Golden

A few photos from last week. That’s why they call it the golden light, just before the light turns blue… Guitarcase in my kitchen.

Golden light plus rainbow and red spot, in DMV!

DMV, hugging the floor. The past and future is a blur, only the present in sharp focus.

Golden

That’s why they call it the golden light, just before it turns blue…

Wednesday in Santa Fe

A day filled with mundane tasks, dealing with garbage and recycling, cleaning, doing dishes, putting fresh armor on my nails (((I gave my nails a rest after Jon and I returned from the private performance in New York and took a week off of guitar-playing))) and playing guitar… all the while thinking about Bella, my Tibetan Mastiff.

The old girl, born in 1997, has a nasty open tumor on her back and we will soon have to decide what’s best for her.

Maybe inspired by Bella’s fate, I have had great conversations with Roshi Joan and others about end-of-life. Surely death is as big a deal for any life as birth is, but we don’t seem to talk about it much and most people would rather forget about it.

Anyway, I won’t go into it because, well, you signed up for music, not for my writing about death, which you might find morbid.

Here is another happy-Bella-pic:

Tuesday in Santa Fe

Overcast with rain now and then. Dug a hole for the little three foot tree that was a gift from the school we did the benefit concert at the Lensic in June for. The soil around here is mostly sand and rocks and digging even one to two feet down takes a lot of effort. Well, it’s got a new home now and the drizzle-rain gave it the perfect welcome.

Went back to the Canyon Preserve and took a few photos. Colors looked incredible in the muted light of the overcast sky.

Minimal Mac
I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.
— Leonardo da Vinci

In the evening I made dinner for Roshi Joan Halifax, who I had not seen since we met in Soho, Manhattan, in May (((we were playing at the Blue Note, she was doing something at the U.N.))). Interestingly we knew that we were both in Manhattan via Twitter.

From the New Yorker. This is the article, but you need to subscribe to read all of it.

Molchanova uses a technique that she refers to as “attention deconcentration.” (“They get it from the military,” Ericson said.) Molchanova told me, “It means distribution to the whole field of attention – you try to feel everything simultaneously. This condition creates an empty consciousness, so the bad thoughts don’t exist.”
“Is it difficult to learn?”
“Yes, it is difficult. I teach it in my university. It’s a technique from ancient warriors-it was used by the samurai-but it was developed by a Russian scientist, Oleg Bakhtiyarov, as a psychological-state-management technique for people who do very monotonous jobs.”

That’s hardly a new technique or something invented by the Russian military. In Zen, this is called just sitting, or shikantaza. In fact, I think it was preceded by a hunting technique that may be thousands of years old, whereby hunters learned to sit still and use panoramic attention, that is, attention that is distributed all around the body instead of focused on one particular spot.

It is curious that I started practicing this technique on my own as a child. I would sit down somewhere and just de-focus. I would hear everything around me, I would see things that moved in the field of my vision, and my awareness was just like a spehere radiating from where I sat. It was just a game I played by myself.

What bored engineers can do with an automated console: