EXCELLENCE, INVOCATION, CONVOCATION

This new year welcomed me in Florence. This small rental car, and I wander about beautiful Tuscany. It is a requitted and desired journey, for a long time. Even in Winter, this land is beautiful, precious. Not surprisingly, the Renaissance chose it as a mother.

I watch the passersby in Piazza San Firenze. Far away, from Via dei Leoni, I see a man -approaching on with the case of his guitar and his backpack. He walks with a slight smile.

He reaches what appears to be his usual place to stop, and displays his tripod-like stool. He draws out his guitar. And he starts heating up the strings, and I come closer before he connects the speakers. Face to face, we are alone, nobody else seems to have noticed his arrival, his display. His old guitar begins singing, while his hands shake its idleness off. It just sounds with an amazing purity and his hands fly over the instrument that he gently caresses. Piotr Tomaszewski is his name. I read it on the poster he has made to introduce himself.

When he connects the speakers, a crowd gathers slowly and inevitably attracted to the magnetism of beauty, the music, this guitar singing -caressed by him. I turn around, I’m not alone. I can count roughly about two hundred people, who in just a minute have gathered. And every time there is more and more coming over, to form a sort of human amphitheatre that completely surrounds him, even at various levels in several rings of people. We all listen in reverential silence, amazed, astonished.

And I think that excellence attracts. That love for the well done work magnetizes. That beauty, convokes. How many hours have Piotr taken just caressing his guitar on and on so that each of his pieces sound like that? Thousands, tens of thousands.

Absolutely. Beauty is not casual.

More songs are played. Ovations grow on. Finally, it is ‘Fragile’, Sting’s beautiful song, without lyrics, just a melody. One takes the lyrics back, to oneself, mentally. When it ends, a long silence preceeds a standing ovation. We all smile, many take photos, others record a video, like me. And some of us receive a tear on the sills of our eyes.

No doubt, Piotr expresses his vocation. The beauty, excellence, hours, work, convoke, move, touch.

Thank you, Piotr. We go buy the two albums that he recorded himself and sells. Now that music is with us. I listen to ‘Invocation and Dance’ of Joaquin Rodrigo, sung by the old guitar teacher Tomaszewski. And now, as I write this, I smile, nothing is accidental: invocation and dance…

This is what I’ve learned: let’s do well what we have to do, so we shall convoke, move, transform, as does Piotr.

Convoke, with vocation.

Kisses, hugs.

Álex