There is a regularly recurring moment of childhood set deep within my mind, my soul – a moment of weightlessness, timelessness, of perfect balance and stillness, a moment that defies gravity, that blinks onto eternity… At the time I only knew it as the thrill of flinging myself as high up off the ground as the chains of the swingset would allow.  If done with enough force it happened at both ends of the pendulum, on the swing back, that little lift that picks you up off the seat before gravity pulls you back down and throws you forward… and again when feet forward and leaning back on the chains you rise off the seat.  Of the two this is the scarier – because if you choose to let go momentum will hurl you into the yard, miles away from the swing.  You could break a leg.  You could win Olympic Gold.  Will this be the lift that I choose for launch?  Or will I stay in the seat to keep repeating the thrill? It is an eternal instant, that moment before physics determines where you fly next.  The paradox of stillness and balance in the midst of hard play.The moment came back to me when I returned from a three-week trip to Europe with a thousand other US teenage musicians.  My parents were eager to hear all the details – neither of them had ever been abroad.  Up until then I had never been more than 100 miles from my hometown.  The tour was somehow all in my head still, and I had the feeling that the only events I was ever really going to remember forever would be those things that I put into words in that car trip on the way back, that everything not told would somehow get lost because it wasn’t named.  I remember the pause, the silence, that eternal instant while the memories queued up for telling, that moment before the swing came down, before taking a deep breath and reliving for them everything that transpired the previous three weeks.I hear the moment in Jacqueline duPré’s recording of the Elgar cello concerto.  As an adult student learning the piece for a recital I often tried to play along with her, finding it difficult to match her ability to sustain the intensity of a phrase for as long as she did. The way she spun out phrases of the slow movement made them all feel like that eternal instant, like she was able to hold infinity in her bow, like she was able to maintain her grasp of the ineffable longer than any human alive, like she was able to face the divine and not turn away, in between every note, every musical thought an eternal instant.That moment is back upon me now.  The past week or so has been so full I hardly know where to begin… and almost fear to lest I lose any part of it that has been so important to me.  The only cure, I suppose, is to inhale deeply, and begin to exhale through these fingers on these keys and hope I can capture the essence, for you, for myself, of the end of this school year.