The windchimes rustled in practice this morning. They’re soft and deep, and slow. Very Music for Airports in tone. (Their maker must have intended that—it’s too perfect to be coincidental).
They probably rustle often, but we don’t always have our window cracked like we did today, and I’m not always aware of sounds besides the background whispers of a teacher and the diswasher-like drone of the ujjayi chorus.
Today, the breeze touched the chimes little just as I entered tittibasana, ringing a subject-verb-predicate into something like my front-brain. Tell V. your method. This one’s for her. Can you practice a posture as homage to someone—besides sages and wild creatures, that is? Anyway, I came home to email from V. asking for advice on just this matter, so clearly the chimes were telegraphing the same.
Music for Airports is a guilty pleasure for me. Guilty because corny, together with the rest of early ambient; and a pleasure because after about two seconds of listening I lose all self-consciousness about genre and cultural meaning and all that. A year ago, after a week of vipassana, I drove north out of Marin and pushed play on track 1 just as I made into the clouds that were hanging on to the Golden Gate. I hadn’t said a word in days, and figured the sound would ease the transition into Sunday morning Mysore practice on Divisadero. Really, the record is beautiful, and might have been written exactly for an empty morning drive in clouds across the Golden Gate, when you haven’t spoken or even much cogitated for ages.
I was the first one to arrive at Divisadero by a half hour, so broke the seal with some Sanskrit in a big empty room. Later C arrived and, to my horror, went to the CD player. No no no no noooo: please no music for yoga.
She played Music for Airports. Practice was amazing.
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