Category: Arts Apprenticeship

Wow, here’s another song that played a deep and important role in my music therapy internship. It represented a shared moment of profound intimacy between me and an end-stage HIV/AIDS patient. A relatively young man, not much older than me. This song had long been an expression of my own feelings of loneliness and isolation…

I’ve been pushing myself so hard lately to do well in my classes and in my contract position. And I’m once again by myself back home, while my wife is still in India taking care of her grandmother. I’ve been feeling so lost, so isolated. “Wandering, I am lost…” This deeply moving song by Jimmy…

This song also speaks to some deep-seated issues for me, particularly my history of great difficulty on going after the things that I want, often difficulty even in naming or knowing them. But walking through life feeling as I have nothing, and that whenever I do get something, I lose it or have it taken…

“Baby, You’re A Firework…” I’m leaving India in a little over four days. I’m feeling so sad. I’ll miss my wife so much for the five weeks we’re apart. I’m also feeling terrified about starting my new music therapy contract, about whether I have what it takes, about working in-person for the first time since…

After my wife’s grandmother had yet another blowup, and I was feeling profoundly put-upon in having to even do “another stupid painting” when I was feeling buried by my academic work and also stressed at the living situation and at seeing my partner subjected to such a challenging, abusive and explosive caregiving situation, one which…

2/4/22 On February 1, the first day of the Year of the Tiger according to the Chinese calendar, there was a blowup between family members which for me, although only a bystander, felt quite triggering and activating. The house felt quite charged with “tiger energy.” I didn’t quite know what  to do with it. I…

Yesterday, I decided to indulge and give expression to my inner voice without thinking about technique or subject. My only objective was to somehow contact the energy that the New York School of abstract expressionism seems to elicit in me. I found a Spotify playlist called “Jackson Pollock,” which really was just a bunch of…

1/15/22 The other day, after my instructor Henry suggested I was ready to move on from orchids to irises, I had quite the mishap with my paints. I had yet to open the tube of yellow, and feeling too lazy to dig around for a safety pin or needle in my grandmother-in-law’s apartment here in…

“Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping, into the future…I want to fly like an eagle.” – Steve Miller Resuming practice of orchid leaves last week, I found myself frustrated with my lack of progress and perhaps backsliding, and I decided to add a bit of landscape in the background, going totally off of only work…

Today was a bit of a breakthrough. Fueled by my recent experiment with the Buddha Board, and with my newfound resolve, inspired by Pat Allen, to approach painting with an open mindset, giving voice to my inner aesthetic impulses with less restraint or concern about conformity or technique, I created my first painting that includes…