Friends have been talking about playing instruments lately, have been humming with me on car trips, have been talking about getting together to sing. After the last TML gig A. and I plotted to get together on Thursday for some singing at her place. A couple more ladies joined, and we had a fun evening learning and singing a beautiful round. Between the Monday planning and the Thursday get-together, friend D. had forwarded Karl Paulnack's Why Music? speech that's been making the rounds on the Internet. Since I set about healing myself with the violin, I've known that music is essential for my life, happiness, and brain health. After Thursday night's singing, I'm even more convinced that we all need it on some basic level that we, as a society, don't recognize.

I just updated Tango Mucha Labia's events calendar. Whoa. Lots of good stuff this month.

Why you should not give your cell phone # to students:

7:56 a.m. "Dont mark me late, there was a huge stampede of rhinos!"

Yessah.

Today I took Maurice to the shop, where he is no doubt flunking inspection at this very moment. Meanwhile, I had a nice ride home on the newly adjusted Xtracycle. Yay! I biked home in the sun and poked my head in the hoop houses. The cilantro died in February, but there are tiny red and green lettuces growing. Spring is coming! And my seeds arrived yesterday. Time for peas in the hoop house, I think.

I found this e-mail deep in my inbox, from when I was just out of the hospital in 2001:

Dear Val,
This is your friend Aunt Pollyanna. I have this disgusting sense of really important stuff coming from your catastrophe. I feel like in a funny way you saved your life. And that it will have much more love emphasis and less, but also different and better, performance emphasis. I wish you'd get a longhand writing habit going. Maybe morning pages, but also some very short essays related to music teaching. How's that for none of my business?
Love, J

Oh. I'd forgotten all about that e-mail, from when I was in the sea of trauma and depression and anger and absolute stubbornness that I would somehow make it. But reading it now, she was completely right. All of those things happened. MS did save my life. It still does, as it makes me constantly reassess what I'm doing and where I'm going. I've been reassessing all year, since September, realizing that it will soon be time to move on from schoolteaching. The next thing hasn't completely revealed itself yet, but it's starting to become clear. I'm getting glimpses of it as I continue to teach school, violin, and tango, and continue to think about music and motion and health and teaching. I think I can see where I'm going now and why. Oooooh, the suspense is killing me.

It's Spring, so it must be MS season. It seems to be that way for me. Maybe it's my liver wrenching itself out of Winter, maybe it's the damp, variable weather, maybe it's a long, tough school year. Who knows. This week I've had pain behind my left eye and weird vision in it, blurry I suppose. I haven't usually had eye issues with MS, so this was something new. I've been trying to get enough sleep, trying not to absorb the crappy energy of my high schoolers, but the eye just seems to be like that right now. Nothing is helping.

Tonight TML continued our run of crazy gigs, playing with Primo Cubano over at SPACE. I taught a crash course in tango at 8:00, and then we played alternating sets with PC. We were waiting around in the green room and I was apologizing because I was in kind of a detached mood from my MS stuff, and L. said "have you done tapping?" "EFT?" I asked. I'd come across it early in my recovery but hadn't really used it. So she took me through some of it while we were waiting for our sound check.

I think there probably is something to the tapping points, but what got me today was the talking. I "wrote" my grandmother's eulogy when I was just out of the hospital, using voice recognition software. Wow, was that tough. Sometimes it's hard to say things out loud. That experience came back to me this evening. While tapping, I was supposed to say things like "Even though I feel ______, I choose to feel ___________." Mine started out as "Even though I feel lonely and sad, I choose to feel happy and full of life," but that seemed kind of syrupy, and I switched it to "Even though I feel lonely and sad, I choose to feel relaxed and accepting of my body as it is."

After about the 6th or 8th time I said it, I finally cried. It was a relief. I think I don't let myself cry sometimes. And it was a good thing, too, because I needed to get rid of that stuff before going on stage. Thank you, L. I heart my band. Now for a gig tomorrow, a gig on Thursday, and then finally a vacation.