For my dear friend and mentor, the brilliant, generous, wise and kind Pauline Oliveros, who passed peacefully last Thursday.  We are listening Pauline, remembering your instructions, remembering your sounds and presence.  You are with us forever.

Lines For Winter

Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself —
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon’s gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.

~ Mark Strand  ~

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Last night’s Oliveros at 80 concert at the EMPAC performing arts center, part of Rensselaer Polytechnic in Troy, New York, was simply the most astonishing music performance I have ever experienced. Pauline and her collaborators – Stuart Dempster, Brian Perti, and a host of guest artists, created a transcendent sonic experience.

The concert hall had been altered to sound like  a two-million gallon, WWII-era water cistern with a 45-second reverb.  Oliveros used a 32-channel loudspeaker system to capture and process the sounds of each of the instruments (electronically enabled accordion, trombone, digeridu, conch, voice and Dungchen, the long Tibetan horn that sounds like singing elephants.)

The result was a sound that was completely immersive, a sound that resonated the bodies of the audience as well as the instruments themselves.  In the last piece, drummers from the school’s percussion ensemble were positioned around the balcony that surrounds the audience below.  The result was a wild hive of sound that rose and fell in waves and felt, to this listener, like a “soundbodygasm.”

This performance had an almost liturgical quality, a feeling of deep, embodied ritual that took us within ourselves and at the same time connected us to each other through reverberation, heart and an experience of sound as bliss.

Today I am noticing how much more deeply I am listening and I have the feeling that I have been physically re-calibrated by the sounds from last night.  As I was listening in the concert hall, I felt like my molecules were being directed to vibrate around my spine, as if I was being collected and spun.

If you have not experienced Pauline’s music live, you can find out more about upcoming events here.

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This is an appreciation for Pauline Oliveros, an artist who has inspired me for nearly three decades.  In 1985, I discovered Pauline’s music in a vinyl album called The Wanderer (Lovely Music).

Five years later, I found a way to collaborate with her.  Pauline is the author of Deep Listening, which is based on her life practice:  “Listen to everything all the time and remind yourself when you are not listening.”

I watched this video yesterday.  It moved me to tears.  Here is what I love:  the seamless connection between the musician and the music.  It is in her movement – watch closely – the way that she sometimes precedes the notes with the movement impulse. Other times, the music and the movement erupt simultaneously.  It is like a current moving though her.  I teach a practice called Authentic Movement – the mover, eyes closed, waits to be moved.  That is  what I see here.  She is being moved by the music – as if she is being played.  I love the quickness and the whimsy, the volatility and spaciousness.  The color and contrast.  But mostly I love seeing her dance with the music, be danced by the music.

My own practice has a performance artist, a dancer, has cooked down to this:

Listen.  Move. Stillness.  Breathe.  Wait. Stillness.  Feel.  Let yourself be moved.  Listen.  Move. Wait.  Feel.  Wait to be moved. Move.  Stillness.  Breathe.

Thank you Pauline.

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I did not write a post yesterday.  I did not have an inspiration for a post.  I tried waiting, fingers on the keyboard, mind searching, digging, not finding.  I decided not to wait.

I feel like when I am waiting, I am focused too hard on wanting, and when I am focused on wanting, I am also focused on what I do not have. An idea or enough of anything – money, chocolate, fun.

When I start thinking about lack, then it is time for a change.

One of the strategies in my eBook, Breaking into Blossom, is change, inspired by Pauline Oliveros’s Poem of Change.  The point is to change anything, your position, your location, your mind, your body.  Dramatically, imperceptibly.

A few weeks ago, I listened to an Abraham workshop with Esther Hicks, and she said, “Make the fun that you are having unrelated to anything else.”  What that meant was to not make the fun you are having dependent on how much money you have, how great your blog post is, how your health is, how your kids are doing or anything else.

For the past three years, we have been trying, but not really trying, to sell our house.  We love our house, and don’t particularly want to move.  But we also feel it is time to have less to take care of, or rather, to be taking more care of what has become most important to us – our creative endeavors and each other.

So I need to stop waiting there too.  Stop waiting for a buyer, for a resolution to that uncertainty.  Because here is the thing:  if I am waiting, I am not really here, not breathing this breath, not dancing the dance of this moment, savoring what is here.

Not waiting is one of those changes that requires vigilance, noticing – so that I can tell if I have slid back into some subtle, cramped form of waiting.

What are you waiting for?

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I have been thinking and reading about a lot about play for the past few weeks.   As I write about it, I am aware of how diminished my own sense of play can become if I m not actively seeking and feeding it.  How the day can become turgid and dim if I don’t look for a genuine rhythm of exertion and recuperation.

Here are some conscious playful recuperations:

• bouncing:  I have a mini trampoline in my study, so standing up once every 30 minutes to bounce for 3 minutes is a great way to move fluids, feel the dance between gravity and levity and change my p.o.v.
• getting down:  I also have up to three dogs in my study.  Getting up from the desk and getting down on the floor with the dogs is also refreshing.  Another change of level and p.o.v.
• Getting out:  step outside with or without dogs.  Look around, breathe, stretch your arms up and take in the sky.
• Listen:  Stand up, close your eye  and listen. What is the softest sound you hear?  What is the sweetest sound you hear?   I highly recommend Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice by Pauline Oliveros as a way of cultivating a listening practice.
• random moving:  take some time during the day to lie down in an open space (does not have to be large) and let your body move.  Don’t exercise or stretch.  Just get quiet and see what impulses for movement might be there.  Let your body move in any way for 5 minutes.  No judgement, no interpretation, no  thinking.  Just feeling, moving.

How do you recuperate?

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Yesterday morning at breakfast, our Spanish Galgo, Cho, barked loudly right behind me.  I yelled, “Cho!” and then laughed because I sounded just like him.  Barking woman.

Which brings me to the topic of reactivity.  Knee jerk reactions.

Many years ago, during a creative residency, composer Pauline Oliveros taught me several of her Deep Listening strategies.  One she called the instantaneous strategy.  It works like this:  when you hear a sound, you respond with a sound immediately. Or you move as fast as you can when you see or sense a movement.  Being good at this  strategy demands that the response bypasses conscious thought, which tends to slow things down.

Practicing the instantaneous strategy is different from a knee jerk reaction, in that it is intentional.  I have discovered that practicing the instantaneous strategy can tune you up for those moments when you may need to respond instinctively very, very fast.  Like when a cup slips out of your hand.  Or when a child or an animal is in danger.

Here’s is today’s recipe:  find a moment to practice being instantaneous.  Tell me about it.

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