The Grove: Recent Episodes
mira
We invite you to join us as we livestream Part 1 of the Cosmic Vaudevillain Opera on Tuesday, December 21st at 7:00pm MST at aspenchant.com.
The Libretto:
Bright Omens & The Cosmic Vaudevillain Opera is a musical composition written in the mode of a closet drama, as a series of stories that our two musicians have experienced sojourning on the good red road.
Climb into the closet, close your eyes, listen, and let Imagination run wild.
Characters:
The GuitaristThe ViolinistAriel the ArchangelThe Blind WomanFausti
Voices of the spirit of the Multiverse (No, not that multiverse!):
Terence McKennaAlan Watts
Structure:
Act 1 The Mystical Fool
Act 2 A Blind Woman Drives and Conducts the Future
Act 3 I’m Not Your Minion, I Have an Opinion!
Act 4 Multiverse
Act 5 Universe
The orchestra:
GuitarViolinDrumsOrganVoicesBass
*Engineer’s Note: Although this is already nontraditional, necessity took it even further. All recording/production equipment is vintage. It’s all stuff we’ve rescued from the trash, received from friends or bought from other musicians. I have wired, repaired, and reconfigured our small studio many times. I hope you resonate with the Lo-Fi version 2.0. — I do, and it is most fitting for this “play.”
Get full access to The Grove at thegrove.substack.com/subscribe
We continued with our livestream music compositions on Wednesday, September 22nd at 8:00pm MDT at aspenchant.com. The recording is archived above.
This Autumn Equinox session is our last livestream composing before we put together the end-of-the-year recording for Winter Solstice and complete The Cosmic Vaudevillain Opera.Music of the times, at least as the times feel to us. So naturally the music will sound different that what we’re all used to listening to.
We’d love to have your vibes connecting while we play, if you’d like to join us.
Stay well and love your neighbors.
Peace,
Hawk and Mira
Get full access to The Grove at thegrove.substack.com/subscribe
Warm wishes to you on this Summer Solstice. Live composing continues.
In the music I hear the sound of a relationship navigating the terrain of crashing paradigms and phase shifts, exploring new territory and falling back into the familiar, following each other’s inspirations towards new melodies and deeper coherence.
The music tonight is an invocation of the more beautiful world we know is possible.
Get full access to The Grove at thegrove.substack.com/subscribe
Bright Omens and the Cosmic Vaudevillian Opera
Push. Pull. Prod. Provoke. With Love:
Get full access to The Grove at thegrove.substack.com/subscribe
Sketches from composing A Symphony for the Living, continued:
PART 2
Ten is Zen: The compass brings us each to our own beating hearts, until we feel ourselves on solid ground and can begin to chart this new landscape. Haltingly at first, we begin to harmonize.
Pause: Honing in. Simplify, so we can keep moving.
(Another) Border: This time we are more prepared, and can move faster and more fluidly through the hinterlands.
Pause: Relief. We've made it this far, but there's more to go. Gather the energy.
Saturn's Jig: Learning the steps of this new dance.
Lo Key Left: The patterns of the new terrain begin to emerge more clearly. This whole composition is the journey of a dance coming to life. Difficult times are ahead, and we’re being called to the circle to dance a more beautiful world into being. Feel ourselves in the circle. Feel the ancient medicine - dancing together.
Phase out: So here we are, in a new place and a new time, practicing for the coming celebration of our common kinship.
- Initial tracks of The Border and Ten is Zen were recorded in The Before Times, with Oso on drums.
*collage using digital image by Marije Berting
Get full access to The Grove at thegrove.substack.com/subscribe
Sketches from composing A Symphony for the Living:
The Method:
By last March, suddenly, along with everyone else, we’d entered a new world. Uncertainty, fear and disruption permeated the air. We made a decision to create a record of the time, our acoustic journal of the experience. We committed to a slowly unfolding process: Broadcasting and recording our collaborative music writing over time, not rushing to complete anything, just following where it takes us. We have enjoyed and appreciate our kith and kin who have joined us on the journey, and who have sent their reflections on participating with our real time "living field experiments." We've discovered that we listen differently when we know others are listening with us.
In November, we pulled the tracks from the sessions we’ve recorded over the past nine months, the ones where we feel the most life stirring in the depths, and listened to hear where they were sending us. At this stage it’s not so much the notes that are there – some of them will fall away by the time it’s a whole piece – it’s the notes we can hear that aren’t there yet. They come and go, some with certainty and force, some whispy and elusive.
The next stage is to play with them, to find the notes that will come through our fingers and want to stay. To hear a piece of music coming to life that wasn’t there before… It’s a peculiar kind of joy. We hear the symphonic voices, but we are only two, honing in on one line, one at a time. We then record another layer to the track. (Don’t overthink, just play with it once and let go!)
It’s taken on a life of it’s own. We’ve gathered the tracks that are telling us a story about ourselves and our journey, and woven in some long pauses for more to enter in between. This is how our writing process goes. It is our work and our prayer, a practice in co-creating a more beautiful future out of the present chaos. An invocation to create ourselves anew, and leave the past to rest in the hands of our ancestors.
