Nothing is Required of You

How deep listening in a Japanese garden restored my inner artist

I am standing in the garden of Chion-In temple in Kyoto, Japan. Somewhere, just blocks away but in another world, noisy throngs of tourists are busy checking off their lists of historic sites.

Here, I am surrounded by the gurgle of a gentle fountain, the owlish calls of Japanese crows, quiet footsteps on gravel. The path and the garden have been cultivated to invite mindfulness. The senses are engaged on every level: in contemplating the pleasingly smooth flagstones underfoot, the lush composition of trees, flowering shrubs, and stones in and around the pond, the scent of various blossoms.

Less than 5 days ago, I was unsure I would be able to travel. Fatigue had overcome me yet again and I was unable to eat any proper meals without suffering abdominal cramps afterwards. But I am here now in what feels like the most peaceful place on earth, and all of it feels miraculous.

If I had heeded my thinking mind, or asked my doctors’ opinions, or googled my symptoms, I would not have boarded the plane to Japan. But I didn’t do those things. Through the discomfort, pain, and fatigue, I consistently checked in with my body’s wisdom to see how it felt about the prospect of my first tour in over a year and a half and my first concerts in 9 months. My body responded with a subtle lifting feeling around the heart, the lightest of breezes waving a cherry blossom branch. As hard as it was to trust such an ephemeral feeling, it was even harder to ignore it. And so I went.

I have booked a personal sound walk with fellow Substacker Simon James French and am wearing binaural earphones that both record and amplify the sounds around me. I hear my breathing, but I also hear the faraway ringing of the bell from the neighboring Shoren-In temple, the bamboo leaves rustling in the wind, the occasional splash of a fish. I am here to honor the aural peace of the place, to dissolve into the garden’s natural counterpoint.

Simon lets me set the pace and choose where I want to go and what I want to record. There is, blessedly, no Wikipedia pontification about the history of the temple or its material constitution, and this is exactly what I want. I don’t need to be regaled with more information about a place that inspires such pure presence. What I need is the opposite of information: a well into which to pour the thoughts, emotions, and memories of the past 9 months of illness, loss, personal and geopolitical chaos.

Emptiness is a much-maligned concept of Zen Buddhism; to Western minds it sounds negative; it reeks of lack. “The void” is another Buddhist term, equally anathema to the Western intellect. Walking slowly through the garden, I find that the void is precisely what I have been craving. An atmosphere that does not ask me to ingest anything, to react to anything, to take action.

We walk up a hill through a bamboo forest and arrive at an airy hut. On the wooden floor lie straw mats to sit on and moktaks: cowbell-shaped woodblocks to accompany the chanting of sutras. I sit and listen to the birds, strike a moktak a few times, look out at Kyoto down below.

Everything in the garden, in the whole temple, seems to say: nothing is required of you.

Thinking is superfluous.

Effort is unseemly.

At Shoren-In temple, we continue our walk. Simon shows me how to ring the temple bell the traditional way: bow, clap twice, ring the bell, pray, bow again. The bell, green and oblong like a copper barrel, hangs from the roof of a hut in the garden. Simon takes the recording gear from me and stands a few meters away while I ring it; the bell is too powerful for the sensitivity of the microphones.

I bow, I clap twice, I pull the rope that holds the wooden beam. When I release it, it clangs against the bell and then ricochets, striking it again. I bow my head and pray for my mother’s soul, which I have felt hovering around me since my arrival in Japan. May our two souls find harmony with each other, I pray, more so than they could on this physical plane. The bell resounds for a full minute, maybe more. I am close enough to feel a tickle in my sternum, the spirit of the temple garden made manifest. When its last reverberations have subsided, at least to my human ears, I bow again.

I am reluctant to leave the grounds. I want to stay here for hours, weeks, months. I have felt at peace in nature, but nowhere else have I experienced the particular kind of human-cultivated peace that is a Japanese temple and garden.

Here, no action is required.

All is as it should be.

After the walk, I am even more attuned than usual to the sounds around me. Everything has a rhythm, a pitch, a relationship to other sounds.

Back in the hotel in Osaka, I enter the lobby and hear a familiar chord progression. I stop by the elevators in disbelief. It is Spiegel im Spiegel by Arvo Pärt, the piece I recorded for my mother’s memorial service in February. It is not just any version—there are many, for solo piano, for violin and piano, and more—it is the version for cello and piano, exactly the one I played, as if to inform me my prayer has been granted.

