct.

Spent most of the day wandering through the narrow streets of the old part of Naples. First to the market, where we bought a soft chocolate-laced bread, a hard bread with nuts, and something akin to pizza but not really – delicious and flaky, with the tomato inside. Then clementines, plums, big white grapes, and beautiful small tomatoes on the vine. The grocer, a small, wiry man with dark eyes behind heavy black glasses, watched me like a hawk and when I reached for a branch of tomatoes immediately said, “No touch, madam!” I gestured apologetically, smiled, and pointed, and he put whatever we chose into bags; OK, I had learned the rules. In another, friendlier shop, where we bought excellent prosciutto and some marinated eggplant, the proprietor stood, nearly hidden, behind the refrigerated display of cheeses and cold cuts while a young man on the floor of the shop interacted with the customers. He spoke some English, and wanted to talk to us; he described each item and then, once we’d made our decision, relayed the information to the owner, who fulfilled the order and carefully wrapped each item in paper.

The cloister and garden of Chiesa di Santa Chiara (The Church of Saint Clare).

After eating at the apartment we went to the Chiesa di Santa Chiara and spent a couple of hours in their beautiful cloister garden with its majolica columns and benches, orange trees and cypresses, and their museum with its Roman and medieval antiquities, photographs of the terrible destruction during WWII, and their many reliquaries and images of saints.

At the museum of the Chiesa di Santa Chiara, a Renaissance polychromed wooden reliquary of St. Thecla. Described in a book of the apocrypha, The Acts of Paul and Thecla, she was a devoted follower of St. Paul who was miraculously saved from the executioner’s fire by a sudden storm, and also miraculously escaped the wild beasts sent to devour her in a gladiatorial stadium. As legend has it, she lived out her life in Maaloula, Syria, where the rocks closed the entrance to her cave when assailants tried to capture her. The Convent of St. Thecla in Maaloula, built near her supposed tomb, is still active today.

Through the rest of the afternoon, we walked through the narrow old streets filled with shops selling clothing, souvenirs, religious objects, leather goods, cheeses and sausages, and the intricate figures needed for Neapolitan nativity scenes — both the characters, angels and animals of the bible story and the ordinary Italians who also populate these elaborate, iconic assemblages (more on these later.) J. took pictures in the busy, winding, darkening streets. I took a detour into a clothing shop with beautiful but relatively inexpensive Italian-designed clothing, and, uncharacteristically, tried on a few things. The store’s credit card machine wasn’t working and I didn’t have enough euros to pay in cash, so they put aside a blouse for me until later, but I had doubts; I’ve learned that buying things that seem wonderful when traveling doesn’t always mean they’re going to work in one’s daily life back home.

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The late soccer hero Maradona is everywhere; he’s been made into a Neapolitan saint/martyr. We saw an enormous mural of him in a pope’s mitre; he’s on posters and flags; Maradona as Jesus on refrigerator magnets; Maradona as St. Sebastian, shot with arrows, Saint Maradona with a halo. Bars offer Aperol Spritzes, which are orange, and Maradona Spritzes, which are blue like the team’s jerseys. When he arrived to play for Napoli in 1984, a local newspaper wrote that despite the lack of a “mayor, houses, schools, buses, employment and sanitation, none of this matters because we have Maradona”.

This window display in a religious shop has Maradona images along with baby Jesus figurines (both white and black), cherubs, candles, rosaries, and Jubilee Year souvenirs reading Peregrinantes in Spem: Pilgrims in Hope.

Last night Naples was playing a German team. Our landlord told us the polizia had contacted all the short-term rental agents to ask if their booked guests were German, because last year they trashed the city.

Today, near the big Maradona mural, a parade of mourners carrying pink and blue balloons followed a hearse to a local church. All the passers-by crossed themselves when the hearse went by. When it was parked and the back door opened, four pallbearers pulled a small coffin out and carried it easily into the church: a young child, which explained the sad procession with balloons.

We ended up eating at Pizza Michele and then walking back to our apartment with a stop at a grocery store for the staples we couldn’t find at the market: butter, milk, eggs, yogurt, cereal.

