I had a dream
Me and my Siberians Kimi and Mischka see the eagle at the very same moment.
With the clear blue sky as a backdrop high above us, the lake and the autumn’s sparkling golden-red leaves, the powerful white-tailed eagle hovers proudly in sole majesty. She moves her wings occasionally in what appears to be slow motion and embodies the outstanding confident overview on all things we know from a position where nothing can threaten.
The solitude of strength.
It is a rare experience to perceive the world with another creature, and I often feel Kimi and Mischka see the bigger picture on a level that I rarely manage. I wonder what they really see up there right now. In the image of the eagle, I wish to see myself as a husband, father, brother, and son of my parents.
I also see my creativity with music through my cello’s body and soul, my shortcomings that made me fail and suffer.
Solitude gives strength, strength gives solitude.
I had a dream as powerful and real as dreams can be. After my initial thought of ‘just another musician’s horror dream’, the dream unfolded and became dream of consolation and comfort.
Together with some of my closest friends and colleagues, I have run a string quartet festival for 10 years on an island just off the southeast coast of Sweden. In this tiny-tiny village and its mediaeval church, which has been a place of human comfort for a thousand years non-stop, we play our favourite pieces from the great repertoire treasure box of the string quartet.
Now to the dream:
The day before our first concert at the 10th anniversary festival my three colleagues in the quartet summoned me for a meeting. They had something important to tell me. We sit down, I look at them, but no one is looking at me. Suddenly Helen bursts out:
“You do not play enough well; you do not keep up and your level as cellist just does not match any longer – we cannot stand it anymore and you do not seem to care or even notice it…!!”
I look immediately at the other three.
Silence.
David stares deep into his pint of beer; Peter is just looking at me with his big wide open expressive sad eyes.
I look down in internal panic with my heart going bananas moments before my reptile-brain takes over and I allow the defence of a cornered human to take over: “You all go to hell, I started this festival 10 years ago, you are here because of me, and this is how you re-pay me, by stabbing me in the back!! I am leaving the island now and I will never come back, and I will never play with you again!!” Helen starts hyperventilating, Peter sits silent on the sofa still with his big expressive eyes nailed at me, which is the worst of all, David still with his beer but now in tears.
The break-up and end are inevitable. This is it; I am really leaving the table.
The truth is slowly getting to me, like a wet deer skin wrapped around my forehead and drying up. The once empty bucket that stood under the dripping crane for years gradually filled up and I just didn’t notice it before it tipped over.
I lost contact with reality.
This is where I wake up and my instinct tells me that I had a nightmare since the feeling in my soul is that of horror. However, it only takes me a few seconds to realize what the dream was about.
The fear of not being able to do what I love the most: to play string quartets with some of my best friends in an environment where I have a deep personal history and where my wife and I had a fairy-tale wedding, a place and part of our country where I spent my childhood with my brother and our parents and where I started to play the cello 44 years ago.
This is the fear of getting old. Fear that my incredible and, after all, fantastic life is under threat.
I start to reason with myself: I am only 54 years old, sure I could be more fit and carry around less weight but come on, 54 is not that old. So why this sudden fear of age? I recently even had a visit to a clinic in Germany to thoroughly investigate my problematic left arm, so-called tennis-elbow, that has caused me so much stress my whole career only to find out that during all these years it was mostly in my head.
But I do feel that my body is getting older and that I will pay a price sooner or later for not being as fit or slim as I might be, something that has followed me my whole life. The stiffness is the worst because I am reminded non-stop about how I’m losing strength and flexibility. My inner, quite touching, picture of myself is the one of a tall and dark, incredibly strong and fit man, forever in his best years and eternally saluted and praised by his grandfather, the patrolling policeman of the north who became a chief lieutenant and who poured his love onto his first grandson maybe even more than he did to his own children. Anyway, this inner picture is breaking up now and I am under threat, and if I do not address it the rest of my life will surely be different from how I want it to be.
Through my dream I am receiving a message from myself. I better listen. The message comes through my dearest friends and through what I love doing the most.
In my fingers I perceive the music from the kitchen
With memories of the red waters of the Russian Karelia
in the deep taiga high above the Volga’s endless sunflower fields
I know what should be written on the stone when the Borodin Quartet plays Beethoven’s slow E minor Quartet