Friday, February 10, 2012

Connected by dots

Just got back from a two-day workshop hosted up at Taipei American School--a workshop for music educators, which included lots of dancing and singing and storytelling and exploring sound/space/movement. I always enjoy hanging out with music educators. They are a special breed of people that I am not ashamed to identify with, even though I am shy and perhaps more self-conscious than most of them.


I really appreciated getting to meet these people from different walks of life, now teaching in such different places like Singapore, Jakarta, Vietnam, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Many of these people (from Canada, US, London, or Australia) professed a love for Asia that I could appreciate. It's always good to meet people who are well-traveled. They know that the world is much bigger than their own experiences.


Classmates were lovely, the classroom was lovely, the school was beautiful. I'd only heard of TAS before and seeing it in real life and in action made all the childhood legends of enviableness make sense. 


I want to work there. Sort of.




Being there made me wish I were staying here longer. I wish I could invest more into this...and really own it for what it's worth. But the stakes are high against the possibility of staying, and that's always a downer.

In the meantime, though, I'm going to use what I've got.

So thankful for Orff workshops! This is the kind of teaching that motivates, inspires, strengthens. It makes me realize in new ways how our experiences with music can shape who we are, how it resonates deeply in an unseen part of our souls. Music truly does draw us together, on different levels and in more ways than we realize. We are like dots on a page, ready to be connected, ready to be inspired by the fluid and dynamic lines that may pass through us.*

It's quite beautiful, actually.

(*taken from the theme of the workshop)

1 comment:

  1. your time and place to invest is coming, no need to get ahead of ourselves :)

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