Healing with Music

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

I vowed that I would write a little every day. If I just wrote half a page every day, I would have so many more blog posts!

I feel like I'm repeating myself. I feel like I'm a stuck record, but I'm sick again. Can you believe it? This time though it's just a little cold that came from the FAN/BLOWER blowing too hard one night. Just a stuffy nose, a sore throat, low energy and sleepiness.

Spiced with depression from the rejected Vipassana meditation retreat application*.

I have never been very good at dealing with depression. When it comes it tends to just stick with me for a few years at a time. But this time I found a cure and it came from the unlikeliest of places – the ukulele!

We bought a small and cheap but very pretty mint green ukulele in Beijing one night. In a spontaneous child-like frenzy we decided we definitely need to learn to play it. Play and sing.

So that's pretty much what I've been doing here on Lombok whenever I've been sick, which is all the time. I sit in my room and play the ukulele and sing.

It's been a month now and I'm getting pretty good. What I mean by that is I've moved from the stage of being forced to play easy songs like Three Little Birds over and over to the stage where I have had enough practice to actually start choosing my own songs.

Oh, the happiness! Finally I can start learning the three songs that I've been dying to learn ever since we got the ukulele – Moon River, Can't Help Falling in Love and La Vie en Rose (en Français, bien sûr!)

I dove into learning of these three songs, which filled my depressive meaninglessness with fun and pleasure again. I've never been able to do this before – to chase away depression like that.



* I applied to a Vipassana retreat in New Zealand and was rejected because of panic attacks.