Here's how I describe my experience of Ludwig:

The first inkling I had that I would become obsessed with Ludwig had come twenty years before with a dream. I dreamed I was standing in the midst of a magnificent garden - like a garden in one of those fabulous Persian miniatures it was filled with a myriad of flowers and trees covered with blossoms - all in luminous colors. There was a great pond in the midst of the garden and Beethoven’s music was playing. It was nothing of his I had heard before and yet I knew that it was Beethoven. I stood in the garden enraptured by the colors. and the sounds. As the music reached a crescendo the trees and flowers, fruits and sky became transfigured with light. The hand of God - as in the God of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel - came down for the heavens, its index finger touching the center of the pond sending ever increasing circles outwards. It was more than I could bear. I closed my eyes and put my hands over my ears. When, moments later as the music began to descend from its climax, I removed them and opened my eyes, the garden was returning to its previous colors. and state. A voice within told me, ‘It’s all right - the next time this comes you will be able to bear the beauty of it’. That was all. The dream had occurred in my mid twenties. I had no idea what it meant. All I knew was that it was some kind of a blessing for it felt as though something fundamental had shifted in my life - at least in my inner life.

For a few years I forgot about the dream and immersed myself in earning a living, writing books, making films for television and doing all the other things we all do every day when the responsibilities of a householder sit heavily on your shoulders. Then, some fifteen years later the dream came back to me, and with it a strange imperative from within: you must put everything aside to write a novel about Beethoven.

I had never written fiction, not even dared to dream that I could. The thought terrified me. Having raised four children on my own I had spent a lot of my time earning a living. I began to research the novel but soon realized there was no way I could write it unless I gave up my work in the media and not have to earn a living for the time it would take to write it. Most of us would, I suspect, say that the only thing stopping us from doing what we want to do is money. It was only when I found myself in the position of having enough money to not have to work for four years, that I discovered that it’s not a lack of money that stops us, but a deep unwillingness to embrace the absolute freedom of choice we all have.

Until this point I had been able to see myself as a conscientious and caring mother willing to sacrifice her own desires to earn a living and care for her children. Suddenly I found this was no longer necessary. I had all the material resources I needed to do exactly what I wanted. Just as the beauty in the dream had seemed overwhelming to me, this new found freedom was terrifying.

During the years that followed I was to learn a lot about patience and humility - I was nothing - am nothing - and can do nothing of myself. Yet out of that nothingness I learned that new things could be born. During the next four years so many internal events occurred that it would be impossible to speak of them all - I suppose much of them went into the novel itself. Very much like the disciple who follows unquestioningly the will of the guru no matter how irrational it seems of how difficult and no matter what his or her personal will may be, I followed the imperative to finish the novel - never knowing from one day to the next if I would ever finish it. Then one day the novel was finished. I felt like someone who had come back from the dead - the caterpillar who bound itself into its cocoon and watched while its body was dissolved into a white gel only to be reformed again into a butterfly. Maybe one day I will use my new wings to fly - to where or how is anybody’s guess.

And what have I learned from all this? Only that there is the most incredible order which regulates our lives even when we perceive ourselves to be in total chaos and that within such order lies a love or a compassion that goes far beyond kindness into the realm of knowing exactly what is right and necessary from one moment to the next.

Home | Top of Page | Journey to Freedom