Meditation on a life with music

To have been rooted by birth and upbringing in East Asian culture and philosophy and thus to have absorbed ‘native’ influences from Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism is to have a sense of being grounded simultaneously in an underlying calm and alertness. This sense seems not contradicted but rather reinforced by immersion in the traditions of great Western music, in savoring the privilege of breathing-in the atmosphere that pervades creations of transcendent masters like Bach, Mozart, Schubert, and Beethoven, as their glorious spirits too have nurtured and cultivated my sensibility. The intelligence and virtues of Eastern medicine and Western music have thus seemed to work jointly to weave their strands into the fugue of my life and, therewith, the fabric of my healing art. In order to become worthy of them, gifts such as these, while they come ‘unbidden’ from the universe, ever challenge me to strive for the highest.

—Xilin F. Jordan