We invite you in tonight to listen with us in a different way. To listen as if you are composing, noticing how the music feels, where it spirals out and where it soars. Let your imagination wander through the soundscape, and notice where it likes to wander most. When you hear the dance emerging, can you feel it through your body, even while resting still, eyes closed? When a pattern runs on too long for comfort, can you begin to hear the next notes and rhythms that could enter to change the tune? We know, this is a long time to concentrate on something at one go. When we let our thoughts rest and our imagination relax we find our minds will pull us back in when something interesting is beginning to brew...
Tracking the Theme - a story of what the music is saying at this stage to our inner ears:
Phasing In: When you feel a big shift coming, and hone in to what’s being whispered on the wind.
Public Domain : A glimpse of the possibility of common cause and common sense. But it’s barely there, and sadly fleeting from public discourse. We grasp the thread anyway, and follow it. We tune out the monsters brawling in the public square. The birds are saying something else.
Pause: They warn of even bigger shocks coming. Listening deeply, almost ready to act.
The Border: When the world as you knew it is about to be swept away in a tidal wave of change, and you gather your kith and your kin and run for the hills.
Pause: Catch your breath.
Retrograde: The space between worlds. Everything appears to be sliding backwards, becoming more relentlessly unfamiliar. As it happens in times of shock and transformation, it brings out both the best and the worst in us. We react. We push and pull against the tempo we wish to change and follow streamers of notes until they sometimes go careening off the edge of this new terrain. We surrender back into sync. Out of the chaos, melody finds it’s way. The notes of a new dance begin to emerge.
This lasts for longer than we thought it could, but in the sliding back, we return to find our compass.
*collage using digital image by Marije Berting
Get full access to The Grove at thegrove.substack.com/subscribe
So tonight I just want to recommend something to you, my friends. Choose a beautiful poem that makes your heart sing and memorize it. Then recite it to yourself when things feel extra stressful. Stop and swim in the poetry.Your mind will thank you for exercising your memory. Your heart will thank you for the beautiful images. I'm going to leave a poem that's become a great friend to me, and which goes with the feeling of what we're playing tonight. We've pulled two tracks that we recorded with the lovely drummer Oso just before the pandemic lockdowns hit. It feels like a good time to revive them and continue with writing them. Here's the poem that's keeping me company these days:
The Truly GreatBy Stephen Spender
I think continually of those who were truly great.Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s historyThrough corridors of light, where the hours are suns,Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambitionWas that their lips, still touched with fire,Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song.And who hoarded from the Spring branchesThe desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.What is precious, is never to forgetThe essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springsBreaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple lightNor its grave evening demand for love.Never to allow gradually the traffic to smotherWith noise and fog, the flowering of the spirit.Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,See how these names are fêted by the waving grassAnd by the streamers of white cloudAnd whispers of wind in the listening sky.The names of those who in their lives fought for life,Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sunAnd left the vivid air signed with their honour.
Get full access to The Grove at thegrove.substack.com/subscribe
UPDATE: Thanks to those who participated! Original email below:
Since we're in a blue moon tonight, we thought it timely to try something different. Since April we've been live streaming our composition process, with all of it's messiness and surprises. Through it we're creating a kind of record of how this period of time has felt to these two musicians, recorded in sound.
Tonight we're bringing in two audio tracks from previous sessions where new rhythm and melodies appeared; intermixing them, and playing live to see what emerges. Instead of just being about writing music, this has turned into a practice that's helped us to focus and get centered. Helpful, in this long vertiginous moment.
Tonight I invite you to experiment with us, and engage differently with this live broadcast. Not as a performance that you are just listening to, but as a process that you're entering into. I've included the transcription of the voice sample we're entangling with the music. Maybe read the transcript below in sync with the voice, and see if you can pick back up on what he's saying when you can hear him again. Or if there are dance-y parts, maybe you'll feel like dancing with it. This is not a controlled experiment, it's an uncontrolled experiment!
Some suggestions: If the music gets agitating, tune it out, and focus on the words. If the music gets enticing, tune into that. Notice what odd or wandering thoughts pop up while you're trying to concentrate in this way. Notice the dance of order and chaos, and how, after some time, we find our way to dancing with both of them. Kind of like the slightly hidden pictures in the image above. Something clicks, then you can see the whole thing at once.Experiment! And then, please do let us know what it was like to participate.
My loose hypothesis is that rather than just passively absorbing all the sensory input, choosing to focus on one thread in the midst of information or even musical overload and letting the rest pass by peripherally has a distinct effect on our nervous system, which affects our thought patterns. Let's see?
Below is the voice we're tuning into and playing with, excerpted from a discussion group that met regularly back in 2001-2002.
There's a way of understanding - give you a little insight into the experience of the shaman, because what the shaman is doing with his drugs is changing the timing of his clocks, changing the timing of his perception, and turning the world upside down, just by changing the way you time things. So there's a huge - when you say timing is everything you can't emphasize too much what this means. This is an incredible, our whole world can be turned upside down in many different dimensions and directions simply by changing the timing. Deep, deep insight. Profound insight.
