Opening Doors

There's a moment in Franz von Suppé's overture to Poet and Peasant (Dichter und Bauer) that gets me every time. It opens with a slow, aching melody written originally for solo cello, and something about that opening has never stopped feeling personal to me.

For me this piece is more than beautiful music. It's a reminder that most of us are carrying two characters around at once.

One is the poet: the dreamer, the part of us that imagines a life before it exists and isn't afraid to want something big.

The other is the peasant: the one who shows up and does the unglamorous work, day after day, long before the dream looks anything like real.

I don't think these two are in competition. A dream without steady effort behind it just stays a dream. And effort without something to aim for starts to feel pointless pretty fast. You need both, and that tension is what gave me the idea for a new guided meditation.

A house with many doors

Picture yourself at the entrance of a house that feels warm and lived-in. Light is coming through the windows, and you can smell flowers from the garden outside. In front of you is a hallway lined with doors.

Each door is a step further into the journey.

The first door opens onto your vision, your inner poet: whatever you're hoping for, whatever you can already picture even though you haven't built it yet.

The doors after that belong to the peasant. They're not about giant leaps. They're about walking through one door, then the next, letting one small decision lead into another.

The music behind it

Toward the end of the meditation, the melody comes played by me on the violin. I found a transcription of it that I love, and it plays as your companion for the last stretch of the session. It's not there to rush you along. It gives you room to sit with whatever came up while you were listening, a bit of quiet to let it settle before you come back.

I've started to think the poet and the peasant were never really opposites. They're partners, and maybe they always have been, working together to shape who we already are and who we're becoming as we go after the things we want.

My hope is that this meditation gives you a little more courage to want what you want, and a little more patience with the slow work of getting there. The good part usually happens in between, once imagination and effort stop pulling in different directions and start moving as one thing.

If you want to go deeper into the research behind why this kind of imagery and reflection works, I wrote about that here: You are already imagining. The question is what.

With love, encouragement and music,

Aja