Tonight I painted, finishing the sketch of Via Toledo at night from last evening and doing another of our fruit bowl. Unlike the sketchbook pages in Mexico City last March, which were mostly very detailed, I’m trying to do looser sketches and watercolors that create an impression and memory of things but are less literal. I have almost no energy right now for either drawing or writing. When I said I wasn’t sure why, J. said it was because I’m completely drained. Which is true. But it’s more than that; not only do I not have much energy for it, I feel like whatever I do is going to be unsatisfying and uninspired — which is pretty much a guarantee that it will be. So I will do a bit, but try not not to be too demanding of myself.

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A close friend wrote that if he were a doctor, the medicine he’d prescribe for us over the next week would be a city like Naples, teeming with life – which it is. It’s full of life, but death is never far away. The air is terrible from the diesel fumes and the smoking pedestrians and cafe-sitters; we can’t believe how many people are smoking and vaping. J. remarked that it didn’t seem like most people here “were planning to be in it for the long haul.” Maybe not. It would be a hard city to survive in through a long life. But the older women in the last night’s trattoria were doing all right: clearly they were good friends, and well-known to the waiter, who took very good care of them, even cutting up a pizza into small pieces for one of the women, at her request, leaning over and smiling at her, to make sure he’d done what she wanted.

Tomorrow we’re planning to go to Pompeii.

—to be continued

Montreal to Naples.

November 4, 2025

Over Ireland, dawn on the eastern horizon. Below us, blackness, and to the north, a planet or bright star that’s kept me company each time I’ve opened my eyes. After taking off I watched a video interview with Garrick Ohlsson that I’d downloaded – he had chaired the jury at the recent Chopin Competition in Warsaw in which I’d been so interested, but I’d disagreed with the awards. There was a decent meal on this Lufthansa overnight flight, and afterwards we watched a new movie about Leonora Carrington, much of it set in Mexico City and the Mexican countryside. Then an attempt to sleep. I managed perhaps 45 minutes. Got up and walked a little, visited the restroom, drank some water in that bizarre dim atmosphere of a night flight filled with hundreds of uncomfortable passengers trying to sleep. We’ll arrive in Munich around 9 am local time, which will be 3 am for us, and after a two hour layover, fly south to Naples.

Over the sea now past Ireland. My star has disappeared and there’s a perfect gradient of deep blue down to pale gold over England in the distance.

It’s been such a hellish time for the past two weeks, as we made the decision to say goodbye to our 18 year old cat Manon, and then received the shocking news of Jonathan’s brother’s death on Wednesday, two days after we took her to the vet, when we were still in deep sorrow. It was good that we had a lot to do to prepare for the trip. I was still recovering from the dental surgery the week before, and wiped out and achy from the antibiotics. By Friday I was feeling much more stable. On Sunday, All Saints Day, we decided to go to Evensong at the cathedral. It was a beautiful liturgy with music by Tompkins, Elgar, Greyston Ives, Caroline Shaw, Schutz. The names of the dead were read, and then the Dean invited everyone to come forward and light a votive candle and place it on the altar steps. My eyes filled with tears, but it was good, and felt like a fitting way to remember and bid farewell, along with so many friends who were there for the same purpose, remembering people dear to them, some of whom we had known too.

Shiori Kuwahara, one of my favorites among the Chopin Competition competitors. Pen and ink, 9” x 6”.

One of Garrick Ohlsson’s observations on the Chopin Competition was that most of these young players didn’t seem to understand Chopin’s dances. He found the Mazurkas were often played with accents on the wrong beats, even though the accents are clearly indicated in the scores, but even worse were the waltzes in the first round, which were often played with wildly varying rhythms. He smiled: “Human bodies dancing simply don’t move like that! But how do they know? I’m not a great dancer, but I’m old enough to have taken a few lessons before my senior dance in high school — I doubt if any of these young players have ever waltzed.”

We’re over Belgium now, almost to Germany. My friend M.K. must be nearly beneath us, starting her morning, getting ready to go and teach.

Over the Alps.

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9 p.m. In our apartment in Napoli. It’s in an old stone building, reached by going through a gate, past shops, into a small interior courtyard and up three flights of heavily worn stone stairs. The apartment is large, comfortable, well-equipped, and looks out from two small second-floor balconies onto Via Toledo and the narrow market street where we’ll shop in the morning. We took a harrowing, high-speed taxi ride here from the airport, narrowly avoiding two serious collisions, then unpacked, fell asleep for maybe two hours — my body now has absolutely no idea what time it is — and then went out to a neighborhood trattoria for a dinner of salad, pasta, delicately fried baby calamari, and a large glass of local red wine.

