29. Under the Lime Tree in the Courtyard

You stand barefoot on red clay tiles, still warm from the late sun.

The air carries the smell of cumin, garlic, and slow-roasted tomato: your spontaneous creation, simmering through an open window.

Overhead, a breeze stirs the canopy, flickering mottled shade across the clay terrace. Wisteria petals dance on invisible strings. One lands above the back of your hand.

The tower bell chimes once.

Then again, softer. As though it, too, prepares for rest.

[ Sit down at a table of blue tiles ] —

You rustle into a wicker armchair, shared with a village kitten curled up in half-moon.

Somewhere, down a cobblestoned alley, someone is singing.

And without thinking, you begin singing too — is it the same tune?

---

// Side B //

A hearthy hello from Campfire Sparks! Thank you for tuning in.

You heard two piano clips: last month’s 90-min live composition session bookmarked at minute-59; then in the video, a visitation to salty sea air on faraway melody, three days prior.

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1 Epiphany That Cured My Procrastination vs. 8+ Courses That Failed

Brooklyn, winter 2013.

I’m walking through a blizzard to my local CVS pharmacy. Snacks for the weekend before it gets tragic. At the store I bump into my barber, arms full of the same idea, except sweet not savory, and within sixty seconds he rummages from his pocket 3 capsules of molly: here I gotchu, this storm’s gonna be crazy . . . take these, 1 per person, you’ll have a blast.

I had just bought a shiny Bechstein upright piano, because transcribing Jelly Roll Morton onto a Rhodes Mark II was not going to fly forever.

Two instruments now flank my bed, complicating the previous vibe. The new arrival is closer, basically on top of me.

Ready.

Gorgeous.

The piano lid stays open — and I don’t play.

Here’s my secret: I can’t approach a piano.

It didn’t start that way, not when I was 6 and asked for one, fascinated by the music coming from the radio — not in those early years, how the instrument unwrapped itself each day in our Phoenix, Arizona living room, 100-years-old, dazzling, decked in mahogany carvings like a lighthouse beaming a path for late-night explorations. But that was so long ago: was it just a honeymoon?

I forgot.

---

Snow seals me in for years, but my room always leaks time.

The city hums back to life, monochrome to neon. I gig in town, tour around the world, record albums — but mostly, I pace circles between radiator and piano, rehearsing excuses: need email, need burrito, need to set the mood just right.

The bench remains a foreign continent ten steps away.

When I practice, the feeling is magic. Rehearse for shows, run arps and bebop, explore the mysteries of Bach and Garner, arrange Black Hole Sun and Oblivion with that spirited thoroughbred leading the way.

It’s just that I spend most of every day avoiding it. Half the days, I dither, dally, dawdle, end up a no-show. It sucks.

One day, a friend invites me to church on a whim: I find myself in front of the pastor and congregation, in tears — confessing equal-parts frustration and confusion.

“I don’t understand why I can’t make it to the instrument that I love so much.”

10 years of this.

Meanwhile, 2 years after our CVS hang, my barber is nominated for a Latin Grammy.

---

This story is more common than it is told. The struggle, the ironically well-practiced downplay of the struggle. My own students, confiding in hushed admission that they’d signed up with hopes of rewriting the story.

1 monkey per person.

I felt I tried everything:

• Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. Dutifully keeping up with morning pages for a week and a half.

• Transcendental Meditation.

• Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art: nodding with gusto the whole carnival ride. Must conquer La Résistance!

• A 10-day Vipassana silent meditation retreat in Belgium.

• 3 separate accountability buddies — one family member, two friends — each cycled to abandonment.

Spinning wheels create theories as illusory as holograms.

maybe i’m lazy and lack self-discipline
real musicians don’t wait for inspiration, they act
it’s gotta be stress — I mean hello, the topic alone makes me anxious

• I study Atomic Habits (Clear), Can’t Hurt Me (Goggins), Unwinding Anxiety (Brewer), Four Thousand Weeks (Burkeman). Draw diagrams, recommend them to friends . . . because I want to believe.

