practice.. 2023 Aug 28 Mon.. listening

morning.. thinking
I spent some time catching up this little blog thing. It made me think about what I'm actually doing with it. I thought I was committed to publishing little pieces of things I work on each day. It's turned into just a little report each day, with hardly any pictures or recordings of anything I'm working on. Over the next few weeks, I'll start fleshing this out and making more intentional practices around setting direction and making sure I'm trying something hard each day. I don't know what that will look like.

afternoon.. portfolio
I've been thinking about how I got decent at playing the piano years ago. It was mostly just going every Sunday to the church with my dad a few hours before meetings started. I would just flip through the hymn book and play all the songs I knew and then it would be sort of obvious where I needed improvement and I would pause and work out tough passages and challenge myself to try adding more than just the melody.

For a while now, I've been working on just a list of stuff I want to work on like that. It's not all just hymns, any longer. I have jokes and stories and harmonica and singing and poetry and web sites and all kinds of stuff I want to come back to. I think I'll just start with a portfolio page which will list my material of all types in different arrangements that make sense to me as I build up a way to review old material and add new material and watch the magic of everything growing and twisting and becoming really fun and great. I don't know what it will look like and it will likely change as the material and I grow and my needs change. I'm reminding myself to let that take years, and not put off the actual practicing of the material which is really where I learn what needs to come next.