Walkabout Practice Week 5:

Instruction: Look for the dynamic of the field communiqué within appearance. Put differently, envision substance as a message communicated forward by the mind in ongoing acts of naming. In doing this walkabout, give ‘substance’ an expansive definition. It includes anything we consider to be real, and thus includes our own thoughts and emotions and those of others.

On my Facebook page I wrote about using a Jazz piece to focus attention. The song was as follows, try playing it as you read this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0o-wZ4Ld9fw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0o-wZ4Ld9fw

I live between the notes of this song, the silent spaces draw me into a luminous listening field that displays patterns of sound. The relationships between what is heard is where the deepest levels are found, is where clarity and the pristine are felt. From the darkened background comes the light, the non-thing of a melodic movement, a rhythmic changing in three-quarter time that sets waves of emotion crashing on the beaches of memories of old, between imaginings of what could and never be… Still crazy after all these years…

“And the current holds and takes
Him to where the still river flows…”
By Ken McKeon

A friend responded, concerned that I might be grieving over the past, or wishing for impossible things. My response was that I could see where one might get that impression, and even be concerned over what I wrote. But that really wasn’t what I was doing…..

So I said there can be a kind of joy while experiencing the play or flow of emotion as it washes over us, or perhaps better, as an undercurrent that moves our thoughts as they play, riding and bobbing like objects on the surface of a stream of consciousness. As it was with the music, and the spaces between the notes of the melody, those melodic spaces that seem to allow for other deeper memories and imaginings to surface, not in any wished-for way, but just as time playing with open possibilities. My training is to observe these objects without clinging or grasping. To just allow and feel them as transparencies, not weighted or frozen things… to appreciate those allowing, exquisite spaces between the notes, for they carry their own melody.

And so I remembered times past, loves and opportunities lost by taking positions and making choices, a kind of melody of my life. And it played like the song, its structure apparent, and so I understood the necessity for the treasured space for relationships between points and notes.