02025-09-17
Last August I arrived at a meditation cave in the wilderness of Northern New Mexico, armed with food and water for a week, with my guitar, a microphone, a recording device, and a mic stand I borrowed from Jon Gagan’s studio in Santa Fe.
Over the course of the next week I spent each day doing zazen (sitting meditation) for 6 hours and playing guitar for 1-2 hours. I recorded much of that guitar playing but didn’t listen to what I had recorded. I brought no musical ideas to the cave, hoping that I would have enough ideas during my days there to record an album’s worth of music.
I used the Valhalla Supermassive reverb because it made the guitar sound the way I wanted it to sound in my *mind*. A large reverb, such as the one I used for his music, creates chords out of arpeggios. The single notes of a melody hang in the air and are shaped into clouds of harmonies. At times it sounds like I am playing with an orchestra or added a lot of keyboards.
02025-09-13 | Uncategorized
The are many ways to practice meditation. Over time we discover which method works best for us. Here I want to offer a couple of things I have learned in the course of meditating for about 50 years.
Here is the first thing: I have learned that having a daily practice is more important than doing the occasional long meditation. I think if you do just 5 minutes every day you will derive more benefit than from doing one 35 minute meditation per week. I myself sit for half an hour twice a day and consider it the time most well spent. It is luxury, it’s necessity, it’s wonderful, sometimes difficult, sometimes glorious, it’s everything.
Here is another thing: the instructions for Zen meditation are very simple: sit and count your breath. I have long wondered whether something was lost in translation though. I mean count your breath can have two different meanings:
- count the occurrence of each breath
- count the length of each breath
Ah, this is very different isn’t it. Counting the number of breaths is merely something to occupy the mind but counting the length of the breath is actually very useful. Let me explain. Buddhism collided with Taoism and other philosophies in China and the result was Chan, which over time became Zen in Japan. The Taoists were really into controlling their breath and knew that breathing slowly calms the nervous system. That is something modern science has proved to be correct. Take a deep breath is very good advice whenever you feel stressed.
I imagine that the original meaning of count your breath could have been to breathe slowly while counting the length of one’s inhalations and exhalations. Most people will find a length of around 5 seconds to be a good duration for each in or out breath. That’s 6 breaths per minute. I discovered that for me 6 seconds is a more natural duration and so I take 5 breaths per minute.
There are a whole bunch of posts regarding meditation on this blog. These are tagged Meditation and these are tagged Zazen. If you want to read more about Zazen, this is a very good essay.
02025-01-05 | Book, List, Reading
- Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow – Gabrielle Zevin
- Doppelganger – Naomi Klein
- Breaking Bread with the Dead – Alan Jacob
- The Little Drummer Girl – John LeCarré
- The Mountain Poems of Stonehouse – Red Pine and Stonehouse
- Master Dogen’s Zazen Meditation Handbook – Eihei Dogen
- Zen – the First Thousand Years – Red Pine
- Stonehouse’s Poems for Zen Monks – Red Pine
- Trusting the Mind – Red Pine
- Breath – James Nestor
- Double or Nothing – Kim Sherwood
- A Spy Like Me – Kim Sherwood
- Movement Matters – Katy Bowman
- Red Team Blues – Cory Doctorov
- The Bezzle – Cory Doctorov
- Listen – Michael Faber
- Slow Horses (#1) – Mike Herron
- Dead Lions (#2) – Mike Herron
- The List (#2.5) – Mike Herron
- Real Tigers (#3) – Mike Herron
- Joe Country (#6) – Mike Herron
- London Rules (#5) – Mike Herron
- Spook Street (#4) – Mike Herron
- Slough House (#7) – Mike Herron
- Bad Actors (#8) – Mike Herron
- Standing by the Wall – Mike Herron
- A Tale for the Time Being – Ruth Ozeki
- The Singularity – Dino Buzzati
- Cloud Cuckoo Land – Anthony Doerr
- Work – Robert A. Caro
- Playground – Richard Powers
- Karla’s Choice – Nick Harkaway
- Die Herzlichkeit der Vernunft – Ferdinand Von Schirach & Alexander Kluge
- To Catch a Thief – David Dodge
- The Dawn of Everything – David Graeber & David Wengrow
- And the Roots of Rhythm Remain – Joe Boyd
Books I especially enjoyed appear in bold type. Of those 36 books 2 were audiobooks, 3 were paper books, and the rest were ebooks. 18 of the books were borrowed from the public library.
02024-09-03 | Uncategorized
Today I posted the new album to Backstage. 14 tracks. 40 minutes of music. Exactly four weeks from start to finish, because I arrived at the refuge on Tuesday 6. August. I loved every moment of working on this album. One guitar in the wilderness… and my reaction to the surroundings and the sound of the cave and six hours of daily zazen. I want to make more recordings like this, especially now that I know the equipment does what I was hoping it could do. one guitar three… next year sometime, somewhere.
A big thank you has to go to Roshi Joan Halifax, who has been an important part of my life for two decades and who invited me to stay at the refuge. It was she who suggested the cave as a place to record my guitar. Many thanks also to Sensei Noah Kodo Roen, who built the meditation cave.
02023-12-29 | Uncategorized
Uchiyama Roshi, in his commentary in the book Master Dogen’s Zazen Meditation Handbook.
In mathematics, one plus one equals two. None of us doubt this. But actually, this is only correct from the standpoint of mathematics. In life experience, when my car crashes into another car, the hoods are dented, tires come off, and glass breaks into pieces. No cars remain. With cars, one plus one makes zero, or we could say that one plus one makes infinity, because the two cars break apart into an infinite number of pieces.
The following example is even clearer. One man plus one woman makes three or four when they have children.
Once I took a piss in the ocean. At that moment I clearly understood that one plus one makes only one. The one was the ocean. Nothing was changed even after my piss was added. The ocean was not concerned about my piss at all.
:-)