And that's the difference between sanity and John Nash. We talked a little bit around this last time, the timing of his internal clocks. Every control system - most biologists generally look at the nervous system as a series of control systems that basically stabilize, keeping us level, keeping us from falling over on our head, allowing us to predict what's going to happen next, allows us to put our hand in front of a baseball and then catch it. All of those things that we do involve predicting the future. Not only is timing everything in terms of what happens, but every control system has got a sort of, because of the little time constants and offsets, it takes time to catch up. When you put your hand in front of a baseball that you are about to catch you are predicting the future. You put your hand there before the ball got there. And an intelligent furnace is one that understands it's got a time constant and tries to predict what's going to happen and lead the outside world so that it doesn't have this, and if it can do that it can make this line really smooth. So a good part of smoothing this line out is predicting the future. Making something be an insulator involves predicting the future.
So the way we get through life is predict the future, which is another way in which timing is everything. And see, at the heart of all of this stuff we've been talking about is the understanding of timing. It is incredible, there's an incredible set of insights here that allow you to make sense out of all kinds of stuff and see magic in your life that you thought was not there. Just to be able to walk down the street and not fall over on your face involves predicting the future like it does catching a ball. When you see a step that's about to happen, you don't fall over at this curb, you anticipate, and put your foot into a different place, and you're predicting the future. You're predicting what that experience is going to be like for a few seconds before you get to it.
Time is at the heart of this. Timing is at the heart of this thing. This is not space, this is time. The magic in our life is full of time, and when we have paradoxes it's full of time. And the things we miss are time. As children, when we grow up, a sense of time is the last thing that we learn to come to terms with. You cannot ask a four or a five year old to come back in an hour. It doesn't mean a thing.
...Well, yea, it is in the process of exploding...
Right, well the thing could be, there are lots of explanations for this, I mean, it could be other dimensions and stuff, and I, at this point I'm not worried about what particular theory you're going to use to try and explain this. The point i'm trying to make is that time is everything. Every one of these issues that we're talking about, where there's a paradox, where we feel the crunch of impossibility, all involves time. And time is the thing we've seen, over and over again, is the thing that we have one of the most, you know, dynamic process, which involves time, change, we're afraid of change, all this stuff in our lives. Timing is everything in spades! Right, these are all issues of time and timing, and yet we are a culture that has sort of created it's identity out of understanding static structures, not process, and that's part of our left turn. It's part of coming to understand the details of this left turn that the culture has made, so it's another way to understand what went wrong.
Well, it's all related. What we're talking about is extra-sensory perception could be related to changing how our internal clocks work so we're framing what's there a little differently and seeing other aspects of the same thing. That's what John Nash and shamans and -
This is hard to think about. We are not given tools, our culture doesn't give us tools. The only tools, really, that our culture gives us to deal with this stuff are things like - this is what partial differential equations is about, is about dealing with time in this way, and it's something that we don't think about very clearly at all.
And knowing, if you look at the equations of motion that describe how a bicycle works, a bicycle is a very unstable, out of balance thing. If you just let it be it will fall, over. If you get on top of it it will still fall over, maybe even faster. It's very unstable. And you, somehow, have got to balance this bicycle, and the equations that describe how this bicycle, the rates of change of various parts of it, are all given in what are called partial differential equations, which is probably the nemesis of every graduate math student and engineer and physicist. But knowing the equations of motion give you no clue about how to ride the bicycle still. So all the tools that we have for dealing with time and the complexities of time do not help us do it any better. They do not help us ride the bicycle any better. The engineers who have all this systems dynamics stuff still miss Thales, still will not see the historical importance of Thales any more than they will know how to ride a bicycle by having these equations which they can understand, and parse, and do all that stuff. So the tools that our culture has given - the lesson here is the tools that our culture has given do not help us, make us feel stupid because having all these abstractions does not help us solve this problem of riding the bicycle or catching the ball, or understanding what Thales did. They're all the same problem. At some level, they're all the same problem. See that? So this is all by way of understanding the nature of the left turn, what we've been calling the left turn, that our culture made back several thousand years ago, and made over and over again with the council of Nicea and all those places where we decided, our leaders decided to simplify our world for us, that we were, that Christ's teachings were too dangerous for us and we needed to simplify. Every time you simplify your world you get bitten by some little thing, and our culture has been sort of the history of being bitten by untruths that have come back to rest and bite us. We're continually seeing this thing that we put our teeth into and it turns out to be our own tail.
That's right. That's right. It has a time constant. It has a minimum reaction time. That's why we can bite into our tail and it may be generations before we...
We're seeing this with environmental issues. Everything has a time constant. Everything takes time to be realized in the world. Everything we've set in motion doesn't happen instantly, it takes a long time. And politicians get to take credit for all kinds of things that were set in motion generations ago, right? So we have a whole culture that is blind to time constants. It's one of the sicknesses of the culture. Understand that. Understand how important this is.
