Beginning Now

This is my first blog post. I have written much in my life, but today I enter a new format, with a new potential for being heard.

The Players of Now domain is dedicated to the spread of spontaneous artistic expression in all mediums, by all ages and all abilities, so we each feel we are contributing to the heart of the community.

My impetus comes from many areas (here are 4) –

  • Years as an improvisational musician, catalyzed by participating in one of Paul Winter’s Living Music Villages in 1994, where I learned that amazing and lyrical music can arise from the silence, given a high level of paying attention.
  • Allowing important or striking events to spark poetry. This began on my birthday in 1991, inspired by a man who recited his poems with such energy and glee that I asked myself if there was any poetry in me.
  • Being trained to facilitate drum circles by Arthur Hull, who demonstrated that any group can reach heights of musical expression without having a designated leader.
  • The joy of just “messing around” with drawing, paints or collage – it seems to focus me in a different mode.

Given that all creative expression begins with quiet – the silent mind, holding a hint of a question, open and expectant – I’ll sign off now, and wish you many playful moments.

Share

Blaise Kielar received Honorable Mention in the 2022 Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize for an excerpt from his memoir in progress, "Be Heard: The Quiet Kid Who Started the World’s Loudest Violin Shop." He opened Chapel Hill’s first violin shop in 1978 and retired from a music retail career by transitioning Electric Violin Shop into the first worker-owned co-op music store in the United States. He plays jazz violin and clarinet in several bands and leads the Bulltown Strutters, Durham’s community New Orleans brass band.