Spring is, well, springing .... despite my best efforts to deny it.
It's very pretty, the leaves and trees are starting to bud - I took a very close look at willow buds on my walk this evening - still, even at this moment of transition, of the world in satori, the bones of Earth are being covered in green sinew and something of the raw power of the land is camouflaged and hidden
It's easier to be aware of the Earth in Winter, you can see it better. It has a very slow, deep, patient voice - you have to slow your brain down to the speed of a rock.
It can be done, your mind perceives time and change happening at a very different rate - it can be done.
I hear leaves and trees as rapid patterns, like the song of a thrush - lovely, flutelike but full of small pieces of information that you have to allow to flow and then put together - rather like Lego blocks.
Since childhood the sound of waves has entranced me - that's the reason I love living here in Portland. It was a great shock in college when friends told me they heard waves as all sounding the same. I discovered while quite young that each wave has a unique sound, same as individual snowflakes having a unique crystal structure. If you sit by the side of the ocean - which I don't do nearly as often as I want to - you can understand their voice, hear their songs.
This getting lost in sound happens pretty easily to me - often at a tango practica I will hardly dance, just lost in the sound from the stereo in combination with the movement of the dancers. Over the vision of movement - and the movement of sound - my own imagination will take me over and I get lost - or, more exactly "find myself" in the sound.
Other sounds and patterns impose themselves on top of what my senses are telling me and my imagination, a sense of sound and time, takes me over. It's a different world than that experienced by the people sitting right next to me.
This can really freak out people who don't know me. I'm surprised I don't find myself drooling.
As I get older I discover that my capacity to relate to people has grown. So has the danger of my being overwhelmed by the presence, thoughts and feelings of the people around me.
I'm not a misanthrope - I love people very much, so much that I'm paralyzed by my sensitivity - same as with music and movement. Too sensitive in an almost psychic way.
With preparation you can be ready for it -but if I'm tired or cranky or have low blood sugar my defenses will be down and people will freak me out in a way music and movement don't.
A roomful of people can sometimes feel like being buried in an avalanche of sensation.
I suspect this is why I get along so well with rocks.
Tuesday, 11:00 p.m.
1 comment:
I remember this about you from all those years ago and the myriad musically-related things we participated in together. :)
Also, I heard this for the first time in a meeting a few weeks ago and my therapist brought it up in our last session, saying that it is particularly true of me because of my tendency to "tune in" to others rather than myself: the acronym, "HALT" - never let yourself get too Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired. I'm sure you don't need the consequences of these described, because I know I understood immediately why each of those is a danger to me and my self-preservation.
Finally, the ocean is my favorite thing in the world and the differences between the Atlantic and Pacific showed themselves to me slowly, like a burlesque reveal. It was pretty magical, realizing them when I was in CA, and comforting to return to "my" ocean.
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