Music in the Garden

♫Pachelbel in the Garden♫

Last evening we attended Surreybrooke's Music in the Garden event.  Throughout their extensive gardens were musicians playing hammered dulcimers, fiddles, flutes, banjos, guitars, recorders, harps, and mandolins.  Most of the attendees brought picnic suppers and bottles of wine, setting up their own cloth-covered tables with chairs amongst the bushes and under the trees.  I did not record any music but I've put links where I could find them to several musicians on YouTube for you to listen to after you've finished listening to the music I've selected to accompany this post (at the top of the page).  What follows are a few of the photos (to enlarge click on them) of the garden and musicians. . . .

An elfin child resting in the Children's Garden

Gabriel's Tale - Chapter 5

Thank you for your kinds words and encouragement last month.  I also received encouragement in the form of a video posted on Facebook about the four stages of learning that I wanted to share HERE starting at 1:48 on the video.  The first stage: unconscious incompetence; second stage: conscious incompetence; third stage: conscious competence; fourth stage: unconscious competence.  This helped me a great deal because I realized I've been moving back and forth between stages 2 and 3 and that the reason I'd fallen back into stage 2 is because I'd quit practicing every day.  Last year I was making great progress so I thought I didn't need to practice every day.  But as he explains in stage 4 the ability has to be so ingrained that it becomes unconscious competence because that is when you can draw from the right side of your brain--when you are not having to think about what you're doing.  When you have to think about it you are in the left side of your brain.  There is a great book called "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" that showed me that I DID have the ability to draw.  I did a post about it several years ago HERE.  So I hope by next month's post I've improved greatly.  In the meantime, I will share Chapter 5 of Gabriel's Tale.

Last month Gabriel had made his way to Baltimore and met a dog who told him where he could find the docks.  We begin Chapter 5 with Gabriel trudging along the side of the road, exhausted. . . . .

                                                   

Chapter 5 – The Voyage