![]() Eventually, that dark inner child found light in music as she became an accomplished classical composer, creating with “that wonderful absorbing feeling of being,” with “a sigh of homecoming.” She writes: Soon, her single mother married and Tina became the eldest of five children living in an itinerant family across Turkey, Germany, and Israel. To the passing eye, I was unremarkable, even normal - but my inner self was silent, dark, and eternally sad for a loss that had no name. The day my mother rang Solvig’s doorbell and brought me home as an adopted child, I lost my first mother and father, my three brothers, a home, a country, and a language. To my three-year-old self, my foster family was my family. Long before she became an accomplished pianist and composer, she was a three-year-old girl living with her foster parents and siblings in Sweden, until she was ripped from the only family she knew to be adopted by an English teacher from Ohio, who eighteen years later was revealed to be her birth-mother, having abandoned her newborn in the heartbreak of an ill-fated love affair. (Available as a print.)ĭavidson - who is living with congestive heart failure after a savage bacterial infection - was a small child when her heart was first broken. ![]() One of French artist Paul Sougy’s mid-century scientific diagrams of life. Moist, dark soil, ready for new life to begin. Heartbreakingly, your heart breaks, and in the two halves, rocking on the table, is revealed rich earth. The life that you have so carefully protected and cared for. Acknowledging the vastness of the question, Levine paused, then offered: “I think the meaning of life is to let your heart be broken.” Reflecting on his words, Davidson writes: She recounts attending a talk by Stephen Levine - the poet and author best known for his work on death and dying - at which an audience member asked what the meaning of life is. How to live with that generative brokenness is what composer Tina Davidson explores throughout her memoir Let Your Heart Be Broken: Life and Music from a Classical Composer ( public library) - a lyrical reckoning with what it takes to compose a life of cohesion and beauty out of shattered bits and broken stories. In those moments, kneeling in a pool of the unknown, the heart breaks open and allows life - life itself, not the simulacrum of life that comes from control - to rush in. ![]() We lay plans, we make vows, we backbone the flow of uncertainty with habits and routines that lull us with the comforting dream of predictability and control, only to find ourselves again and again bent at the knees with surrender to forces and events vastly larger than us. We spend our lives trying to anchor our transience in some illusion of permanence and stability.
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