Glass is Like Water

During the gong retreat, I noticed something I wasn't expecting. The biggest aha from the whole experience wasn't learning how to use your mallet in umpteen different ways, or what overtones look like on a graph (a science class that actually explained what we were doing). It was the journey back to play. To hold that childhood wonder again. To see the world with fresh eyes.

It really hit home when we spent a day with Jochen Fassbender and all of his musical creations. I first met him the day he arrived in Calcata, an approachable silver-haired seventy-year-old with a ponytail and a strong German accent. He'd brought his instruments with him — an entire world of things I'd never seen before. A glass xylophone that you need wet hands to play. The sound was mesmerizing. Then there were these impossibly thin copper tubes held upright from a base. After dipping your fingers in rosin, the tubes are played by rubbing your fingers up and down along their length. The rubbing left a semi-permanent indentation on my finger. More xylophones, this time made of shale and travertine; they sing too.

I could see the little boy coming through in Jochen, demonstrating each instrument and then inviting each of us to play with him. Jochen became most impassioned when he described the effect of the instruments on a group of small children. One of them came up to him afterward and said that he now understood what music was.

Then the finale: taking his instruments and the gongs down to the river, wading in, making music in the water. When would anyone ever let you take a glass tube harp into a river? According to Jochen, glass is like water, always moving, just at different rates. So taking it back to the river was like finding its home. And taking us to the river was like finding ourselves.