It all started when I had a toothache. It hurts and hurts, the infection does not go away. I had to go and give myself up to the doctor. This is such a civil clinic, everything is clear and understandable - they looked in your mouth, tapped your tooth with a metal stick, took an x-ray, went somewhere for advice. They say it won’t be possible to treat, you have to tear it up. Well, it’s necessary - it’s necessary. Although it’s a shame to tear it up actually. And it hurts. And it’s expensive, so what? Let me, I think, take a closer look at why this tooth is hurting.

In general, this is not my first day in the world, I already know that if something hurts somewhere, it most likely means that I am not allowing myself to do something that my soul really wants. Well, or, on the contrary, I force her to do something that is not at all to her taste or soul.

I'm like, look inside! - I don’t seem to force anything like that. It turns out that I’m not doing something that she desperately needs. It's like this again - look! - and I ask: tell me, my soul, what unbearable hunt of yours lies unfulfilled yet?
And I listen.

I told her: well, my dear, I’m trying, I’m studying, do you even know how much you need to study in order to play music? This is not dancing for you - let go of the body, and dance for your own pleasure, this is to know how much you need, to develop technique, to study notation, to comprehend harmony, to awaken a sense of rhythm, to develop an ear for music.

Again, there’s a lot of time required for all this!

“Whatever you say,” he says, “you’re the boss of the house.” But then - tooth! Because I don’t have the strength to wait any longer.

Here, of course, I gave up. A tooth is painful, and expensive, and a pity in the end. Fortunately, the weekend was free. I write to Sergey: I want to go to the Umbrian forest. Will you take it?

Come, he said. So I went.

This is where the very difficult part of the story begins; it’s not very clear how to tell it. Firstly, you need to imagine what a Mill is . Because the Umbrian forest is in the Mill. In a nutshell, the place is magical. You can’t leave the same way you came, it doesn’t work.

Secondly, I have been a dance teacher for the last few years. In general, I know how to awaken dance in people (it doesn’t always work, but more often than not it works out). Therefore, purely by analogy, I can guess how a person should open up space for any other art, especially music. Because of this, it is very difficult for me to teach something like this: I feel that I am being led in the wrong direction, I get angry, argue, interfere with the one whom I supposedly came to learn, and in general. But I can’t get through by myself, alone: ​​it’s one thing to guess how the door opens, quite another thing to have the key to it.

But here is a tooth, and also Moscow February outside the window, dirty, slushy, sad. In general, I carefully placed all the hope that was inside me closer to my heart; He left all the musical instruments that were in the house in the car and off to the Mill.

And thirdly, my ability to weave words into a pattern of meanings and images quickly disappears somewhere as soon as I internally get close to telling about the very essence of events. I even had to allow myself this slightly foolish and tongue-tied style, because in my usual manner I can’t write anything useful. And so - look! - sideways, sideways, let's get to the heart of the matter.

Sergey, of course, did an amazing thing. The only one that was needed, the only one that could work, the only one that couldn’t even be called a thing. So - pampering, prank, fun. It took me back to my childhood. During that period when everything around is interesting, all objects, smells, colors, in general the whole world arouses burning curiosity. Especially the sounds. God, it turns out that any object in your hands can make all sorts of different sounds. Including, of course, those that were made especially for this by people and are called musical instruments, but this turned out to be not important at all.

For example, from this childhood state it turned out that such an infinite variety of different sounds can be extracted from a guitar that after this it is difficult to somehow consider it a stringed musical instrument. More like some kind of outlandish animal. You can, for example, play with screws screwed into a wooden bathroom wall. Or, say, on a calabash - this is a dried pumpkin from which Argentines drink mate grass. Well, like the Argentines, I drink too! God, I didn't know that my hands were capable of extracting such a variety of wonderful sounds from this thing.

All this, however, did not happen right away, but closer to the night of the first day. At first, of course, I resisted for a long time. He said that I couldn’t play almost anything, and showed exactly how I couldn’t play. Seryozha was very surprised, of course, and said to me what I showed him:

“Well, you’re playing,” and immediately rushed to play along with me on something.

“No, no,” I said, “wait, this doesn’t seem to be how you should play this instrument .” It seems that I completely finished him off when, after several hours of studying, I said:

After dinner I vomited. All dinner and lunch in addition. I vomited for a long time and was tedious, my consciousness swam, it was difficult to maintain balance, it was really very bad. The guys looked at me with some fear, I think, and brought me water outside, which I drank and immediately sent outside along with the remains of lunch. The rational mind looked for explanations for what was happening, and in general settled on the fact that I was poisoned by something. But it seems to me that it was all that came out of me that inside me prevented me from freely, joyfully, like a child, extracting sounds from everything around (including from my own body), and this is considered music.

As Sergey himself did it non-stop, without ceasing. Playing music on a frying pan while you wash it - that was what he was all about. One by one, he disenchanted for me all the instruments that I once tried to play at home myself - the pipe, the cajon, the guitar, the tambourine, the harp, the kalimba. With all of them, I was able to fool around, try, experiment, and through this, find exactly how I want and enjoy playing them right now. Every time I reached some dead end in my stupid experiments, he suggested some simple move that opened up a whole field of further experiments for me. And he played with me all the time. And he rejoiced at this like a big child.

Perhaps this was the most important thing - to see, to feel how terrible he himself was about all this, how unbearably he liked it. The time approached midnight and moved on. Both he and I collapsed from fatigue and lack of sleep during the week, but we could not go to sleep. I threw away this idea and surrendered to the flow: Sergey and I played on everything and couldn’t stop. At some point, completely spontaneously, I took a tambourine, put my lips to my skin and sang into it. I started singing because my inner child wanted to try what it would sound like if I made sounds with my mouth into the body of a tambourine, and no one inside me stopped him. It seemed that all the internal characters who practiced such things had been sickened a few hours earlier.

We slept until two or three in the afternoon. I was happy. I told Seryozha all (really all) the questions that had accumulated in me over all the years of trying to play music. He found answers to everything - simple and suitable for me. And damn, he gave me the keys to picking out the music I liked on the guitar. And he also allowed me to tune the guitar wherever and however I wanted, instead of shaking over the sacredness of the only “correct” tuning. I allowed him to play with its settings in the same way as with everything else. Or have I already allowed myself to do this? By that time I already understood the principle. The door was open. I was inside the world of music, and no one would lure me back at any price now. But that was not all.

I returned home and the next day my friend, whose music I really love, sent me his new song. I found the chords for it (cool, I did it!), began to slowly play it on the guitar, then the rhythm on the cajon and tambourine, then sing it - with a tambourine, as I did at the Mill, then simply with a guitar, and suddenly on the second or the third performance burst into tears out loud. There was such melancholy, tears, snot, a completely wolfish howl. At first I roared with the guitar, then I put the song on repeat and cried for another four or five songs, until almost everything came out. The beluga sang and roared. This was another gift from the Umbrian forests - something was revealed in the voice, something that had been locked for years and prevented from sounding.

Well, this is somehow how it is experienced and formulated. Week is gone. Now I play here every day at least on something and sing a little more. More often than not it works out somehow. But sometimes some kind of beauty is born. And - most importantly - I don’t worry at all, but try, try, explore, and get great pleasure from it all. Thank you, Sergey)