--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, whynotnow7 whynotnow7@... wrote:
Sounds like a great walk - I enjoy popping in the headphones for a walk in
the fog, or anywhere - building soundtracks for life is what I call it. I'll
have to give Bruce Cockburn another listen, too. I'll sometimes encounter an
artist or a movie and dismiss them/it, then I meet someone really into it,
and I figure I missed something. :-)
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, turquoiseb no_reply@ wrote:
Over the years, some on this forum, given my...uh...
sometimes dismissive nature, have asked me what *does*
still get me off, spiritually. This post is intended
to address that question.
Tonight I synched my review copy of Bruce Cockburn's
new album Small Source Of Comfort to my iPhone and
then jacked the headphones into my brain and walked
around my new home town in the Netherlands on a foggy
Friday night, listening to the whole album while doing
a kind of self-invented walking meditation. My kinda
Nirvana.
Some would consider it settling. How, they might say,
can he foresake the constant stiving for enlightenment
or higher states of consciousness that we live for, and
settle for a walk around a sleepy Dutch town at night,
doing nothing more spiritual than listening to music?
And they've got a point.
Yet tonight's walk got me higher than anything I've done
in recent months. Go figure.
I walked along the canals, reveling in the visuals of
houses and trees reflected in the still surface of the
water, occasionally broken up and turned into dazzling
CGI-enhanced versions of the same houses and trees, as
passing ducks stirred the surface of the canal.
Although the night was, on the surface, gray, foggy and
uninviting to the adventurous, adventure lay around every
corner. I saw more drama and mystery and adventure in
one short, album-long walk around my town than most folks
see on TV in a year. It was like walking through a holo-
graphic landscape formed by the intersections of beams
of golden light. The night was literally on fire with
light. Again, go figure.
Then again, much of this effect may be due to moodmaking,
and the fact that I actually consider Bruce Cockburn one
of my spiritual teachers. I've only met the dude a couple
of times, and yet I credit his words and music with shaping
my life easily as much as I credit Maharishi or Rama.
Go figure. Bruce is Christian. I'm quasi-Buddhist, with
a soupçon of Taoism, occultism, atheism, and polypantheism
thrown into the pot to add some spice to the dish. And yet.
And yet, his ruminations about the Road Trip of his life
resonate with the Road Trip of my life, and get me high
as a kite. What more could one ask of a musician, or for
that matter, a spiritual teacher?
This walk is a spiritual experience. A bit panentheistic - the divine
permeates everything - the music, the reflections on the pond, whatever you
look at, there it is. I get a bit of that walking the dog at night. I can
focus on the things I see without all the background stuff, since it is so
dark. And when the street lights or moon glitter on the snow and the whole
world is silent, I like that.
