Return again

Things coalesce lately.  Where to start?  I could start from my father’s memorial service, my experiences at Yom Kippur, experience with posture and Qi Gong, things learned from gardening, things I remember my father saying, the formative experience that set me on the path of Just Listening…

So many experiences all point to returning again to the start, to the source.  The inherent principle I have gleaned is that I always veer off from my purest intentions, and have to keep redirecting myself toward them.  The first place I remember learning this is from listening to colleagues’ pieces in graduate school, being turned off by something I didn’t like and ceasing to really listen past that point.  Not knowing what to say when I saw my friends afterward, I realized I had to keep turning back to the music in order to at least have something to say! The outcome, after much practice, has been that I actually like many pieces that use ideas I would never put in my music.

Most recently, as of the morning I began this essay, I had a posture breakthrough while doing my daily Zhan Zhuang (a variety of Qi Gong).  It was a development long in the making: I’ve been doing Zuang Zhan for more than two years, always doing the very first posture at least a little before moving into the more difficult ones.  During 20 minutes of standing still, I keep reminding myself of this detail and that, and by the end I often get a late breakthrough of some sort. This phenomenon has brought to mind something my father had on a handwritten scrap of paper beside his chair in his final years.  It said simply, “Never too old, never too late.”  Wow, so incredibly important: I can’t just stand there for 20 minutes, it’s never too late in the session to make a tiny improvement that becomes a breakthrough! And what about our lives, our intentions to improve this or that aspect of our being?

On the topic of my father’s wisdom, there’s this: I prepared a eulogy for his memorial service that happened about this time a year ago.  We’d just moved, and a friend had kindly helped us move a bunch of plants.  We had a tiny little piece of wisteria that could really have been assumed dead. But I kept watering it, and it eventually showed a little life.  That triggered the thought that Daddy’s patient approach to raising me was very much of the same spirit.  Despite my off-the-path wanderings during college, he never scolded me, never berated me, never gave up on me but just stayed with me, helping in little ways when needed.  So what came together in this story?  The way I expressed it in the eulogy was, “Never give up on a plant.”  (The wisteria prospers even further this summer, having looked dead once again in spring!)

I’ve heard this sentiment expressed in faith circles in so many ways: by a country preacher in the foothills of the North Carolina mountains, by Buddhists in Boston, new age folks from California, but probably never more deeply than in a Yom Kippur service closing the High Holy Days of the Jewish New Year.  In the services I have attended, a song that always brings me to tears is “Return again”.  Very simple lyrics, basically “return again to what you once were”, clearly assuming a start of real purity on entry into the physical world.

Once again I seem to be coming back to a source, an idea expressed often already in this blog: resonance, feedback.  The very phenomenon of hearing pitches is founded upon it, and the experience for me of coming back to the source – listening to my friends’ music without turning away my attention – shows musical experience as a source of insight, something that runs far deeper than our technologically-driven search for why it matters so much is likely ever to discover.  All is vibration.  

As with vibration, everything is cyclical, and that means we have almost unlimited opportunities to start over, to return to the source, to water the plant once more.  The starting point is to listen as if I know nothing, allowing the sound to simply fill my consciousness.  Like returning to focus my attention on posture and breathing, the mind is eventually freed to “absorb world sounds” and entrust the memory to recall my reactions later.