I do declare.

38 thousand feet in the air, not sure of time or place: it made sense somehow that my desire to write flooded back to me as I slipped the surly bonds of my national borders. After so many months flummoxed by anger and grief at the continuously metastasizing American disaster, it was freeing to be up in the clouds. We’re encouraged to believe that data lives up there, but giant machines and countless people do the work we access with a keystroke. Likewise, an invisible network of experts and a massive amount of natural resources were keeping our plane up in the air, hurtling me and my husband toward Asia while we watched YouTube and texted our friends.

Community is everything. You’d think a musician would live this truth instinctively, but it took me a long time to metabolize it. The process of becoming a skilled practitioner feels so solitary! The intensity of performance and the slog of rehearsal are nothing compared to the endless, endless hours spent alone in study - techniquemaxxing, if you will. There’s no real getting around it. We arrive into our professional careers hungry for the connective experience of music-making yet laser focused on ourselves. The drive we need to get that chance combined with the loneliness of the practice room can blind us to the fact that our preparation is every bit as collaborative as our performance.

Just before this trip, I judged a competition and jumped into a short teaching gig for a colleague, two quick stops in two cities, two ways of interacting with people at the beginning of their artistic practices. The aspiring young competitors stepped into an auditorium filled with the people who helped make the moment possible - not only indispensable teachers, but also siblings who tolerate at-home practice, parents who juggle schedules and budgets, donors who fund the presenters, community fans who listen and applaud. At the summer institute, I greeted students from my own university and others where I’ve taught, and celebrated friendships with colleagues that go back decades. The brilliant teachers around me included former students, good friends, and fellow classmates from back in the day. Trying to remember all the people involved in our web of connection, much less to imagine those others never met, was an impossible yet inspiring task. Now, in Tokyo, working with a cast of young professionals I’ve known for between two weeks and three years, it’s similarly impossible to name all the people involved in the musical experiences that tie us together.

We’re borne forward through this life on a stream made of the actions and dreams of other people. Some of these are intentional, most of them are not, and we only ever know about the tiniest fraction. What monumental arrogance, what childlike simplicity must we possess, to imagine that our achievements are our own deserved prizes, that we stand in a place we created alone with a small tribe, each member known and familiar to us, considering anyone else to be some kind of opponent.

Tokyo life is another version of the isolation/immersion dance, leading my steps from a wee company apartment into the rivers of people filling the streets and stations. Most businesses are tiny here, so much of the city’s interactions feel unexpectedly intimate - sushi counters, noodle shops, corner groceries. The day is filled with small compartments of activity that render reentry into the larger scene a kind of surprise. It’s hard to find space in Tokyo, but it’s surprisingly easy to find quiet.

On an early morning walk, I’m struck by the bright variety of potted plants on the stoops and balconies, and the trees adorning every small, bold square of earth interrupting the pavement. My day is brightened by the care of people I’ll never meet, who didn’t water or prune or weed for me, but whose efforts spark my eyes and lighten my steps just the same.

I pull on my walking shoes upon waking, eager to see the city and already yearning to exit the apartment. As much as I want to, it’s difficult to write there. Just carrying my laptop down to the lobby makes the words flow again, like on the airplane. It’s not a real estate problem. When I open my computer in the small living space, some chilly spirit moves through the room, a shadow from the time when no one could leave and the screen was your only way out. We’re still parsing the trouble that we got into then, when work turned into hours of staring at our own faces. Small spaces and isolation can get a person stuck. Musicians face that peril in practice rooms, but we enter them by choice. How much harder to leave a tiny room if you never planned or wished to be exiled there.

At the teamLab Borderless digital art museum, a mind-blowing permanent installation near the city center, fantastical figures from Japanese mythology follow you along the walls throughout the exhibit rooms, samurai and buddhas and frogs and rabbits and birds that change direction or explode into chrysanthemums if you touch them just right. Some doors lead you away from this parade into immersive rooms full of color and light and mirrors and darkness. It’s hard to get a sense of where you are in space, and impossible to parse the size of the room at first. I expected to be impressed by the technology, but I wasn’t prepared to be moved. At times, enveloped in a sequence of shifting colors, I was overwhelmed, delight or sorrow arising from places and for reasons I couldn’t name. Back in the connecting hallways, the ancient shadow procession was there to greet us, centuries of dreams and avatars leading us up to this point and beckoning us on, transformed by us and transforming us in ways we would never understand. In the final room, people stretched out on the floor or followed a flock of digital birds as they flew from wall to wall, leaping up to touch them as they past and breaking into open-hearted laughter as they turned into flowers and rain.

The sun sets in Tokyo tonight as it rises back home on the big birthday back home. We the people, arrogant and lonely, suspicious and far too trusting, gather in all kinds of communities, kitchens to cults. I guess this essay is a birthday greeting to all y’all, each one from somewhere else like every human in every place and in every time. I can only say the few things I’m certain are true. It’s not too late to plant something that will thrive, and you have enough space to do it. You are not a fortress. You have no idea who you are holding up, or who’s holding you.

We’re all pilgrims. Open the door to your little room, America. Get out here and join the band.