Catapulted By Vivaldi

When it is all finished, you will discover that it was never random. The day I saw the advertisement for the Behind the Beat Contest, I had read a line in a book titled, “The Clockmakers Daughter” by Kate Morton. I was sitting in a quiet parking lot with my car window down, listening to distant birds and kids playing in an open grass area directly ahead of me. It was a crisp February day, yet the sun was tenderly draped over my arm, as well as the book pages with a calming warmth. I was waiting to pick up my daughter from school when I read the line, “…music has the ability to alter people’s lives – their very minds.” Whether it was a sign or not, it positioned me to decide to enter the contest.

It had been a long time since I heard those escalating euphoric notes. Those notes that lifted me off the ground and into the dream of a musty, shabby-chic shed infiltrated with the magical smell of oil paint, pink hydrangeas, and bougainvillea climbing the walls. When I was a girl, I always imagined that I would have a special art studio nestled in a lush garden where I could create landscape masterpieces. My passion for the outdoors has always been engrained in my heart and stems from growing up in a small town called Lake Arrowhead in the Southern California mountains. My love affair with art and nature gave birth to landscape oil painting when I was as young as eight years old. I would try to replicate Thomas Kinkade paintings because I wanted nothing more than to live inside them.

But in my early teens, I’ll never forget the first time that I began craving to write as much as paint.

I heard Vivaldi.

It was the 90’s and I was going through my parent’s CD collection looking for something calm to listen to while I painted, something other than Whitney Huston, Maria Carey, or the Soundtrack from the modernized Romeo and Juliet film. My mom had gone to the grocery store and when she came back, the whole house was filled with Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and I was screaming to her, “Mom! What is this amazing music?! I adore it! I adore it!”

It was then that I had leaped from painting to writing; like vaulting from one high branch to another. I was catapulted to new places, imagined new stories, and craved to get my invisible thoughts to something tangible like paper.

I saw myself walking distant grass hills in Ireland. I envisioned salt air entwined with dense sappy forests rolling down from peeks to mossy valleys and rivers, whispering a scent that gave nature a soul. I envisioned sailors gawking in revulsion as mystic black crows watched over like drone soldiers, lining roofs of stores, pubs and houses, weaving towns together like a dark thread. I envisioned a meek cottage perched on a foggy bluff, covered in ferns, fireflies and the tallest trees anyone had ever seen; so tall that looking up at them caused vertigo.

But by the time I was 40, it had been over 20 years since I had listened to those magical notes. Life got in the way as it does for so many of us. Adult reality hit – college, work, marriage, baby, divorce, bills, and traffic. My music choices would bounce around according to my mood as a single working mom and consisted of anything from country to heavy-metal to Enya, Eminem, Creedance Clearwater Revival, Coldplay, Depeche Mode, the Black Keys, Beck, and everything in-between. Never Vivaldi, it had faded like vapor in the wind.

But life has a strange way of speaking to us, and many times its through music.

Two years ago, I had come home from work exhausted by the office job and dull traffic. I had poured a glass of pinot noir and turned on Netflix when I saw a show called Chef’s Table. Not knowing what to cook for dinner and craving some inspiration to lift my dreary spirits, I pushed play and plopped on the couch.

The opening theme music was Vivaldi.

Like coming out of a comma, the moment that I heard those magical crescendos and vibrantly dramatic violins, I began to remember who I was again. It was like tiny bursts of magical star dust were whirling up inside my soul and ready to burst out. The music was digging up what had been buried deep down in the dusty caverns of my weary heart. I have talents and gifts that should not be hidden but seen like a lighthouse in the dark and used to help and inspire others. I was and am an artist, a writer, a creator…and passionate lover of nature. I felt a twist in my heart that intertwined regretful sorrow and newfound invigoration rolled into one.

Only a few days later, using old oil paints that I dug out of the garage, I had a forest landscape which was finished with ease in four hours listening to Vivaldi. As I brushed and shaped and created each dark notch for the birch trees, I heard a whispering in my ear, “you are a unique masterpiece.”

My daughter now listens to Vivaldi with me. Her favorite piece being the Spring version of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, mine being Winter.

We all have a purpose; we all have gifts and talents that are uniquely made to be shared with the world. Vivaldi was the supernatural sign being held up for me as I was walking down the foggy road of life not knowing where I was or where I was going. Those magical notes put me back on my true path, and when it is all finished, you will discover that it was never random.