Returning to joy after years of held up fears and disappointments. A brilliant cellist's story.

Yana Reznik with Kina Kantor after an inspirational reherrsal..

For artists - a career is not just a career. It is the sharing of their soul, passion, full range of emotions, their identity, their dedication from early years, their dreams and their obsession. Art making space is sacred, safe and intimate. It is only when this intimacy is broken, and it no longer feels like a nourishing space, that artists collapse. It might be the pressure, or expectations, or lack of certainty in the business aspects, or lack of support.

My dear friend Kina was a single cellist from the USA to be chosen to compete in the Tchaikosvky competition when she was 17 years old. Compete, compete, compete is the path for so many artists to connect with their dreams. But the counterintuitive nature of this approach plays a tremendous toll on the sensitive, pure nature of a real artist.

Kina has chosen to stop her music path 10 years ago when the sacred space of internal artistic connection was broken.

"Feeling the pressure, that I was going to be the one to MAKE it and being told how special I was, I felt shackled by its weight. It stopped being about the journey of self-knowledge and simply creating".

Kina has discovered herself in another artistic field, as an actress, but the "break up" with a potentially promising cello career seemed to never really rid of the roots within her. When an idea of playing "The Trout" quintet by Schubert with a few of our friends came up, we thought of Kina right away. How incredible would it be to just enjoy connecting with her on a musical level? I dared to ask her to open up her cello case. Tears were spilling in my eyes when she described what it felt like to connect with her old dusted friend.

I cried all through our first rehearsal, seeing the true beauty of her soul through the music making, knowing from personal experience what she might have been feeling playing music again with her friends, with love, with joy. Just to play. Just to share. Just to express. Just to communicate. As all artists originally intended to connect. This is what makes my soul rejoice and burst in overwhelm.