SUMMER RAYNE OAKES

I’m halfway in the air right now between New York and Kansas City with a clear view of the veiled sky beneath. My mind is the only element of this flight that is clouded over – fogged up from too few hours of sleep over the last few weeks. The therapeutic tap-tap-tap of my fingertips atop my MacBook keypad of this very entry teases out the invisible impulse of thought – a sinuous river rich and writhing with electrical impulses, like the Pacific streams that once throbbed with Oncorhynchus migrating from the Mother Sea.

My fingertips pass over the black lettered key beds like a blind man over Braille. It’s the same foreign familiarity I felt when my hands passed over piano keys just five short months ago. How embarrassed I had been to have forgotten four years of childhood practice. I was afraid to approach the dressed keys. They seemed so formal; the sound – just a faded memory. And yet he told me to let my hands fall heavily upon the keys, allow them to slump like the dead weight of one’s body before it passes into slumber, or death, or dying. He said to let them make mistakes, (if there ever was such a word)…To allow them to hear the notes reverberate from the hollow halls of the wooden case – as if those very discordant sounds would summon the vestiges of musical memory.

I was bemusedly astonished that the cobwebs began to clear after a few short weeks of furtive vespertine rehearsal. The ear became attuned to tune, and the fingers played without any noticeable cognitive approval from the brain. It was only when I would come “back to my senses” that my fingers would stall in starts and fits, as if my cerebrum was second-guessing such melodic movement. This made me wonder if one is too capable of thought, too trapped in ones own bell jarred-notions – if such philosophizing would only create a Mr. Palomar out of us…never bestowing the owner of such onerous ponderation with any sort of self-actualized creative inspiration or inspirational action, just a purgatorial cycle of self-admiring adulation.

I accept how perfectly paradoxical this all seems, especially as my mind comes to a clearing just as stormier cumulus clouds heave their heavy bosoms into the plane’s view. Our vessel rumbles over the blushing glow of the sky and we receive word that there are rain clouds hanging low over Kansas. It’ll take two hours to reach my surrogate home. Jana from Kansas State University, who I met nearly five years before in Aveda’s New York offices, will pick me up in an orange VW bug and deliver me to a quiet Bed & Breakfast in Manhattan, Kansas.

My last two weeks were overflowing before I even had a chance to drink in all the flavors that life has poured into my cup. Now I’ll spend the next couple days delivering two talks (“The Art & Science of Good Design,” and “The Journey: A Career in Eco-fashion”) at Kansas State University, (which has graciously begun using my book in their freshmen fashion classes), followed by two talks at Payless addressing the Collective Brands Sustainability Task Force and all the folks working at the headquarters. It’s a full agenda that will find itself face first into forty more consecutive days of conferences, presentations, photo shoots, trail running, parties, meetings, filming, and perhaps…if there is a moment for the mind to let go…a little music from the fingertips, eyes closed.