Yes. This relates to that. This is another sort of slice to the pie. What we've been doing in all of these talks is sort of taking a slice of this pie, going through this rat's nest of cultural ideas from different perspectives with different visions. We're crossing back over the same material over and over again, each time with a slightly different perspective. We're cutting through at a slightly different angle through the same material. So we're continually talking about Thales, continually talking about all these stories that we tell - the council of Nicea - all these things are all sort of pivotal moments in history which we are continually revisiting with a new concept.
So it's going to look like we're talking about the same subject over and over again, but we're actually revisiting it with slightly different concepts. We're actually making explicit now, this concept of time, which we've only been dancing around in a peripheral way. We're actually making explicit that all of these issues that we've been talking about all involve time, and when we have conceptions of the world that are different - the culture has taught us all kinds of things that aren't true and that our inner heart of hearts knows isn't true, often the untruth is around the issue of time. These are all pivotal issues that we feel as paradoxical, that we feel as a crunch, all have at their root a timing concept. Something around predicting the future, or something that can't exist in the same place at the same time. There are a whole lot of really interesting paradoxes around time that grew out of relativity, that have never fully been, made sense out of yet, but...there are all kinds of wonderful time paradoxes about what happens to clocks when you travel fast. When Einstein, in the special theory of relativity, says when you travel away from somebody if you can see his wristwatch when you were travelling away, you would see his wristwatch slow down, his clocks would get slower. It's sort of like when the train goes by, and it starts to go away from you, the pitch of the horn goes down -
The doppler effect. Except that with light, with Einstein, the equations all involve a squaring of time. So, when the train comes toward you the pitch gets higher, and when it goes by it gets lower. But with the light effects, and because all the equations squared time, time gets squared. which means that if things are going backwards - if there's a negative sign, when you square a negative with itself it turns positive. So the sign is lost in all of the relativity equations, so it shouldn't make any difference whether they're coming towards you or coming away from you, the clock should slow down if you're going faster, according to Einstein's equation.
So let's say you're on earth. The rocket ship goes out into space, flies all over the place, relative to you it's clocks are getting slower because it's moving very fast, it comes back. Now - this is one form of the paradox, one form of the Einstein time paradox. The rocket ship's clock should be slower than your clock, but, at least from the standpoint of the special theory of relativity in which gravity is not involved, this effect should be the same for the rocket ship. The rocket ship, when it leaves the earth, sees the earth go away, gets faster and faster, it's clocks slow down, so when they come back, each person says your clocks are slower than mine. Here are two clocks. How can this be that this person says the other person's clock is slower?
Well, this is what the special theory of relativity says. It might be wrong...
Yes, Yes. Now they come back together, the special theory of relativity that talks about this time thing has no way of dealing with it.
It's a complicated..yes. There are various ways to resolve paradoxes, and I'm not so much worried about which particular theory, at this point, is the truth. People are sort of looking at this stuff and trying to figure out what's going on, but
Well, clocks come back at a different time. Would the person, if a person rode along with this, would he see time differently? Would he see the other clock- there's a suggestion in relativity that two people can look at each other and each say the other person's clock is slower. Now, we're pretty sure that doesn't happen, because we've seen the difference in clocks, and Einstein predicts that there's going to be a difference in clocks, it also predicts that this might happen - the fact that we see a difference in clocks, it doesn't prove anything. It still could be, it's just you're perspective, it's what you're experiencing. It's possible that you're experience, what you went through, changes your perception of what is. And we've seen that happen in John Nash and in shamans and in a lot of things. Haven't we? And who's to say in John Nash's case who's right, or in the shaman's case, or with the astronauts? I'm just tossing this out - that it's the same issue. These are all the same issue. They may not look like it but they're the same issue and we can think about these in a whole lot of different contexts, but whether we're talking about madness, the truth, how cultures work, these are all the same issues. Exactly the same issue. Let's not worry about what the solution is. What the solution is is going to, is probably going to be twelve dimensions and we're not going to understand it anyhow, all right?
It's going to be like the partial differential equations. It's not going to help us ride the bicycle at all. What's going to help us ride the bicycle is something else, some change of consciousness. Some change of our own consciousness and being flexible about how our own consciousness works. That's what's at the heart of all this stuff. Is that clear? This is at least my view. Now you don't have to accept what I'm saying, but all I'm saying - I'm not worried about the answers just yet. I'm not trying to tidy up this thing, I'm trying to show that there's a mess here no matter where you are, that there's a set of paradoxes, that they're not clear, that we have traditionally as a culture been confused about this stuff, our personal lives are a reflection of all that stuff. We're not thinking clearly about it. I mean, our own picture of the world and what we think is right is defective, is not solving our problems, it's not the truth, don't get wedded to any particular truth at this point. If we're going to rise above all of this we have to somehow have compassion for our confusion as people, as cultures, as individuals, and as societies and everything. Be it, these are difficult things. We have been taught inconsistent stories, we have been told inconsistent stories about how the world works. Most of what we believe, I've been saying this over and over again, most of what we believe about the world is wrong, and we've sort of been documenting this, right? And this is another - we're still talking about how that is, how it got to be, what's the nature of it? How did it get to be that way? And what's at the heart of all that suffering? Why are we so confused and so wrong? And let's give ourselves some sense of compassion so that we can sort of learn to live with all this stuff, and have a sense of humor about it, and not be too crazy. You know, if you're not careful, what we're taught in this culture can - is crazy making. Because, behind all of this, our inner heart of hearts knows the truth. We all, remoter viewing, and all this stuff, the fact of that says that we have access to every truth that's there. We can actually stand in grand central station and train ourselves to listen to every message that's there if we want to.
