After some technical difficulties earlier this week, on the actual summer solstice, we’re back in business. So Happy Belated Solstice!

Monday morning, I got up earrrrrrrly to celebrate the longest day of the year with some yoga in Times Square. As much as I loathe Times Square (with the fire of 1000 suns) and do my best to avoid it in my day to day life, I must admit that the sensation of lying in Savasana with the subway rumbling below me and the skyscrapers soaring above me (and the jackhammer rattling behind me) was, well, pretty cool.

Balancing and reaching up to the ceiling is one thing, but when that ceiling is the infinite sky, perspective goes out the window. Suddenly it seemed a precarious balance, all five feet five inches of me on two skinny legs. I felt myself wobble.

You are supported, the teacher reminded us. The ground is beneath you, supporting you. Trust that. We can extend because we are established.

I deepened my breath, planted my feet more firmly into the ground, and felt my stance solidify. We can extend because we are established. We can reach higher if we are grounded; we can stretch ourselves when we have built a solid foundation out of which to grow. The sun started to peek over the buildings and light up our faces.

All the days I sing my scales, vocalize and build that myelin around my healthy singing habits, I am laying the groundwork for the stretch, release, and LEAP that lies ahead.

All the days on the ground are what enable me to fly.

Last night I had a great class courtesy of MaxTheatrix — six of us (and a coach and a pianist) in a room for a few hours, trying out new things and working out old things and finding our own versions of homeruns in the audition room. It’s one of my favorite places to be: getting to use the time, the expertise, the mini-audience, however I need or choose to that week; getting to watch and support five other artists as they get up and do the same; the lessons learned from doing my work, and those learned from the gracious and generous work of my classmates; the joy of the music and the stories we tell and how each performer is so unique.

For my part I tried out some new material, including finding a cut of one of my album songs (thanks, Mike Pettry). I have some vocal growth ahead of me before I can show that song who’s boss (me? a challenge? no!), and so to stand in a room – in front of people! – and sing the whole thing, through, without stopping or giving up or commenting on it – was a minor feat.

It sounds so elementary. And I consider class a safe space (I wasn’t trying it for the first time in the audition room, for pete’s sake). And yet, and yet. It still amazes me how nervous I can get before certain situations that theoretically have no stakes and no consequences.

But I wasn’t. I still have all the little stories I tell to deflect things; all the excuses I make and extraneous gestures and running commentary that is so apparent when I see it in other performers and yet it pours out of me from I know not where as soon as I get up in the hot spot. But I’ve come a long way.

And the most amazing thing, to me, was how un-amazing it was. There were no trumpets and I didn’t have a major breakthrough and I didn’t cry, or make my audience cry, either. I just sang a song, and I didn’t make it mean any more than that. In fact, I barely noticed how easy and unremarkable it had all been until later – because I guess sometimes the best kind of growth and change happens a bit at a time, when you’re not looking.

Today it was all I could do to just show up. The snooze button, my worst enemy, had me in its vice grip and my half-awake brain churned out rationalizations and guilty thoughts like oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Yes, that toxic.

Even when I recognize Resistance so clearly, there are times I feel powerless to defeat it. (Now you know why I needed that War of Art book!) So I started small. I may not have gone to the two auditions I was planning on. But it was only 9 AM; all was not lost. I cleaned my house, sweating in the 80-degree humidity (that counts as exercise, right?) and ended up clearing my brain as well.

I had planned, by this point, to warm up and sing some songs from the album, write about it and call it a day. But the little voice told me to get my butt to one of those auditions anyway. So I did. And got a compliment, and a callback.

Just by showing up.

Last night I nerded out at AWE-MAGEDDON*, a live event series put on by my favorite WNYC podcast, Radiolab. The show featured Brooklyn-based duo Buke and Gass, creating the sound of five musicians on their homemade baritone ukelele and guitar-bass hybrid — as well as robotics engineer Hod Lipson, whose work in evolutionary robotics involves creating machines that can adapt and demonstrate elements of human creativity (and take over the world…?). Nerd central!

Professor Lipson introduced us to one of his four-legged creations that has been charged with the instruction to move forward. But this robot does not know that it is four-legged. It does not know anything about its nature, in fact; it will create a computer simulation of its sensory input as it exists in the world, and then figure out how to walk from that simulation. Lipson tells us that the robot starts by making a random motion, assessing the sensory input that it receives from that motion, and then it begins hypothesizing as to what its shape and form might be.

Here’s where it gets interesting (as if it weren’t already). To test the hypotheses, Lipson says, the robot starts looking for “the most disagreement”. It tries movements specifically to rule out one possibility or another. It tips and tilts and tries to throw itself off its axis, because that will give it unequivocal information about what it is and what will or will not work. It looks, in other words, for failure — because that is the fastest way to learn.

There is a lot of lipservice paid to failure — don’t we all know by now that you learn more from your failures than your successes, and everyone falls down a few times on the way to the top? But – and maybe it’s just perfectionists like me – but I don’t think too many of us go LOOKING for failure.

I certainly hope it’s true that machines will never be able to embody the human creative spirit, our ephemeral impulses and nuances and subtleties. But maybe there is something to learn from this non-human creation, with no emotions and no attachments and no desires, and no need to have great PR.

Because it is entirely possible that the fastest and most useful information about my nature; about what and who I am; about how to move forward… could all be found by throwing myself off the cliff and hoping for an EPIC FAIL.

*You can watch the event webcast here!