Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?

2017 allowed me, time and time again, to change my answer to this question.

• I started the year a coffee drinker — and ended it a tea enthusiast.
• I started the year a housing cooperative resident — and finished it a food-coop worker.
• I started the year teaching 20 elementary aged students — and ended it teaching none.
• I started the year a girlfriend — and finished it as an equal part of an open, honest relationship.
• I started the year a senior — and finished it a graduate student.
• I started the year with only a casual interest in zen — and ended it with a seven day sesshin.
• I started the year a Texan — and finished it a New Yorker (though I couldn’t resist retreating back to Texas for this sub-zero winter!).

So much has happened in one year! And, of course, who I am has changed every step of the way.

At the beginning of 2017 I was preparing myself for grad-school auditions. I had successfully turned in my applications and pre-screening videos, but over winter was putting in the work to make my live audition as persuasive as possible. Days were spent slaving over Mendelssohn and Paganini, and wrestling with the desire to procrastinate that comes from insecurity. I found resolve in Mary Oliver’s writing (blog about it here), and my wonderful teacher, Sandy Yamamoto’s, encouragement.

Throughout the winter break I was also processing two of the most important courses I took at UT, peacemaking rhetoric with Dr. Diab and Teaching and Learning in Music with Dr. Duke in Fall 2016. Taking these advanced rhetoric and graduate level music courses gave me the confidence to begin thinking of myself as an academic. I started to wonder what value I could offer in academia, and what sort of skills I should begin honing in order to deliver that value. Though my last semester (Spring 2017) was a walk in the park compared to all other semesters, Dr. Diab’s willingness to help me publish my writing and Dr. Duke’s praise of the maturity in my teaching the semester before let me use my free time to wonder and dream forward.

In February and March I traveled, nearly every weekend, to a new state to audition. The fun of traveling to Wisconsin, Arizona, Colorado, Ohio, and New York far outweighed the anxiety around auditioning. I had more lessons with a variety of teachers in five weeks than I had had in my entire violin career. I learned so much from visiting with potential teachers and amazing string pedagogues. It was, honestly, a blast.

When I returned from auditions, I finally had the time to pour into relationships. I invested time and love into my housing cooperative family. For the first time in four years I was home before sunset, eating dinner with a group of people, and letting myself just chat on a couch with a friend. I went out for beers with my friends from school at the nearby pub (on weeknights!), performed farewell gigs with Light Horse Harry, and illegally ventured up to the private hot tubs at the luxury apartments next door. I had a blast serving the cooperative as ‘labor tzar,’ stayed up late talking to my roommate for hours, and woke up before the sun to attend 6am sits at the Austin Zen Center.

The last semester of undergrad was crucial. I needed it to emancipate myself from the grind of classes; I needed to tap out of school in order to tap into a deeper meaning for academic work. It was, quite honestly, the perfect preparation for graduate school where the hours in class are few but the course load is heavy.

And graduate school came. I departed from the University of Texas, and enrolled as a student of Violin and Suzuki Pedagogy at Ithaca College. There was an interlude of wonderful summer adventures in between, however.

I loafed in my grandmother’s beautiful home (just a few minutes away from the gorgeous San Marcos river), completely relieved of obligations and responsibilities. I traveled through the Rocky Mountains with my best friend, Eilish (blog about the experience here). I taught music deep in the woods of western Michigan at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp (the importance of that experience here, here, here.)

After a road trip with a new friend in an old, purple mini-van, I found myself in Ithaca, New York. I was enamored with the newness of it all. New bicycle, new roads, new teachers, new campsites, new food, new friends. New identity — grad student.

I nestled into my newfound roles in the music school

• teaching String Class (a secondary methods class for non-string players) alongside string pedagogue Dr. James Mick
• teaching scales class to the undergraduates of my violin studio
• researching at the graduate level (blog posts here)
• returning to Book 1 as a teacher trainee with Carrie Reuning-Hummel as my mentor (new teaching philosophy here)
• being a professional leader for the school of performing/teaching/living

Requests for my playing, my knowledge, my advice came in ways they never had in my time at the University of Texas. There was something about remaking, no re-presenting, myself at Ithaca that was true, but also misleading. I had to be clear that I was only 22. My advantages were just the result of a four year head start. The struggles of undergraduate life were ones I experienced, too. We’re all (undergrads, grads, post-grads, faculty) in this together.

The most important change in my first semester of graduate school, a change which really taught me that we’re all in this together, was a trip every Sunday morning to Ithaca Zen Center.

Though I began exploring Zen while in Austin, it was the commitment to Zen practice in Ithaca that really opened up a new path. I found the effort to unplug, to let go, to breath, to listen, to collaborate in individuality unfailingly yielded a presence of mind, body and soul that I had only before experienced in running and in playing violin.  The more I gave to the Zen center, the more clear violin playing became. The more I studied Zen philosophy, the more of it I saw in Suzuki’s teaching.

The more Sundays I settled into my cushion at the Zen center next to musicians, professors, gardeners, and business men, the more I came to realize that we are all (all beings) striving to exist together. This elucidation helped to put studio class and orchestra auditions and juries into perspective.

I allowed my fascination with Zen to drive my annotated bibliography project in Prof. Shanton’s research course — the most important academic project I have completed to date. Aligning my musical, academic, teaching, and spiritual life was deeply gratifying. It is this work of alignment that I hope to continue into future doctoral work and professional life.

Sitting at the Zen center for seven days at the end of the year, illuminated my self-ness, my being as it resides on earth to me. The importance of sitting with myself in silence, day after day, became evident in the sitting. But since returning to ‘real life’ I have felt the reverberation of that deep presences in everything I do, from eating to thinking to walking to listening. It is clear that sitting will deeply impact the work that I do as a teacher, and that in sitting I am doing a sort of teaching.

My seriousness about Zen has helped me to liberate my being from selfish-egoness and recursive thinking activity. So the answer to, “Who am I?” is far different now than it was at the begining of 2017. My idea of “I” or self has been (partially) dismantled. My concept of myself as an individual, sentient personhood is weak after a semester of weekly sits and seven days of straight sitting. Instead I’m seeing myself in the ground that supports my feet, the string that spins under my bow hairs, the bird whose song appears to my ears. I see myself in the students I teach and the teacher who teaches me. I marvel at the beauty of myself appearing as the universe around me.

“Who am I?” the existential question that has stumped humanity for centuries, seems to matter less to me in this boundless moment of Now, than it ever has before.