And that's magic that we do every day when we tune a receiver to a radio station. It's the same thing.
I'm not worried about the truth at this point, about the truth of some explanation that resolves the paradoxes. In the end it's not going to make any difference. It's just competing theories and so on. It's to understand our predicament. Where we are in the history of our culture, what are the issues at this moment in time?
Yes, yes. People get persecuted and all kinds of bad things happen. And it's a problem. Right. And the world should be changed. But the question is: how do you change the world? This question that we keep coming back to is what does it take to change the world?
Well, it's to understand how feedback works. To have a concept of feedback, to understand that all of these things are timing problems and that timing is everything, and then to be looking for the moment in terms of time. Time and tide, knowing that there are tides, that everything that happens in the world is riding on a tide, a cyclical event, a phase, everything has a phase, everything is in some phase, in some frequency, in some cycle, and timing is everything. So changing the world is actually knowing when to step on the roller coaster. The timing of that event is much more important, according to what I've been saying, the moment that you step onto the system- whatever it is - can determine more than what it is you do. The possibility -
The answer to that is never that simple. What you need to know, in order to be able to effect change, to manifest change, you have to understand these things about timing. You have to be focused on the possibility that timing is everything. Now. That the exact moment in which you act, when you decide to act, picking the exact moment -
But you never can tell, but you also can. I mean, because, do you - can you catch a ball? Most of the time? You're predicting the future. You're managing time. You're managing something that is uncertain. And you can't predict the future you say? But you can!
We have tools. You've got tools. You've got conceptual tools. I mean, you've been playing catch for a while, and you've been thinking about this process of, you've been leaning into the process and trying to decide when, you know, to put your hand out, all that stuff.
Everything is timing. In a culture that teaches us that everything is static things, everything is really timing. And it's to understand that, and to compensate for what your culture has taught you. Now you, I mean...You can say you can't predict the future, and that you don't know anything, which is true. But it is also true that you can predict the future and that you can know. We depend on predicting the future all the time. To see that, and to understand, is to have confidence in your ability to catch a ball. And then increase the amount of time - and one of the exercises that you can do in life is to take a look at the ball, as you're playing catch, close your eyes, and see if you can catch the ball. See how long before the ball comes you can close your eyes and still catch it. If you think about the exercise, that's wholly a timing exercise. You are not thinking about doing a thing, you are thinking about the timing of it. So you are learning to improve your performance by thinking about nothing but the timing. It's a different way of thinking about what we are doing than we normally are taught to think. Is that right?
Out of all of this talk become strategies for improving your sense of timing. Be conscious. The first thing is to be aware, that timing does this thing. Timing makes John Nash what he is. Timing Thales what he is. Timing makes everything that we've missed in the culture. So timing is the thing that needs to be honed, it's the thing our culture has made us get dumb about. Part of our stupidity. Part of our illusion of progress has to do with how we think about the timing of events. And so timing is everything, really is a powerful - we've all heard this phrase - but there's a huge amount in that, there's a huge amount to understand when somebody says timing is everything. You say, 'yeah, sure.' That phrase 'timing is everything' includes John Nash. It includes the culture. John, Thales, all the things we've been talking about.
Yes, and it will mean different things to different people.
Get full access to The Grove at thegrove.substack.com/subscribe
Cheers to those who joined us.
We're harvesting Retrograde, our first live stream of this composition process, so we'll be recording new layers onto the original track we recorded on the April 4th conjunction. Zak Stein's words that we were contemplating and wove into the mix feel alive now in a way they couldn't have then, so I'm transcribing them below. Maybe someone out there will need just this arrangement of words as much as I did. If so, may they hold you. Remember, we're all in this together, aye!We'll also be harvesting the track Public Domain, which we recorded...sometime, I can't remember exactly when, in between now and Retrograde.
First samples on Retrograde: Alan Watts and hummingbirds (not transcribed)
Second voice:
"We are living in the liminal, a time of pure potential and change, a time between worlds. And I feel this.
~ Peter Lindberg, host of The Stoa
Third voice:
The things we're looking for are the things we do with our bodies, our voices. Which is actually deeply organic. A return to the - turn to the ritual of living together, is what we're asked to do.