Flying into Naples, over the bay, then the tile roofs of the city, with Vesuvius looming behind it, was astonishing.

I’m going to sit on the balcony and see if I can draw a little. We want to try to last until at least 10:00 pm, which right now feels as impossible as it would be to drive in this city.

—to be continued

Beth Adams

Nov 24, 2025

My husband and I returned on Saturday night from nearly three weeks in Naples and eastern Sicily. Since then, we’ve been adjusting to the weather shock (from sunny skies and temperatures of 60-70 degrees F. to right around freezing, with snow and freezing rain); the cultural shock (from streets and trains full of animated Italians, all talking at once, and markets overflowing with fresh beautiful fruits, vegetables, fish, meats, spices, cheeses, nuts and olives, to subway cars of dour bundled-up Montrealers, each glued to their phone, and northern supermarket produce, looking tired and limp); and body shock — I came down with a minor but annoying cold on the very last day of the trip and am having a hard time telling how much of the fogginess and fatigue are illness, or jetlag.

It’s good to be home, though, and it was good to be away. Here are just a few of the things I’ve been thinking about:

1. The world is going on in many places without spending every minute focused on American politics.
2. Life is beautiful, rich, varied, and vibrant, and human beings are meant to live those lives as fully as possible. Many other people do this better than we do, and take care of each other in the process. They are, in other words, less selfish, less focused on the individual, and more on the family and the collective.
3. People in many places make do with much less and yet seem satisfied.

Naples Street Scene

4. It was a great relief to be in cities and towns without many franchises, where small, specialized local shops and businesses are still viable and form an important part of the social fabric.

Casa Editrice Musicale ditta Salvatore Simeoli, Naples. A store packed floor-to-ceiling with sheet music, where I browsed and bought a flute score, and marveled that such a place still exists – all the North American sheet music stores I used to go to have closed.

5. History is long. Far longer than we in North America usually see. This creates a double awareness, both of the short span and relative insignificance of our own lives, and the need to live those lives with intention, responsibility, and purpose.

Portrait of a woman. 1st century BC, from Pompeii. National Archaeological Museum, Naples.

6. The beauty of nature, of simplicity, of a connection to what we eat and where we live, are important components of happiness in daily life.

7. Wealth, technology, and celebrity are greatly overrated in the general scheme of things.
8. I am happiest in societies where friendliness, warmth, and hospitality are valued, especially among strangers.
9. As a visitor, I acknowledge it’s impossible to see below the surface into the problems facing a society, and certain people or groups within it.
10. Travel changes us. I wish everyone could do it, and not by taking their own protective bubble with them, but by going openly, without a shell and without expectations, and with a willingness to be changed, surprised, moved, shaken… to encounter — and to be encountered.

It took several days for me to settle into a travel mode, and leave behind the sorrows and concerns of my daily life. I checked my messages, looked at the Guardian once a day, kept up with Duolingo (switching from Spanish to Italian), but I stayed away from social media and any threaded conversation scrolls, posting only a couple of pictures myself and two blog posts. We ate out some, at pizzerias and simple trattorias, and we also cooked. At first I was unable to draw or write much, but eventually this loosened up and I managed to keep a basic written journal and worked in my sketchbook; every day, I looked for ideas for future paintings or writing.

Ceiling of the cloister, Chiesa di Santa Chiara, Naples.

We had a lot of remarkable experiences, and I’ll try to share some of them here as the next weeks unfold. I’ve come back feeling like the creative discouragement and inertia of the last few months has lifted, and I feel inspired to write and do artwork over the winter. This is a relief, and I hope it lasts. But in order to do that, I realize I have to be online less, to be less focused on political news, argument, and the negativity I can do nothing about, to say “no” a little more often, and to determinedly focus my energies and time on the areas where I can actually make a difference, both in my own life and in others’. Distraction is everywhere, and it’s there for a reason — and not a benign one. Resistance, on the other hand, also takes many forms. One is to set a meaningful direction for oneself, and stick to it. That’s never easy. It’s the path with greater challenge, and greater potential serenity too.