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The following evening, I walk out onto the stage of Hyogo Performing Arts Center in Nishinomiya with my fellow performers from the Camerata Salzburg to the rushing backdrop of many-handed applause. My head is still swimming in the ether of another time zone, but we are playing Mozart and the music organizes the very cells of my brain and body. It begins to make sense that I was lying on a sofa in Salzburg a few days ago and am now on stage in a concert hall in Japan. Gradually, there is no sofa, no Salzburg, no intercontinental flight. There is just music.

After the D major violin concerto, we play Mozart’s last Symphony, the 41st, a piece I have played so many times it has fused with the architecture of my consciousness. My ears fly out into the hall and listen from the center of the first tier while my body continues to play the cello part.

Playing without a conductor means that each member of the orchestra is both leader and follower. The balance of energies is delicate—as delicate as the placement of stones in a rock garden. Sitting on the chair with my cello, I am ringing the temple bell, standing back and praying. I am the temple bell. I am conduit; I am recipient. Now we are playing the opening bars of the last movement; now we are in the thick, gorgeous cathedral of the fugue, and in its geometrical perfection, there is no space for thought. I am playing it for the thousandth time and for the first; how could I have forgotten this feeling, the alchemy of written music into sounding spirit? The respite from the banality and struggle of the thinking mind?

During intermission, I close the bathroom door behind me and cry a few tears of gratitude. In November, December, January, February, in the depths of exhaustion and grief, I could not have foreseen this, the moment of my liberation back into the world of music and performing. And something has changed during this time of incubation.

My mind—maybe the human mind—is engineered to perceive multiple streams of sound simultaneously. When I am not on the meditative path of a Japanese temple garden, my listening is inverted toward the many adversarial parts of my interior who try to outdo each other with imperatives of necessity or danger. The mind tries and fails to achieve equilibrium; it cannot mediate between so many conflicting directives.

A Mozart fugue, though, plugs directly into that primal interface that is wired to weave a tight internal tapestry of chirping birds and flowing water and whispering leaves, and invites it onto a path of aesthetic order. Come this way, it says, hear how the flute asserts itself while soaring over the bassoon. Hear the busy, pedestrian excitement of the second violins as the first violins sing a chorale.

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At home in Austria, my husband listens to stories of my tour and says, “Hah. There she is, the musician. Who would have thought?”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“Your inner musician. She’s been hiding for a long time. Since you left the Staatsoper.”

I consider this. This was fifteen years ago.

“What makes you think that?”

“There’s a playfulness in you now that you haven’t had for a very long time.”

“But I had a quartet. I played concerts. I went on other tours.”

“But your inner musician only came out for concerts and then you went back to taking care of other people first.”

Playing professor. He doesn’t say it but I think it—because it’s true.

When I became a professor, a heaviness overcame me. The playfulness I tried to bring to my teaching and performing was sucked into the whirlpool of professorial striving around me. Everyone was tacitly competing to have students who won first prizes in competitions and got stable jobs in respected orchestras. No one ever said as much, but it was in the air, the walls, the defensive stances. And I succumbed.

Even as I preached to my students about artistic freedom and permission to fail, I punished myself for not doing enough, not being enough, not embodying the great music guru enough. Music became an athletic pursuit quantifiable by exam scores. Standard exam repertoire underwent a transformation from work of art to Olympic pole vault, with me sitting in the jury and holding up a number.

This was not the first time I had let my inner artist drown, but it was the longest and most profound episode. As a professor, I was cast in the unfortunate and impossible double role of mentor and judge. I supported my students’ experiments and then was forced to grade their nearness to an undefined standard of musical ‘excellence’ that had nothing to do with what they were building. During exams, every time I saw students lose a bit of the artistic fire I had helped them kindle, I lost some of it myself. Every time I had to sign off on a disappointing mark when a student was still in the middle of a developmental process, I felt that I, too, was failing in an important way.

I had hoped to help reform the institution from the inside. When that proved a Sisyphean task, I eventually let it steamroll my playfulness, my innovative approaches, my love of performing, and—because all of these were connected to it—my life energy.

Dozens of people I know tell the same story with a different backdrop: law, medicine, nonprofit work. The specifics change; the essence remains the same.

In the institutions that define high achievement, the collective mind is so busy that there is no room for emptiness. Without emptiness, there is no deep listening. When I stopped listening deeply, I must have missed so many mysterious synchronicities of the sort that met me between the temple bell in Kyoto and the lobby of my hotel in Osaka.

When I stopped listening deeply, I lost the ability to hear my inner artist, my inner

musician, who communicates with the subtlety of a breeze blowing cherry blossoms upward.

Truly deep listening goes beyond judgments of excellence and mediocrity.

It reconnects the mind to the soul, the ears to the heart, the inner artist to its paintbrush.

When deep listening is allowed to become the organizing principle of life, maybe no action is required to attain perfection.