A natural process that is actually like a rediscovering of an organic reality, an always already existing reality within the living body of the human, within the bones and the DNA, is the possibility for the forms of consciousness that we are getting when we dance, or when we hold each other with the proper language.
… a certain kind of deepening into the always already present capacities of the human organism that are there. And so meditation is one of the classic ones, but dialogos is another.
Many of the rituals which we have inherited from the great traditions could be repotentiated.
Self clarification, and basically having communities of practice. It is the way that practice conditions your choice, the impact of the practice on your choice making, it's effect on others. If it makes you feel good that's wonderful. I'm not saying that's bad, but I am saying that the payload, the delivery, what we're looking for at the end of the day is a right action, is the condition for the possibility of right action. Sometimes that will actually require going deeper into pain that someone else is experiencing. In order to say the right thing to this person, I need to understand their interior state more. I need to understand their pain. But the practices that allow you to do the right thing, to be the person who you need to be, to say what needs to be said, and so that's about clarifying who you are, clarifying the realities in the field of your experience. And it gets harder to do that as the realities in the field of your experience become more intense, emotional, more unpredictable, more frightening. But this is where all the tricks we learned from Stoicism and Buddhism and other things to regulate and to ground allows you to experiment with other practices. Slowing down -- that's a good one. Reflecting -- that's another good one. Once you've cleared the air and you're in the tragedy, but you're transcendent but still in it, then you can laugh again. Then you have post tragic laughter, You can have post tragic tears that are not self interested "woe is me" tears, that are tears for the world. And so there's a humor possible, there's a levity that is possible, but it has to be the levity of the other side of tragedy. It can't be the levity before we actually confront it. When am I choosing out of a basic orientation of separation and selfishness and when am I choosing basically to lead with love and care and concern?As the situation gets more difficult can you continue to be who you want to be? Can you continue to be committed to the things that allow you to be an integrous person, someone committed to your ideals?
~ Dr. Zachary Stein from this conversation at The Stoa
Get full access to The Grove at thegrove.substack.com/subscribe
The last six months feel like a kind of cauldron in which we’ve been boiling. All of us, undergoing some alchemical process. How much say do we have in what is bubbling into being?When playing around on an instrument and a rhythm or a phrase shows up, and you’re trying to tune in to the feeling of the time and the whispers of what’s coming – sometimes a pattern is suddenly there, as if it had been all along. And the pattern soothes some grooves in your mind that a moment ago you hadn’t known were there.We’re live streaming the raw live scripting process of new songs because we’ve been feeling this alchemy thing – well, that it’s real – and we’re a bit in awe of the beautiful brightness of the hearts of the souls we’re connected to right now, in this wildly hyper (dis?) connected time.Paulo Coelho writes:
“There’s a motto in Alchemy: “Concentrate and dissolve.”As you may know alchemists would, through laboratory studies, try to distill the mercury from the sulfur and then refine the mercury until it converted into gold.This quest would lead them to the Philosopher Stone (which was the solid component) and the Elixir of Long Life (not the Elixir of Immortality – because the longer you live, the chances of an accident increases).
Through this routine, alchemists are also training their patience and thus transforming their perception of the world.
They respect the main teaching of the I Ching: ‘To persevere is favourable.’Perseverance is not the same thing as insistence. There are times when battles go on longer than necessary, draining everybody of strength and enthusiasm.A prolonged war finally destroys the victors too.We must know when to insist, and when to withdraws our forces from the battlefield.Solve (dissolve) means: time to restCoagula (concentrate) means: time to act The two worst strategic mistakes are: acting prematurely and letting an opportunity slip.”
I missed out on learning strategy, or maybe I was daydreaming during those lessons. Perhaps there’s a chance that the elixer’s recipe doesn’t have to be quite that precise?
I know, the probabilities are low.
But new patterns are bubbling into being. Our perceptions of the world are or soon will be transforming. Remember the times when we would walk each other home? Do you long for them again? With the music streaming on the waves tonight can we at least pretend?
Let’s walk each other home.
Get full access to The Grove at thegrove.substack.com/subscribe
We began writing a couple of new pieces this week. We’re tuning in to different cycles of rhythm and sort of rotating around them, finding pathways that feel soothing on our nervous systems. Miyamoto Musashi said that “All things entail rising and falling timing. You must be able to discern this.” We’re practicing tuning into the feeling of the music rather than our thoughts about it, and it's been rejuvenating We really appreciate hearing feedback about what it's like to listen with us on these exploratory streams, so thanks to our friends who are participating with us in this process!
I was wondering about this full moon being named after the sturgeon. I learned that several species of sturgeon are now endangered. Reading an article about how dams are killing them brings to mind the 3 Gorges dam, that giant feat of engineering not far from Wuhan that is reported to be under stress from recent flooding. Although there is no point in ruminating about the 3 Gorges dam, I do. If it breaks, would we grieve more for the lives lost and broken, or the easiness we took for granted before all those supply chains blew? What sort of creatures are we? It feels, one way or another, like we’re beginning to find out. Even though it’s a tired metaphor, sometimes I can’t help thinking of the titanic. Up until what point were passengers still complaining of the poor service of the staff? Or who among them, the moment they knew, thought of how to help others as best they could? Who saved themselves, if there is such a thing? Is the dam in danger of bursting, or is it just another fear grenade rolling around the world? Either way, perhaps it will have more of us contemplating how deeply interconnected we are now. It feels like another invitation to give up our lesser concerns, and starting learning how to learn new ways of being. Where are the maps?
