I finally sit down to write, hearing the bubbling of a couple of pots coming from the kitchen. I was preparing a vegetable puree and some rice, but in reality, I was thinking about Esferas.
I miss Esferas. That constant creative tension, without expectations but ready to fire at any moment. It kept me very attentive to the things I was learning so I could share them later. It was a way to stay grateful and aware of how I’m growing little by little. And above all, it was a way to cultivate and put my gifts at the service of my community. I sense that this is the purpose of life, so it’s not something I want to stray too far from.
This summer, I decided to pause; my mother told me, “Why don’t you take a break?” and something inside me said a “Yes!” that sounded like Handel’s Hallelujah. I think I needed it. And now that the new semester has started, it’s a challenge to open up the big space this project requires again. Each letter used to take me about a whole day of work (sometimes more), as I wrote, rewrote, meditated, reread, rewrote, chose the photos, and programmed everything in Mailchimp and later on astrofonda.com.
This semester, I feel that the wind has changed and is pushing me in another direction. Perhaps not so much towards sharing, and again more towards cultivating. I have a class called Advanced Production for Songwriters with which I’m fascinated. The teacher told us on the first day that she wasn’t going to teach technical things—that’s what YouTube is for. What we were going to explore and develop in that class was our vision.
She spoke about how, as we enter the era of artificial intelligence, much of the music the world consumes will be generated by AI. She called it “utility music,” which is the music you listen to without really caring who made it: calm jazz playlists or lo-fi for being at home, supermarket music, commercial music, meditation music, YouTube videos… AI will take care of all that.
What’s left for humans then? To this question, the teacher answered that the musicians of the future would be spiritual leaders, conveying a vision of life that goes far beyond music itself. She spoke of Taylor Swift or Drake as religious leaders, capable of influencing the behavior, language, dress codes, and even the values of their millions of followers through their music and personality. AI can’t imitate that. And that’s what the class was going to be about: developing a deep and coherent vision that informs all aspects of our work.
I’m in!
I understood that all the time and effort I dedicate to this class, all the value I put into each project, will return to me greatly multiplied. So that’s my new priority, and it’s taking up the space of Esferas. I’ll keep writing, but it will have to be either with less frequency or less depth. I don’t know how it will evolve. What I do know is that I don’t want to let it fall. So here I am.
Hi.
Before I say goodbye, I want to share something brief and good that I read this week. I found it in the book “The Art of Possibility” by Benjamin Zander, an eighty-year-old, very charismatic orchestra conductor whom I’ve had the good fortune to see several times in Boston.
In this chapter, he invites you to reflect on the ways you are a contribution to the world around you. It could be the attitude with which you choose to carry your day, small or big gestures… anything you can think of that, coming from you, has a positive effect on your environment.
The chapter begins with this little story, and with it, I’ll end:
Strolling along the edge of the sea, a man catches sight of a young woman who appears to be engaged in a ritual dance. She stoops down, then straightens to her full height, casting her arm out in an arc. Drawing closer, he sees that the beach around her is littered with starfish, and she is throwing them one by one into the sea. He lightly mocks her: “There are stranded starfish as far as the eye can see, for miles up the beach. What difference can saving a few of them possibly make?” Smiling, she bends down and once more tosses a starfish out over the water, saying serenely, “It certainly makes a difference to this one.”
With all my love,
A.
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