Today I write about three of these.  In chronological order.

• Yesterday I heard a presentation by Eric Brown, founder of Impact Games. I consider myself pretty technically savvy and aware of the incredibly fast rate of new things, concepts, and methods erupting via the Internet.  But something had gotten past me (what else has?)  I had a stereotype in my head of “video games” based on Nintendo, the WII, and video parlors.  x$W%*zk@#/&?…. Throw that viewpoint out the window, Pat, video games are fast becoming a new media for news, social change and education, as well as mindless (entertaining?) violence.  A whole new way of informing ourselves.  After doing a bit of research, I am dumfounded by what’s happening, my mind is boggled.  Please, go and PlaytheNews or Darfur is Dying to get a feel for what’s out there.
• I love lying in bed in the dark.  I lie on my side and kind of meditate.  I feel my heart beating.  If I’m relaxed and unstressed (how lucky I am to experience that fairly often) I see in my mind’s eye pictures of suffering around the globe.  About 3-4 four years ago, at one of those moments, all of a sudden I experienced a rush of warm energy emanating from my heart towards those pictures. x$W%*zk@#/&?…….   This is what love is I thought.  It’s being, noticing, awareness…  Not doing.
• Back in 1979 I gave myself a new TRS80 computer for Christmas.  I installed the suite of software that came with it:  Scripsit (word processor), VisiCalc (spreadsheet) and Profile (database.)  I’d prepared by learning how to program a 128 step Texas Instrument calculator, and was keen to find out how a computer worked. Disc drives weren’t yet available, so I had a tape recorder ready to use for storage.  After the setup, I was completely hooked.  I installed the software, poured over the instructions, and began to try them out.  I started VisiCalc, made two columns of numbers, and then typed in the formula for column total at the bottom.  The math was correct.  Wow – it shows the total.  Then…..    I changed a number in one of the columns, hit the Enter key, and x$W%*zk@#/&?……  The total at the bottom magically changed.  This happened automatically! Things have never been the same since – and now we take that profound change for granted.

Farsightedness: I make sure my vision is not limited to what seems to be in front of me.  My eyes are on the long-term consequences of action.

This thought reminds me that I failed in my effort not to sit down at my desk until after I’ve finished my early morning routine which consists of:

• hauling down the bedcovers to air the bed (mostly Bill is already up)
• putting on robe, slippers and placing butt on  bathroom throne  for the morning’s first dropping
• preparing mug of coffee and sitting down on the rocking chair
• sipping a few mouthfulls and taking 10-20 minutes to quietly inhale the start of a new day
• unrolling the purple mat and do 25-30 minutes of stretch and yoga exercises to lubricate  creaky joints

And because I failed, I fell into automatic pilot after I booted up the laptop and checked email at my 4 primary addresses (for personal, commercial, website, and pro bono web work communications.)  Heedless, next I checked out news feeds from my favorite blogs, and then the feed headlines of a long list of news organizations around the world (europe, india, china, asia, russia, middle east, autralia, usa, canada, latin america.)  Watching the news snippets caught by this web of connection  makes a person want to cry, they’re so full of pain and misery.

What happens if I don’t do my routine first (as this morning) is that I end up following who knows what train of computer-induced thought before I realize the morning is half gone. To regain my balance, I borrow the dogs to walk with them for an hour while drinking in the beauty along one of Juneau’s many hiking trails.  Time to go do that.

My parents started me with piano lessons when I think I was 8. For the life of me I can’t dredge up an image of who taught me, for nothing comes up except that I “know” I had lessons.  Lessons continued for 8 years – part of my history that I “just know” though I can’t recall any details.  I do remember the name of my teacher after I turned 10 – June Birch.  Didn’t like her much, she wasn’t warm or fuzzy, but somehow she and I stuck it through those years so that I acquired enough knowledge, bare competence, and liking for the instrument to bring a new one came into our family at great expense when I was in my late 20′s.

With children around I played nursery songs, Christmas carols, and strident marches – often to the dog’s howling.  Then I began to eke my way back into a comprehensive collection of classical stuff buried in the large pile of music I’d acquired as a student. Some no doubt unappreciated family member boxed it up and shipped it from Scotland to me a few years after my emigration to the US .

Then came The Sting, popularizing the works of Scott Joplin. The only movie I think I’ve gone to 3 times in rapid successions.  I was entranced; acquired the music and began to learn it.  From then on I played and practiced haphazardly until my marriage crumbled. After that, though I shipped the piano around with me on my many moves, my heart was no longer in it.  I could barely listen to music for years because it always made me sad.  Something associated with hearing music brought up all kinds unaddressed longings in my not-yet-mature soul.

Time passed. Bill and I hooked up, and happiness crept back into my life slowly displacing work as my prime focus. When we moved onto Callipygia we handed the piano over to some young friends for custody (along with all the music.)  Eventually we gave it to them (retrieving the music) since it didn’t make any sense to keep moving it around.

I seem to have got distracted here – my intent was to write about practice, not the history of my piano or my lessons. Ah well, so the mind does the a person.

I recently found(with the help of Mr. Google) and then acquired (with the help of Mr. Amazon) The Fundamentals of Piano Practice by Chuan Chang.  What a book!  Dense, wordy, but loaded with gold.  Why did no-one tell me this stuff when I was taking lessons?  (Maybe they did and I wasn’t of a mind to listen.)  It’s about learning stupid, not about the piano.  It’s about the brain dearie, not the music.  At some point I’ll write some lessons learned about piano practice. Suffice to say, I’m going at my practice in a completely different way than I ever did before.  This time I study the pieces I work on – so that I can tell you what key they’re in, what the time signature is, how fast it should be played, how many bars there are, what the repetition patterns are.  These things go into my head – and actually stay there.  Then in order to learn a piece I memorize it hands separately so I can practice in bed at night.  Good grief, who’d ever have thunk it.  What this means is that once I start putting the hands together I already know it!!!!!!!

__________

*This line comes from a poem by Canadian Alden Nolan about the power of the happenstance, such and such happens because that other thing happened, none of them foreseen.

What on earth is the poor world coming too.  The difficult times that erupted in 2008 are but the beginning of a dramatic shift – whose outline I for one can only vaguely discern.

I fear that our response is being driven by a desire to go back to “the way things were.” Not possible. Too many people for a small planet. A collective worldview for the most part focused on material gratification. And endless fighting, fighting, fighting.  Over who’s in charge. Over what’s mine and what’s yours. Over whose belief system or God is the right one. And next, no doubt, over what to do about humanity’s mounting problems.

We have a long long way to go to solve the testosterone problem, and it looks like time is running out on us.  In the meantime, like it or not, we better each prepare for monumental changes in our lives.

I found a video “Music and Life” with the words of philosopher Alan Watts on YouTube that puts it nicely.  Enjoy!

Explanation:

(1) our transition from travelling full time in our little RV to living in our house in Juneau, AK. This was a very big deal, as big as moving onto Callipygia 8 years ago. The first snow fall of the season arrived early (October) but didn’t last long. We’re now pretty settled and loving our cozy little home (shown on the left.)

(2) In trying to add a blog recently we discovered we had a techno-problem.  For those who are technophiles, we installed our blogs using WordPress at our website host, but the version of WordPress had gone out of date thus excluding us from accessing the Dashboard.  We have now updated WordPress, but alas and alack have lost all the formatting.  Add that to the expanding website todo list.

The focus of my blog is going to be on consciousness, a place to explain things like family constellations, subtle energy, etc., etc. Maybe. Regardless, I’ll include all of the posts I had previously done to the old blog on our website.