Music For Airports · 19 July 2007

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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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , having a body , sound , spirituality

Comment

1. i love Brian Eno! which one do like? the one with just Brian Eno, or with Bang on a Can?

   Posted by: cranky housefrau · Jul 19, 06:09 AM · #

2. Lovely. And chiming just at tittibasana: exactly the encouragement one needs at that point. I’ve recently begun swinging back into bakasana and (sometimes) back into chaturanga from there and it is HARD work. Chimes right then would be great: you can do it, you can do it, you can do it.

   We bought a set of Music of the Spheres windchimes recently, and they are so beautiful. I love it when a little breeze gets them going. On their site you can listen to the different sets. Each type is tuned differently (for instance, Pentatonic, Chinese, etc). Check it out: http://www.musicofspheres.com

   Posted by: Gartenfische · Jul 19, 06:44 AM · #

3. I like this one

   Posted by: R · Jul 19, 07:37 AM · #

4. Such a nice post.

   Posted by: RE · Jul 19, 08:27 AM · #

5. Now that I think of it, my version is the original, but I think the one C played later that morning was the BOAC.

   These chimes are so great. Thanks for the tip.

   Posted by: (0v0) · Jul 19, 01:00 PM · #

6. I found your email when I got to my desk – you are such a doll. Interestingly enough, I looked up my chart in the link you sent and it mentioned my potential for esoteric feats – telepathy, foreseeing…

   Posted by: Vanessa · Jul 19, 07:58 PM · #

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