Get full access to The Grove at thegrove.substack.com/subscribe
With a partial eclipse on the way I've been contemplating alignments, both hidden and revealed. In particular, Hawk and I have been ruminating on The Transparency Society by the philosopher and cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han, so I'll share a few excerpts here:
"Today the word “transparency” is haunting all spheres of life—not just politics but economics, too. More democracy, more freedom of information, and more efficiency are expected of transparency. Transparency creates trust, the new dogma affirms. What is forgotten thereby is that such insistence on transparency is occurring in a society where the meaning of “trust” has been massively compromised.Wherever information is very easy to obtain, as is the case today, the social system switches from trust to control. The society of transparency is not a society of trust, but a society of control.If everything becomes public right away, politics invariably grows short of breath; it becomes short term and thins out into mere chatter. Total transparency imposes a temporality on political communication that makes slow, long-term planning impossible. A vision directed toward the future proves more and more difficult to obtain. And things that take time to mature receive less and less attention.As total communication and total networking run their course, it proves harder than ever to be an outsider, to hold a different opinion. Transparent communication is communication that has a smoothing and leveling effect. It leads to synchronization and uniformity. It eliminates Otherness. Compulsive conformity proceeds from transparency. In this way, transparency stabilizes the dominant system.Transparency is a neoliberal dispositive. It forces everything inward in order to transform it into information. Under today’s immaterial relations of production, more information and communication mean more productivity and acceleration. In contrast, secrecy, foreignness, and otherness represent obstacles for communication without borders. They are to be dismantled in the name of transparency.Transparency makes the human being glassy. Therein lies its violence. Unrestricted freedom and communication switch into total control and surveillance. Social media are also coming to resemble, more and more, digital panoptica that discipline and exploit the social.In disciplinary society, the occupants of the panopticon were isolated from each other for more thorough surveillance, and they were not permitted to speak. The inhabitants of the digital panopticon, on the other hand, engage in lively communication and bare themselves of their own free will. In this way, they actively collaborate in the digital panopticon.The digital society of control makes intensive use of freedom. It is only possible thanks to voluntary self-illumination and self exposure. It exploits freedom. The society of control achieves perfection when its inhabitants do not communicate because of external constraint but out of inner need—that is, when the fear of giving up a private and intimate sphere yields to the need to put oneself on display shamelessly.Transparency is an ideology. Like all ideologies, it has a positive core that has been mystified and made absolute. The danger of transparency lies in such ideologization. If totalized, it yields terror.
Today’s society of control possesses a distinct panoptic structure. In contrast to the occupants of the Benthamian panopticon, who are isolated from each other, the inhabitants of today’s panopticon network and communicate with each other intensively. Not lonesomeness through isolation, but hypercommunication guarantees transparency. Above all, the particularity of the digital panopticon is that its inhabitants actively collaborate in its construction and maintenance by putting themselves on display and baring themselves. They display themselves on the panoptic market. Pornographic putting-on-display and panoptic control complement each other. Exhibitionism and voyeurism feed the net as a digital panopticon. The society of control achieves perfection when subjects bare themselves not through outer constraint but through self-generated need, that is, when the fear of having to abandon one’s private and intimate sphere yields to the need to put oneself on display without shame.Trust is only possible in a state between knowing and not-knowing. Trust means establishing a positive relationship with the Other, even in ignorance. It makes actions possible despite one’s lack of knowledge. If I know everything in advance, there is no need for trust. Transparency is a state in which all not-knowing is eliminated. Where transparency prevails, no room for trust exists. Instead of affirming that “transparency creates trust,” one should instead say, “transparency dismantles trust.” The demand for transparency grows loud precisely when trust no longer prevails. In a society based on trust, no intrusive demand for transparency would surface. The society of transparency is a society of mistrust and suspicion; it relies on control because of vanishing confidence. Strident calls for transparency point to the simple fact that the moral foundation of society has grown faulty, that moral values such as honesty and uprightness are losing their meaning more and more. As the new social imperative, transparency is taking the place of a moral instance that would break new ground.Today the entire globe is developing into a panopticon. There is no outside space. The panopticon is becoming total. No wall separates inside from outside. Google and social networks, which present themselves as spaces of freedom, are assuming panoptic forms. Today surveillance is not occurring as an attack on freedom, as is normally assumed. Instead, people are voluntarily surrendering to the panoptic gaze. They deliberately collaborate in the digital panopticon by denuding and exhibiting themselves. The prisoner in the digital panopticon is a perpetrator and a victim at the same time. Herein lies the dialectic of freedom. Freedom turns out to be a form of control."~ Byung-Chul Han
I'd also like to recommend the documentary HyperNormalisation. Clicking on this link will take you to the video hosted on the ThoughtMaybe site.HyperNormalisation wades through the culmination of forces that have driven this culture into mass uncertainty, confusion, spectacle and simulation. Where events keep happening that seem crazy, inexplicable and out of control—from Donald Trump to Brexit, to the War in Syria, mass immigration, extreme disparity in wealth, and increasing bomb attacks in the West—this film shows a basis to not only why these chaotic events are happening, but also why we, as well as those in power, may not understand them. We have retreated into a simplified, and often completely fake version of the world. And because it is reflected all around us, ubiquitous, we accept it as normal. This epic narrative of how we got here spans over 40 years, with an extraordinary cast of characters—the Assad dynasty, Donald Trump, Henry Kissinger, Patti Smith, early performance artists in New York, President Putin, Japanese gangsters, suicide bombers, Colonel Gaddafi and the Internet. HyperNormalisation weaves these historical narratives back together to show how today’s fake and hollow world was created and is sustained. This shows that a new kind of resistance must be imagined and actioned, as well as an unprecedented reawakening in a time where it matters like never before.
