The August Playlist

I was sitting in early morning zazen last week when I suddenly thought: Do practices have seasons? Or rather to the point: Should practices have seasons?

Because mine do. 

And it has been a long tiresome season, for sure. Like almost everywhere, we have been hot-hot-hot. And dry. That Farmer’s Almanac prediction of a wet July? A lie. 

I haven’t taken an evening walk all summer. Some nights it is still 95 degrees at 8:30pm. I dash out to water and run back inside before I am eaten alive by the mosquitos. Mosquitos? Yes! We didn’t used to have mosquitos in New Mexico. Now they are all everyone talks about. 

The first two weeks of August are historically my late-summer studio break before the school year begins. Sometimes we travel. Sometimes we stay close to home and I fill the time with house and garden projects and seeing friends and former students. I read a lot of books and take as many naps as I want.

This most recent break was of the latter stay-cation variety. I spent hours working on the kitchen cabinet remodel project, meeting with designers and making countless decisions about knobs and styles. We finished up the bathroom project (Or rather, our best people finished the bathroom project. I supervised.). Every day I braved the heat long enough to do one small chore outside. I took a carload of hazardous waste to the city disposal site. Sexy stuff.

But all of this got me thinking about the cycles of practice, and finding a graceful rhythm inside the inevitable ebb and flow of our seasons. This summer found me biking to both the pool and the Zen Center in the mornings, until one day a couple of weeks ago it was suddenly too dark to be safe on the streets at 5:50am. In between gigs, my piano practice are Bach and Shostakovich Preludes and Fugues, but Quintessence rehearsals begin on Monday, which means a pile of choral accompaniments to get under my fingers. The musical season resumes. Practices shift. 

The August 2026 Playlist of Practices: 

Writing: (from Yes. February 2024.)

The other morning I was sitting in zazen counting breaths when the thought occurred to me, “Maybe I have a rhythm problem.”

Zazen is the Zen practice of “just sitting.” It’s simple, profound, often very hard. I love the zendo at the neighborhood Zen center, but even so, my formal zazen practice is irregular at best. Walking into that spare, austere space lit only by candles and natural light, I can literally feel my blood pressure dropping. Yet I can manage for weeks upon end to find very convincing excuses not to prioritize the meditation practice in my life. 

Perhaps it was literally the act of counting that triggered my rhythmic insight as I sat there, but regardless of its origin, I knew this thought was something I needed to ponder.

… An expansive definition of zazen suggests that everything in our lives is zazen, the time on the meditation cushion being just a sliver of the practice. And practice, by its very definition, implies a sort of dailiness. Both the gifts and the challenges of practicing arise in the act of showing up every day: on good days and bad days, when it’s sunny, when it’s rainy; on Mondays and on Fridays, summer and winter. You show up and do the work. That’s practice.

But what occurred to me as I sat there that morning and counted my breaths is that while this definition of practice was ideal, it was also a bit rigid, and didn’t honor the natural rhythms or cycles of the world around us. Seasons, after all, have a rhythm. There is the time to plant and the time to sow. There are the months of green leaves and the months of bare branches. There is the season to hike and the season to snowshoe. There are the outdoor tasks in the garden during warmer weather, and the indoor tasks around the house during the colder weeks. We sit zazen in the dark mornings and even darker evenings during fall and winter months, and follow our breaths watching the gentle light of dawn and dusk during spring and summer months. All of it has its perfect time and place.

… So what matters? The discipline of a daily practice? Yes. The flexibility of a practice that ebbs and flows? Yes. Practice boxes? Yes. A day spent in silence after a weekend of gigs? Yes. An evening spent needlepointing and listening to Brahms? Yes. A routine that is stable and consistent? Yes. Practicing sabbath-keeping? Yes. Adhering to a regular schedule of tasks and chores? Yes. A nimble 90-degree turn on a day’s expectations? Yes. A deliberate pregnant pause after a big project? Yes. A perfectly balanced practice of work and play? Yes. A perfectly imbalanced practice of work and play? Yes. 

Maybe in the end it’s all about rhythm. Or so it seemed to me that cold morning as I sat on my meditation cushion in the simple Zendo down the street. Sometimes clarity comes with the breath. Or at least an idea worth wrestling with as I walked home and considered the day ahead.

Gardening: I water relentlessly. I move rocks. I plant cacti and succulents in anticipation of future dry summers. All of this is structural, not cosmetic. It’s roofing and plumbing, not new bathroom fixtures or pretty midnight-blue kitchen cabinets. It’s scales and arpeggios practiced by the hour. Hanon in every key. 

Reading: Last fall, a former student told me she was reading Lonesome Dove. “Have you read it?” Kristen asked. “I can’t stop thinking about it.” 

I hadn’t read it, but then it was a 900-page book about cowboys, for Pete’s sake. I conveniently dismissed this recommendation. 

This summer I found myself in a reading drought. I didn’t have my eye on any newly published books. There was nothing on my library queue. I began randomly pulling novels off my shelves and rereading them. I think I was considering taking up Rosamund Pilcher’s The Shell Seekers for the 27th time when I remembered Lonesome Dove. “Well,” I thought, “at least that would keep me busy for a while.”

I was about two and a half pages into Larry McMurtry’s saga when I realized “OMG! I am going to LOVE this book.” I tore through it, finishing the whole thing in about 10 days. I had no idea I could love a book about cowboys—for Pete’s sake!—so much. 

Teaching: If there is a season to the teaching year, there is also a season to the former student visits. In between semesters or on the edges of the summer, older kids come back from their far-away lives to see their families and drop by the studio for tea and long conversations. This is my favorite season.

A couple of weeks ago, a group of former kids came to brunch. Included in that group was a recently graduated high school senior, Grace, who had heard about the get-together. “Can I come too?” she asked me. 

In my head, all my students are roughly the same age and know each other well. They were all in studio classes together and sat next to one another at recitals. But that isn’t the case at all. A six-year age difference between these young people is an eternity. And as I watched the kids pass toast and pour coffee around my table that morning I realized, Grace is heading across the country to college and is scared. In her eyes, these older kids know everything. No wonder she wanted to be here. 

At some point, one of the older girls said to Grace, “Someone told me this before I went to college so I’m going to tell you: It’s OK to sit in the dining hall by yourself. It’s not like high school where you might think you’re a loser to sit by yourself. In college, it’s perfectly OK.”

Yes, I thought to myself, yes. And right at that moment, my entire season fell into place. 

It is OK to sit in the dining room by yourself. In a world where we are all scared and desperate to fill our lives with friends and activities and evidence of our worthiness as human beings, we could all use the reminder that a little solitude, a little space is not only an OK thing, it is necessary in order for our souls to survive this crazy mad noisy world. Indeed, there is a season for everything under the sun: a season for the 900-page novel, a season for biking to the swimming pool and zazen, a season for building up the foundations of our work and practices, a season to move our rocks and water our gardens. And so we sit, both in company and alone. We count our breaths. It’s OK.