• Log an impressive stretch with an app called Streaks, finishing 60 consecutive days of “piano workshop”. Enough reps to enshrine a habit, no?

• Throughout these efforts, schedule each day — the kind of organization leading to calendars, Getting Things Done (Allen), and other time management systems.

But I always relapse into whiteout.

That time at my friend’s church, I hadn’t expected to tell my story, but I was even more surprised by what happened after. The outpouring of emotions from a bunch of people who came up to me. They knew how I felt, because they’d felt it, too.

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The Terrain

Sketch a world map of the advice out there and here’s the main continents:

1. Just do it. — brute-force willpower and confrontations. influencers, gurus, boot-camps. regimens to adopt, supplements to eat.

2. Systems & hacks — rewards + punishments. habit stacks, pomodoros, gamified apps. devices and life optimization.

3. Social coercion — accountability in groups, public bets. external eyes as borrowed discipline.

4. Mindset makeovers — affirmations, moodboards, "the secret".

1, 2, 3 are pressure.

Pressure raises stakes, under assumptions that turning up the volume makes someone listen better.

4 goes in the opposite direction. Clarify your intentions, trust in the universe, and your desires shall materialize.

No shade on this list: if any combination of them work for you, that's wonderful.

But if not, or not really — not without baggage or burnout — then let me give you an idea whose time has come.

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Here I Gotchu, This Storm’s Gonna Be Okay

2 years ago, I found my biggest trauma . . . waiting in the shadows for me my whole life.

One day I’ll tell the story. For now I’d like to acknowledge it’s some of the deepest wounds a child can experience. Re-encountering it was a surprise: traumatic again, in old and new ways.

I bring it up now because it prompted me to launch a submarine expedition, uncovering places previously hidden from my awareness, bit by bit; understanding how my insecurities and perspectives are connected — and eventually reshaping all my relationships: to others, to acts of creation, to myself.

I bring it up because everywhere I see people suffering from emotional pain.

It’s madness to only now learn of tools to heal wounds untouchable by conventional advice.

The new continent:

5. Embodied learning. looking for the source of the problem, usually emotional in nature, often hidden. in the case of past trauma, which practically everyone has in some kind, releasing stuck energy through the body.

We start by activating curiosity and asking questions:

Is there an emotional obstacle?
Or, does some part of me sense an action unsafe?

Unsafe can be subtle: a quick jaw‑clench when you picture the gym, a drop in the stomach at the sight of a blank page, a pang of stress about a social interaction. You could override such signals with willpower — but they’re going to keep coming back.

There is an embedded dynamic here that I find deeply beautiful: any recurring red flag is your own self gifting you the opportunity to release energy that got stuck. In fact, your entire being seeks out situations for such healing to occur.

So, back to the obstacle.

First, high likelihood your emotional obstacle to action is invisible to you — otherwise you wouldn’t be blocked.

Look for the source: even if you can’t see it, where is it coming from? Often this requires pausing long enough (minutes / months) to explore what’s underneath reluctance, negative feeling, etc. Almost certainly, the exploration will be uncomfortable. Scanning can happen through imagination, meditation, writing, therapy, conversation, and all other forms of self-inquiry — it benefits from every revisit.

Two more clippings of good news:

1. Staying curious in the face of discomfort gets stronger with practice and is cumulative, permanently.

2. No time limits. You can examine obstacles and stresses days or years after the fact, to perfect effect.

In 2023, I began seeing how my chronic, kryptonite piano procrastination was actually:

• fear of sounding bad

• fear of forgetting skills

• fear of running out of ideas

• fear of negative judgment — really my own

. . . and that all of these were the same fear: the fear of not being liked, same as the fear of not being worthy of love.

No wonder all attempts to apply pressure only made the problem worse. (Continent 4 always felt nice but irrelevant.)