Get full access to The Grove at thegrove.substack.com/subscribe
We’re bookmarking this astronomical alignment in this acoustic journal. Some kind of alchemy is underway, on so many scales.
Scales. Running rhythm and scales has been the balm for our information saturated minds, and the energy pulling us out of the lulls.
Mercury is also in Retrograde, or so it would seem.
But does it mean anything?If anything, it's just that we'll play what feels good to play, more than thinking about what sounds right.
Get full access to The Grove at thegrove.substack.com/subscribe
History's rhymes are on my mind. Can tides be turned or can we only surf the waves?
It's not just on the screens. People turning on each other, turning in on themselves. Escalation. Systemic cascades. These aren't just words.
What's the point of music now? The Spectacle Itself seems to be running the show. But the Spectacle Itself has no sentience. It's just feeding and growing on our fears. I fear what it's going to take to shake enough people out of complacency, of clinging to business as usual, for longer than the span of adrenaline fueled crises.
Music is not the point. Our emotions are not the point. This writing is pointless. Still, we play, we talk, we write. What is it we're doing here?
Derrick Jensen wrote this observation almost two decades ago:
"Our culture's deep foundation of competition creates waves of rage and hatred. Not only does the anger get misdirected because it's easier to express it against the powerless, and not only because we are routinely pitted against others of the powerless, but , most especially, because, if we were to focus on the real sources of that rage and hatred, we would soon find ourselves questioning our very identities.Because so many of us have identified ourselves so deeply as civilized, as producers, consumers, workers, engineers, soldiers, policemen, teachers, we have forgotten that we are human beings.And what does it mean to be a human being? We have no idea.To identify so deeply with the system of production that permeates the deepest recesses of our bodies… is to identify with the founding processes of civilization: conquest and repression.To recognize that our lives are based on these processes would - if we reject them instead of embrace them - set us adrift in unknown territory. Who would I be and how would I live if I were not a part of this system?If we were to truly turn our rage and hatred.. toward the right targets, we would find ourselves questioning the basis upon which anyone holds power over anyone else. We would find ourselves questioning the basis for our own privilege..."
Derrick Jensen, The Culture of Make Believe, 2004, pp 506-507And then there's Hazrat Inayat Khan, who said that “There are two aspects of individual harmony: the harmony between body and soul, and the harmony between individuals. All the tragedy in the world, in the individual and in the multitude, comes from lack of harmony. And harmony is the best given by producing harmony in one's own life. ”What's b**t and what is true? What matters most to us?
Get full access to The Grove at thegrove.substack.com/subscribe
May 7th is the Full Flower Moon. Temperatures are rising and we're feeling a bit of the blues. Seeds are planted, the sage is about to bloom, and we miss others dancing the music to life with us. The world around isn't as still and silent as it was a month ago, but fear still hangs heavy in the air. Even the birds seem to keep more distance.
I can't seem to move out of minor keys lately, and Hawk keeps circling back to thundering out a dirge. Sometimes the timing suddenly shifts. Melts. Hawk is dancing, or a joy sweeps through my fingers, and a melody pops out of the dissonance. The sour notes, the in betweens, are all part of it. Undiscarded and woven in.
We feel a song on it's way to us. Until then, we'll bounce and weave the notes, some jarring, some gelling. Every day now, there's a few more moments of light.
Get full access to The Grove at thegrove.substack.com/subscribe
Thanks to those who joined us for our first live stream at aspenchant.com. Here's the recording of our musical reflection of the world-at-the-moment.
The speaking samples woven into the music are the voices of Peter Lindberg, Forrest Landry, and primarily of Dr. Zachary Stein, author of Covid-19: A War Broke out in Heaven.
Here is a wonderful video discussion about that article.
Get full access to The Grove at thegrove.substack.com/subscribe