What did you do on your summer vacation?

Note from Deanna: I’m restarting my blog. Since I had my website overhauled one year ago, I haven’t yet learned all of the fancy design things that I can do with these individual posts, but I want to write and share my not-always-but-sometimes-musical musings with you. Here’s my first endeavor.
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One thing I did at the tail end of my summer was to visit my Mom. Here she is, standing in her long-dreamed-and-planned for new kitchen.

Here’s one of the major things I did this summer: I bought a car! And that’s my very own house, too, with a Steinway grand piano inside it!

What did you do on your summer vacation? This may sound like a common beginning to first-day-of-elementary-school classes, but it’s also a question that I find myself asking myself at the end of what has been a full, boring, exciting, energizing, up-and-down summer. Now that the summer is unofficially over with the too-soon start of the academic year, this question carries an onslaught of dreaded “shoulds”: I should have used my summer more wisely by sending out more regular email newsletters; I should have uploaded all of my sacred music catalog that didn’t transfer from my old website store onto my new site (not giving myself credit for the ten score pages that I re-created this summer); I should have enjoyed the outdoors more; I should have rested more . . . you get the picture.

My “shoulds” fail to acknowledge the simple fact that I—and, of course, all of us—live in a world of finite resources. We are not superhuman beings who can immediately manifest all of our desires with our finite time and our physical bodies. The fact that I am an engaged, curious person who loves to learn new things, coupled with my self-reflective nature, means that I am often asking questions—and, many times, questioning myself. Adding the fact that I am a woman in an extremely male-dominated profession means that I have to continually push through my questions by stating my worth to myself and to others, and to value myself by standing up when necessary.

My goal in this new academic year is to value myself by taking care of my health. By not letting a doctoral program take over my life. By setting more limits. By making the hard decisions to accept that I will need to say goodbye to some tasks in order to say hello to others. 

So, rather than berate myself for not having gotten an email newsletter out in six weeks, I’m going to try to do the newsletter in smaller chunks and send it out regularly, but perhaps, at times, with less frequency (if you’d like to be on the e-news list, sign up at the bottom of any page here at my website). I want to stay in touch with you, my fans and supporters. It is your support that has helped me to make it through the eleven months when I didn’t yet have a piano in my home. It is your tangible expressions of support that made it possible for me to purchase the seven-foot Steinway piano that now sits in my living room. I want to tend to that piano by playing it more, and, in so doing, tend to myself. At this mid-life moment, my life looks nothing like what I thought it might look like—even as of four years ago. I am still weathering constant change, but in everything, I know that I belong wherever I find myself because I belong to myself—and that I have fans, whether existing or yet-to-become, in many, many places. These two things make my journey easier. I hope that I can provide some ease for your own journeys. Thank you for being a part of my mine.