Dear David,
I am blessed to receive your music, once again
filling in the hours and days with sweet and sad melodies. The first
string notes have a John Fahey quality which brought me back into the
past, 1990, spring, driving around the suburbs in an old silver car
looking for a job and one class short of graduation. One morning I felt
especially up against the impossible odds of trying to patch together a
life in the universe, a beautiful day, sun out sky bright blue, no white
skies then, I felt I should be out wandering in the woods, instead
logic and practicality insisted that the best way to move forward was to
sign away my time in exchange for money. Only job I had experience in
was warehouse work, so I knew I was going to be shutting myself inside a
damp dark building for the best days of the coming year. I think I
realized even then that free will has its limitations, I knew I was free
to drive my car down the road and in two days be in Yosemite or
somewhere on the west coast, but that plan was not the right one because
it would cause too much disturbance to the universe, the better way was
to work with karma and later I discovered that through perseverance and
concentration one gets everything desired through a slow process that
somehow bends reality, just an inch or two left or right of center. The
harder part of life is in the waiting for those few inches to move, it
can take years depending on how stubborn and large the mountain is, and
if one wavers before the movement then it never comes and one is left
bewildered and wondering where all the time went. So I park the car in a
grocery parking lot, walk into the store and buy a paper, and emerge
into the bright squinty light with a heavy heart and back in the car I
slip in a mix tape of Fahey songs and this one plays -
I
felt immediate fortification and pleasure, a real godsend. Strange,
isn't it, what sustains us, for some it's the safety and security of
family and career, or perhaps life is so terrifying that once any kind
of shelter is found it is never abandoned, and this I believe is called a
closed mind, and for myself stability lay in beauty, of the earth,
people, animals, trees, clouds, blue sky and lake, forests and fields,
and just as important, the beauty created by artists - paintings, music,
photographs, poems, novels. I drove off in search of a warehouse in
Bensenville, Fahey and his guitar filling my heart with strength and
joy, and somehow that forlorn day turned out to be special because the
universe it seems is compelled to keep unique and unusual combinations,
in this case the mixture of despair, beauty, hopelessness, and faith.
And isn't it also interesting how music is stored in the mind, it seems
to not have its own place to stay, but instead is lumped in with
whatever else is going on in one's life at the moment one listens, so
now whenever I hear When The Springtime Comes Again I am transported
back to the grocery store parking lot reading the want ads.
This
morning looked to be promising with the white sky giving way and
allowing blue and golden light to mix with the earth elements, and when I
reached the lake I felt the exhilarating urge to run (!), and not
having run in 4 months, I was reminded of my times in Chiang Mai in 2012
and 2018/19, when I began running in the hot weather after not having
run for months. I ran 1/2 mile and walked the rest of the way, but just
that little bit made me feel high and happy, which almost seems a crime
with the current world circumstances. When I reached Lake Shore Park I
decided to look into the little free library box and with 20 books to
choose from my intuition told me to take Peace of Mind by Thich Nhat
Hanh. Next to the library box is a unique hand carved tree bench and I
lay on it with my feet up on the railing and read "As you breathe in,
you can connect with your body. Bring your mind home to your body and
remember that you have a body." I smiled, laughed out loud because the
universe loves finding order in the chaos, for earlier in the day I sat
meditating, gazing at the white stone elephant with a note taped to its
trunk, three ideas written out by hand, which currently are the main
focus of my existence :
- Bring the Mind Home
- and Release
- and Relax