Beth Adams

Nov 12, 2025

Whenever I’ve been in Europe, I’ve always thought of my father’s experience here as a tank drive in Patton’s army during WWII. In London and on the Salisbury Plain, I thought of him as a young man, not even 20 years old, getting ready for the Allied invasion on D-Day. In France, Germany, and Belgium, I thought of him in the Battle of the Bulge, how he suffered injuries in Belgium that caused him to be hospitalized in Antwerp, how he helped liberate a concentration camp in Germany and drove his tank through the streets of Berlin. He never spoke about these experiences unless pressed, and said very little even then.

Even though I’ve been to some of the same places, seen the damage, and visited the war memorials, my experience as an American child of a WWII veteran is completely, utterly different than that of my European contemporaries. Growing up in America in the 50s and 60s, we saw little of the damage; we heard few stories, and were taught an heroic narrative of America’s role in both the war itself, and the reconstruction afterwards. And that’s what our parents wanted us to see. They wanted to forget, and to move on with their lives, and in America, they were mostly able to do that.

Here in Italy a different past is still evident. We visited the Chiesa Santa Chiara early in our stay in Naples – the church is part of a convent of Poor Clare sisters, the female order begun by St. Clare, the close friend of St. Francis. The church, which had a medieval foundation and a beautiful, spare interior, had stood for centuries until a day in 1944, when the Allied forces conducted a massive bombardment of Naples, destroying many residential areas and cultural monuments. We saw photographs of the church as it appeared afterwards. The roof was entirely gone and the interior completely filled with rubble. For the citizens of Naples, this was one of the most devastating tragedies of that attack.

The cloister of the convent contained a beautiful garden and unusual columns, friezes and benches covered with majolica tiles painted with scenes of pastoral and domestic life. It was by far the most peaceful place we visited in this frenetic city.

Restoration began as soon as the war ended. Today the church, still medieval in feeling and decor, has an austere beauty and gravity that seem fitting as a monument to the suffering that happens in war. Restoration work in the cloister is still ongoing — we watched some of the conservators at work, restoring the majolica tiles. In the church, I was stunned by the chapel (pictured at the top of this post), the first you see to the right of the entrance. The bronze plaques on the walls contain the names of the local veterans who died, not in WWII, but in WWI, when Italy lost 650,000 of its military. (By contrast, the U.S. lost 116, 516, while the British Empire lost 908,371, France 1,357,800. Russian and German losses were even greater.)

Here we are, in 2025, with a war raging in the Ukraine, barely a ceasefire in Gaza after two years of massive destruction, warships heading toward Venezuela, huge numbers of people dying in the Sudan and many other places on earth — and I have to ask myself, what is the right way to observe “Veteran’s Day”, or “Remembrance Day” as we do in Canada? Yes, we should remember and honor all those who served their countries, but we should use this day to think very hard about the cost of war, not only at the time when it happens, but its effects on people, families, and societies, rippling down through the generations. Being on the “right side” — does that justify the cost? When will we ever learn?

Beth Adams

Nov 09, 2025

We arrived in Naples on Tuesday afternoon, after an overnight flight from Montreal with a two hour layover in Munich. Our rental apartment is on Via Toledo, in the heart of the old part of the city, and there’s a market street that runs diagonally from Toledo, right below us to the left. So one of our first tasks after unpacking was to head into the market and get some provisions: in this case, clementines, plums, grapes, and the small tomatoes grown on the side of Vesuvius that are incomparable for intensity of flavor, along with some fresh bread, marinated eggplant, and fresh butter.

As some of you know, one of the reasons for coming to Naples, a long-awaited destination for us, is pizza. It may not be a religious pilgrimage, like the Camino de Santiago, but it’s certainly a secular one. We have eaten pizza together all over the world, for 45 years, and Jonathan has made pizza at home ever since I’ve known him; it is close to an obsession. This city is pizza’s beating heart, so we knew we’d have to end up here eventually.

You find these clusters of small, pointed tomatoes hanging everywhere; I’m not sure if they’re decoration or actually get used, but they’re certainly beautiful. The ones we bought at the market that first afternoon were firm, luscious, and bursting with flavor; you feel the sun captured in every bite.

