The Moon Never Beams (Part 1)

by lylechan on May 13, 2012

You are the cause of every meaning in the world that you perceive.

In 1986, Patrick Duffy’s parents Marie and Terrence Duffy were shot dead by two teenagers trying to rob the tavern they owned in Montana.

Though I’m not Buddhist, I come across a lot of Buddhists – quite regularly, in fact. I’m sure it’s because my personal beliefs overlap with many Buddhists’, particularly a nondualistic view of existence.

When I was growing up, I loved science fiction. It began with the movie Star Wars, which in retrospect was quite soft compared to the novels of Robert A. Heinlein and Frank Herbert that I moved on to.

Or did it begin with Star Wars? Around the same time – I was ten years old – I watched the Man from Atlantis made-for-TV movies about a man who washes up on a Californian shore dying from suffocation. Doctors are unable to save him but a marine biologist, noticing his webbed hands and feet and that his lungs seemed more like gills, hits on the idea of ‘drowning’ him to save him. He turns out to be a water-breathing man.

The character was played by an unknown Patrick Duffy, later to become a household name as Bobby Ewing in Dallas. As I really enjoyed the Man from Atlantis movies (and I stress the movies, not the limp TV series that followed), any news about the talented and very handsome Patrick Duffy caught my attention.

When I heard about his parents’s murder, what struck me was his reaction. He was calm – so calm in fact he was criticised for not showing grief. And that was when I learned he was Buddhist. What he’s said about this, then and since, is profound and inspiring to me. I’ll share some quotes.

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Untitled, for Steve (from Solo Piano)

by lylechan on March 18, 2012

Untitled, for Steve (2008/2012)

I wrote this piece as a gift for Steve Pavlina in December 2008, and revised it some three years later.

In mid-2008 I was beginning to realise how much I’d been living in a fog. It took catching glimpses of clarity to understand the fog was even there. There’s an old saying about a fish not knowing it’s wet, because it’s lived its whole life in water. It wouldn’t know what it’s like to be dry. I didn’t know what it’d be like to live with incisive clarity.

I was just starting to be honest with myself about my lifelong desire to write music professionally. I had written a string quartet, Farwell My Good I. Forever, which was as it turns out the last work I ‘needed’ to write to convince myself that the tiny number of great pieces I had composed over the years were not flukes, but proof of a permanent, reliable talent.

This is the thing about fear. It’s plain irrational. You can do something wonderful, but still focus on how it was luck that made it turn out well. And you tell yourself, you got away with it that time, better not to tempt fate again.
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Wisconsin Cowboy Lullaby (from Solo Piano)

March 18, 2012

Wisconsin Cowboy Lullaby (1989) There’s almost nothing to this very short story. But I’m telling it because it led me to write a piece of music I’ve grown quite fond of over the years. It was October 1989 and I was at a sparsely attended Homecoming game at Camp Randall, the stadium in Madison where [...]

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Performances in March: Liberty & The Pursuit

March 1, 2012

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December from “Then, gently, the world began anew.”

December 20, 2011

No matter what the song says, what the world needs now isn’t love. Not the garden-variety love people think of, anyway. It needs the special kind of unconditional love called forgiveness. Christmas and New Year hold such power and it’s nothing to do with religion. After all, Christmas is not the most important feast of [...]

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November – from “Then, gently, the world began anew.”

November 23, 2011

Meatballs on Old Smokey mountain. There’s this song, I’m sure you know it. On Top of Spaghetti is a frivolous children’s ditty about the fate of a meatball that rolls off a mound of spaghetti because someone sneezed. The lyrics are by singer Tom Glazer (who’d regretted writing it to his dying day), but the [...]

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October – from “Then, gently, the world began anew.”

October 9, 2011

Life (and the universe and everything, to borrow from Douglas Adams) is intent on giving us second chances. From what? Well, from life, the universe and everything – from mistakes, from illness, from choices made. From natural disasters and other acts of God. Inevitably, an installment of this calendar would deal with recovery, since one of [...]

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Rendezvous With Destiny to be performed at Ballroom of Government House NSW

September 19, 2011
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September – from “Then, gently, the world began anew.”

September 5, 2011

I’ve closed a circle. Back in October 2010, when Steve Robb first broached this calendar project with me, I immediately started writing harp miniatures – without any specific photographs or stories in mind, without knowing if they’d be used. I wrote one piece while on a retreat organized by Amir Zoghi in beautiful Wentworth Falls [...]

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Liberty and the pursuit, Parts 1, 2, and 3 (1988/2011)

August 26, 2011

For violin and viola. Excerpt from String Quartet Back in 1988 during my third year at college in Madison, I was discovering Beethoven, string quartets, and American folk music all at the same time. I can trace my love affair with the string quartet back to a precise moment. In spring 1988 I was accepted [...]

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