About Jung Starrett
When I married Charles, he was in the Ph.D. program at Harvard to become an ethnomusicologist. I told him that I never thought I’d marry an academic. As it turned out, I didn’t.
When Charles married me, a lawyer like his father, he was surprised because he always thought that he’d marry an artist. As it turned out, he did.
In hindsight, I realize that each of us saw the real person inside the other when we tied the knot.
Charles ended up ditching the Ph.D. program and his potential career as an academic; he chose to be a stay-at-home parent when our twin daughters were born three years after we were married. By then, the Ph.D. program had literally taken the music out of him and so he threw the baby (his love of music) out the window with the bathwater (the Ph.D. program) the moment he held our precious newborns in his arms.
As for me, after 20 years of practicing law in law firms and in-house legal departments of global corporations, a revelation which must have been running underground for many years, surprised me in an “Aha!” moment: I am really an artist at heart! A well-paying corporate job with generous benefits could in no way satisfy my huge need to feed both my soul and my family; and my drive to move from passion to action, from intention to manifestation, and from imagination to creation.
But there’s much more to Jung’s story!
About Charles Starrett
Growing up in the small, seaside New England town of Rockport, Massachusetts I always felt pulled between my multiple interests in the arts and the sciences. It’s no wonder I attempted a double concentration in music and physics at Harvard College. However, my physics advisor was convinced that the two disciplines had nothing in common and pressured me to choose one. I chose music.
After many years studying and working in all areas of music: theory, history, performance, composition and even administration and pipe organ construction, I discovered that I no longer enjoyed music as I once had. To be honest, I felt numb altogether; I became incapable of feeling passion for any work at all. This was becoming clear to me at the same time as I began the dissertation phase of my Ph.D. at Harvard University. It was not the best timing, to be sure. In the middle of my struggling with what to do next, Jung gave birth to our twin daughters and I found a passion: I knew that more than anything in the world I wanted to dedicate my time to raising these two miracles of life, so I ended my Ph.D. studies and received a masters instead (to add to my masters in classical piano performance from New England Conservatory).
I never regretted my decision to be a full-time parent, but I always felt that something was still missing in my life. Wondering whether I prematurely ended my old academic career, I resumed my Ph.D. dissertation research and designed my own undergraduate Ethnomusicology course in Asian music. Even after we moved from Boston, I transferred my fieldwork to Seattle, but ultimately I decided that pursuing my degree was not worth the precious time it was taking away from my family, and I stopped my Ph.D. studies for the second time.
But there’s much more to Charles’ story!