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Today, Sunday, was market day in nearby Piazza Dante, so we shopped again, this time for oranges, some tiny green beans, a beautiful aged cheese, one large lemon still on its leafy stem, and a cherry jam tarte.

I also bought some fresh porcini mushrooms that had been foraged in the woods, and cooked them in butter and olive oil for lunch.

Yesterday we went to Herculaneum, one of the ancient cities that was buried in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. I’ll write more about that later. But this was my dinner in a small local trattoria in the modern town of Erculano. I had ordered zuppa di pesce, thinking it would be a simple fish soup, but this is what arrived, along with a loaf of fresh, crusty sourdough bread. I ate every bit of it.

We did NOT eat any of this, but admired it through the glass vitrine. Resisting the pastries completely is futile, but we’re trying to restrain ourselves somewhat!

And finally, the jewels of the city. These are our second pizzas from Pizza Starita, one of the famous pizzerias of Naples and the one we’ve liked best; it’s still unspoiled and uncommercialized, still overseen by the original owner, and seems to deliver consistently excellent pizzas to every table within minutes of your order. I’m sure Jonathan will be devoting a whole post to Neapolitan pizza, so I won’t say more except that these are some of the very best I’ve ever had. The local red wine was also delicious.

Much of my time here has been devoted to seeing art, as well as experiencing the crazy intensity that is Naples itself, and I’ll write more about those subjects soon. We are also trying to heal and recover from not just the death of our beloved Manon, but the loss of Jonathan’s older brother David, who left this life unexpectedly on October 29. The family urged us to continue with our trip — David loved Italy and his family lived in this country for quite a while when he was stationed here as an Army doctor – and he is very much in our thoughts as we move through our days.

2007-2025

After the previous, rather heavy philosophical post, I thought maybe you’d like to look up into that willow tree again with me.

When I was in Parc Angrignon for a walk on Saturday afternoon, my goal was to be out in the beautiful late fall weather but also to take some pictures for potential paintings later on. Not far into the park, there’s a large willow on the banks of a pond. I can never resist getting under trees with long overhanging branches, into that protected and magical space where the canopy hangs around you like a translucent curtain rustled by the wind, and the light filters through from above.

When I did that, my immediate thought was that I wanted to try to paint what I was seeing and feeling there. The photograph I posted yesterday is a different view, taken to highlight the sun itself, and it’s cropped. This watercolor, done in my sketchbook today, attempts to capture the delicacy of all the small willow leaves, the pliable branches that sway off the massive main trunk, and the light as it shines through the leaves. The textile-like tapestry of leaves, golden on the outside, dark olive green on the inside, was set off by the pure blue of the sky seen through the millions of spaces between the leaves.

I can go back to that place and that feeling more easily through the painting than through the photograph, and hope you can too.

Third in a series of three posts about areas where we can focus to help ourselves, and others.

When life is feeling grim, solitary, and like a tunnel with no end in sight, we have some choices. One is to give in to the helplessness, hide under the covers, stay as far away from the news as possible, and anesthetize ourselves. Another is to adopt a state of denial, and just continue to go about our lives as if nothing were happening – because, for many, that’s still quite possible. We can see this happening all around us in the chatter, the consumption, the focus on celebrities or the latest sports event, the endless pursuit of individual pleasure and distraction that characterizes a lot of our society. Or we can doomscroll and share the gloom and outrage with like-minded people, which makes us feel like we’re doing something, when actually we’re just talking to the mirror.

A different choice is more difficult, more demanding, but ultimately better for us and better for the people around us. And that’s to face the current reality, acknowledge it for exactly what it is, and make personal decisions that help us live vibrantly and helpfully in spite of what’s happening around us, and even to us.

In two previous posts, I’ve offered suggestions about places to focus. The first talks about Radical Hospitality. The second discusses Creativity and the Arts. In this, the third and final post of the series, I want to talk about “belief.” And by this I don’t mean believing in a God who’s going to come down and rescue humanity and smite the unrighteous — as much as I wish that could happen. No. I’m talking about developing a personal philosophy on which to base your life, your decisions, your actions, and which grounds you in a solid place, or gives you a sanctuary of steadiness to return to when you’ve lost your footing or your hope.

“Everything can be taken from a man but …the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning.