As I explored this landscape and kept journaling, my life-long fears connected to music-making evaporated in weeks, and the piano became freely accessible at any time. This is no doubt the most monumental, empowering, joyous habit-change I’ve experienced, even next to others I’m thankful for:

daily habit            how long I wanted it before it took

cold shower            n/a
yoga/stretching        months
morning walk           2 years
morning writing        2 years
piano workshop         decades
end-of-day journal     1 year
early bedtime          10 years
no screens < noon      5 years

There’s more work to do.

I am thrilled that the process remains categorically separate from “self-discipline, willpower, and grit” narratives.

Whichever core wounds someone is still hurt from — embarrassment, rejection, being “not good enough”, etc. — uncovering those from deeper levels allows surface resistances to soften, even dissolve.

It’s important to note: Examining feelings isn’t a detour from action; it’s actually upstream the usefulness of all other tools. And while dedicated time with a trauma-aware therapist can loosen deep-seated emotions, even a few minutes of honest body‑check — “tight throat, anxious; okay, noted” — can lower internal alarms.

Once safety levels rise, an alternative system you choose — “just do it (even if you’re scared)”, pomodoros, accountability partners — lands on more fertile soil.

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I’ve found these resources the most helpful

• The Book: on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (Alan Watts)

• A Return to Love (Marianne Williamson) and A Course in Miracles (workbook)¹

• Gabor Maté’s talks and learning resources

• Peter Levine’s Healing Trauma workshop materials — this is superhero stuff

• Extreme Ownership (Willink & Babin)

• A trauma-aware therapist who champions radical self-love

For creators, also these:

• The Gift (Lewis Hyde)

• Big Magic (Elizabeth Gilbert)

• Effortless Mastery (Kenny Werner), especially for musicians and performers

• On Connection (Kae Tempest), ditto

• Jack Butcher’s perspectives on permissionless creation

• Dickie Bush’s and Nicolas Cole’s frameworks

I believe there’s a book to be written on this stuff, especially for creators who face not only “being alive in this wacky world” but also “pouring soul into things they make” and “showing themselves vulnerably to crowds”.

In other words: this is a high-level survey — if you want me to go into detail or write a how-to guide on a particular aspect, let me know in the comments.

tl;dr — maximum agency; limitless love; you are amazing.

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Tributary 3: Waveriding

Something terrible has happened.

I tried to write an album.

But the music refused. It multiplied, like weeds through a mystic ruin. Each time I touched the keys, new paths appeared.

Melody, rhythm, time itself — untamed, anarchic.

I had been feeding earth spirits into the machine, and it began to speak back, in rhythms no conservatory would admit.

The piano revealed itself not as a polite European harp in a box, but drums filled with secrets — ready to unleash their percussive soul.

So be it: the album cannot be assembled from tracks laid in a studio, or recorded out on field pianos, or other such “me-centric” nonsense.

Instead, it’ll be unfurled in full public view, as music+performance art — stream-of-consciousness note-by-note, a portal we’ll all jump through together, an invitational work to upends not only the fundamental role of the piano, but also our assumptions about how a collection of music is distributed, released, captured, learned, spoken.

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Since the project sings a set of perspectives on the piano that I’ve never heard before, I originally planned to unveil all of them only with the album’s debut.

However.

Original plan is a no-go (see fever-dream above).

So the “album” has been expanded into a collaborative language.
and the “debut” has been expanded into a gift exchange rooted in oral tradition.

Therefore the reveal begins not in 6–9 months, but now.

The intro video above is a clip from Tributary 1: Embarkation, the first show I performed with the material.

Coming up in Issue 30: more of the music, where it’s from and where it’s going, and the distribution model.

Love you all.

🦤

1. Some people find “God” language alienating (including, partially, me); still I recommend you try this book, and weigh Marianne’s advisory to keeping in mind that the word can be swapped out for any other you prefer.