When I was young, during the Vietnam War, with a father and other relatives around me who’d fought in WWII and suffered from its losses, I thought a lot about what it would have been like to be in Nazi Germany, or be sent to a concentration camp. What would I have done? How much courage would I have had? In those impossible situations, how does one cope, how does one keep some sense of integrity, dignity, hope? These questions have continued with me throughout my life.

I grew up in the 50s and 60s in a family with a father who was the son of a Methodist minister, and, while quite clear on “doing good”, rebelled against his religious upbringing, and a mother who was an atheist, an intellectual, and essentially a Stoic. Because Dad and I sang, and because it was the way of my maternal grandparents and our small town, we nevertheless went to the Episcopal Church every Sunday. Afterwards, at the Sunday lunch table, we’d often discuss the sermon and the lessons and how they applied, or didn’t, to our own lives. We talked about politics, Vietnam, government, war and peace, culture, sports, society. My family members read books, and they read the newspaper, and a lot of well-written magazines, and we talked about these things together. My eventual educational path of classics and the humanities, my exodus from the church, my explorations of Buddhism, and eventual return to Christianity — as an extremely liberal and unorthodox semi-believer — all make sense in that context. At 70+, I have a pretty strong sense of myself, the meaning of my life, and my place in the world, but I can see that those values been formed over many years of reading, listening, conversing, and thinking. I’m grateful for that, and for the writers and friends who’ve helped me — it’s been deliberate, lifelong work that never “arrives”, but continues to evolve and change.

I also realize that my beginning and path would be unusual in today’s context. How many families even eat meals together anymore, let alone discuss ethics, religion, society, and what they’ve been reading? These kinds of questions used to be a major part of a liberal education, too, but educational institutions and professors are under increasing pressure to watch what they say, what they assign, and how they teach, and the humanities themselves have been devalued as the pressure to work and succeed in lucrative professions takes precedence. But what prepares us for a time when everything turns upside down? Each of us needs to engage with these questions for ourselves, in order to find a personal framework that can support our life and our decisions.

“A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the “why” for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any “how.”

Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning.

For me, it has been helpful to read the work of people like Victor Frankl, quoted here, who survived a concentration camp in WWII and wrote about the imprisoned people he observed there and what gave some of them hope and purpose and meaning, even in the direst of situations. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a clergyman who was accused of taking part in a plot to assassinate Hitler, imprisoned, and executed by the Nazis, is another person who chronicled his experiences in detail, and offers an example of the struggle to live with integrity under impossible circumstances. Thomas Merton wrote extensively about the struggles between his silent monastic vocation and being a thinking citizen of a world threatened by nuclear war. Many Buddhist thinkers and teachers survived exile and persecution, and anchored their teaching in the fact that while suffering is a truth of human existence, their commitment is to liberating all beings from suffering — even though that is impossible. The life of Jesus is an ancient but timeless example of how to live selflessly and with love toward all in spite of repression and persecution; the Gospels are quite explicit in their teachings, even if the institutionalized church, as well as immoral people who call themselves Christians, have a history of ignoring them, and distorting and using the religion for their own purposes.

There’s a reason why “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” and “love your neighbor as yourself” have persisted as ways to consider the most basic questions of what’s right and what’s wrong — and we don’t have to subscribe to any religion to think about and use these concepts. I think what matters is to consider one’s life, its meaning and purpose, and decide if we really believe, for instance, that love is stronger than hate. Then we have to ask ourselves what that means in our life, and at this particular time in history. How are we going to act on it?

The true meaning of life is to be found in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system….Human experience is essentially self-transcendence rather than self-actualization. Self-actualization is not a possible aim at all, for the simple reason that the more a man would strive for it, the more he would miss it…. In other words, self-actualization cannot be attained if it is made an end in itself, but only as a side effect of self-transcendence.”

Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning.

A friend told me recently that he was making a commitment to kindness. I am committed to that too. It sounds like a simple thing, but it’s actually very profound when it emanates from a deep choice of how one want to be and how one hopes the world can be. It’s not something that comes out of a fake sense of joy or even optimism, but rather out of seeing that a deliberate shift in one’s consciousness and intent can have a profound effect on one’s own life as well as every interaction we have with others.

Another person might decide to believe in goodness, or in love, or in being fully present to others, as grounding principles for their own actions and decisions. It doesn’t matter so much what words we use; the point is to take a stand, an internal stand of your own volition, and say, all right, I choose not to despair, but to live and act from this place.

“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.”

Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning.

What we can learn from those before us who’ve grappled with humanity’s cruelty, selfishness, greed and violence is that there are always people, often anonymous, who find ways to live with integrity, hope, and purpose that give light to others, even when times seem very dark. It can be hard work to get to that point, and there will always be periods when we lose our way. However, we can each make the choice to try, and live more fully and more helpfully in our own difficult times.

Last weekend the pianist Paul Helmer and I played a short recital as part of Montreal’s citywide “Journées de la culture,” an annual weekend when all sorts of institutions and organizations open their doors and invite the public for free. My friend Sheena Gourlay coordinated the cathedral’s offerings, which included a Saturday afternoon “Collegium Musicum” – an eclectic mix of musical, dance, and spoken word performances. Paul and I played a 15-minute set: the four-movement Sonata for Flute in a minor by Handel, followed by Sicilienne, by Gabriel Fauré, from his suite Pelleas et Melisande. A little while later in the program, I played Vocalise by Arno Babajamian with pianist Sam Keuchgarian, who had also brought two Armenian singers and a troupe of Armenian folk dancers to perform.

The center pews of the cathedral were filled with an appreciative crowd of visitors, who came and went during the afternoon, and the atmosphere was fairly relaxed. Not a big deal, one might think. But it was for me, since it was the first time I’d performed music like this as a soloist for, well, just about exactly fifty years. As I’ve written here recently, I took up the flute again last year and bought a new, considerably better instrument. After practicing daily to get some technique and my embouchure back, I worked hard for about six months with a fine accompanist, Mouse Elisedd, who I met through the Taizé services, and we were planning to do this September event together. Unfortunately, this summer they developed some health issues and had to withdraw, so our other Taizé pianist said he would step in. Paul Helmer, now in his 80s, has had a long and illustrious career as a solo artist and accompanist, and as a musicologist at McGill; like Mouse, he’s a fellow parishioner at the cathedral and we’ve worked together on the music committee there. I was very fortunate to be able to play with him and benefit from his knowledge, experience, and encouragement.

So, what kind of experience was this first outing? Did I suffer from the debilitating stage fright that was a big factor in keeping me from pursuing a more serious music career when I was young? Would my hands shake and sweat, would I suddenly have much less breath than I needed? This fear had been a factor for me not just as an adolescent, but in my 40s when I studied piano and voice and did some solo work. So I had worried about that, but it didn’t materialize. Playing every week for Taizé, months of practicing in the church with lots of people coming in and out, and all these years of experience performing with the choir, under quite a bit of pressure, must have helped. I knew I was well-prepared, and I also knew it probably wouldn’t be perfect. I was motivated to do my best, and to get past this hurdle of a first performance. There was another factor: I’m a lot older now, and I have a different attitude. Enjoying the moment, trying to give music that I love to an audience, and being fully present to myself and to the music felt far more important to me than other people’s judgements. Not much was at stake; it wasn’t an audition; there weren’t any reviewers out there.

In the end, I felt I played a bit better in the rehearsal than in the performance, but that’s OK. In the recording, I can hear myself settle into the music partway through the first movement; the intonation improves too. There were technical problems with the piano’s action that need to be addressed and it wasn’t perfectly in tune; both of the pianists I played with were struggling with the instrument and I could feel and hear that during the performance: there’s a lot that goes on in real time, and not all of it is predictable. All in all, going into the performance, I was more excited than scared, and coming out of it, I was proud of myself for rising to what I knew, even if few others did, was a big personal challenge.

The lesson in this is: you’re never too old to start something, or begin something again that you once loved or have always wanted to do. It takes work and dedication, and some courage, but you can do it. I feel inspired by Paul, too, who is a decade older than I am but still plays extremely well, bringing good physical stamina and a keen intelligence and focus to his playing. Now I’m glad the pressure is off, and, at the same time, anxious to work on some new music and keep at it.

This is a first post for my new self-hosted blog at this address. In the days to come, I’ll be importing previous content from the past 20+ years of blogging.

Everything I write from now on will appear both here and on Substack.