reconnecting in the woods of music

Here I am, back from a week filled with camping at two different rivers in two different states and another 4 days at the Oregon Country Fair (OCF) festival.

It's been a very full week filled with beautiful nature-moments, skinny dipping in rivers, camp fires, hikes, beautiful waterfalls, trees, mountain views... getting back into the urban life is odd, but I've had such a good return-to-center experience : thanks to the Oregon Country Fair : that I am eager now to set things straight in my life.

Things have been so full-on lately that there has been little time between one experience and the next that there has been little time to really reflect on my actions and choices, I remember feeling a few days ago as well how it is interesting how on the one hand life could not be any better; with things in Portland materializing effortlessly, and yet simultaneously at the same time things for my mother could not be any more difficult. There have been other parallels in my life that echo this paradox. A few days ago in my journal I wrote:

"It is interesting that sometimes the most beautiful moments in our life can also be the most painful."

On a side note, 'pain' is an interesting experience in and of itself. While I am no where near an expert on "pain", as I know others can attest to its spiritual nature, the thought occurred to me lately that pain can perhaps also be seen, from the perspective of your body as it: "loving you so much, that it doesn't want you to leave it, so it makes you feel pain so that you [your soul] stay close to it [the living body], and healthy." Where the 'body' can also be extended to 'material-affection'; where 'material' means 'material-existence'.

While camping at the OCF, I found that my mind had a hard time to relax, it took quite a time to really wind down, but one technique I found that worked for me is:

"Listen to the zen of the body, and the mind will follow"

By this I mean, if the body wants to stretch, then stretch, if it wants to walk, then walk, if it wants to lie down on its belly, then do this too, when you walk, walk with the gracefulness that your feet would have you walk if you are fully present in just this task. Breath with purpose.

Other interesting thoughts I had include:

"All the life that you see in the world exists because it lives in harmony"

In regards to my own harmony, this was a good time to realize what changes I needed to make to re-achieve that harmony in my life. The mind ponders many possibilities, projecting what-if scenarios which rapidly form behavior altering fears. In response to this thread of thought, I wrote:

"The way I think the universe works: A continuous thread of choice you face at every present-moment, is whether to be true to yourself. Love, kindness, gratitude, generosity, happiness, contentment, peace... these, and more, all flow from here"

OCF was a really interesting place, I heard and saw so many special heart moving musical & theatrical moments. A mixture of burning man (BM) and the dutch elvish theme park: the eebeling. Every year the art that is present increases instead of being burned like it is at BM. And whereas at BM money is banned, here it is the money derived from the 3 'open days' that fuels the economy for the artists / community lovers who work to construct it. Its a totally different angle, with different values. A village built into a forest of trees that is submerged most of the year under water and then rebuilt every year again in time for the yearly summer festival. Its been going on since the 1980's; so its quite an old-school event for sure!

The forest it takes place in is very special, the bird song in the mornings was incredible, a growing chant which begins with a distant echoing chorus and mounts in numbers into the hundreds. At this point it also ocured to me that most birds on the planet sing at sunrise, and since there is always a sunrise somewhere, there is in fact a band of birdsong which follows the sun continuously around the planet all the time, 24h a day [yes, there are gaps in the song caused by oceans, but its still very pervasive].

The song had a deep mantra chanting sound to it, I listened carefully to the layers, it sounded like hundreds of birds, close and far, were singing a main phrase which consisted of 3 notes repeated in 4 steps and then a pause: Mid, low, mid, high, pause [repeat]. Between which some birds would launch little sparkles, phrases or spiral chirps, but overall, all the birds were uniting into this one over-arching chorus of unity.

This led me to reflect on the function of sight to sound. And how at some point in the past there was one living creature that felt the need when it "saw" light to utter "sound". The participation of the birds in the song felt like an acknowledgment to the one, to their species and to the world, one would say: a religious experience for them, as well as an acknowledgment to [between the birds] of their presence. I couldn't imagine that a bird could hold back from the chant without negatively affecting its place within the other birds. No song: no location. No location: no contact with others and no territory. No territory or no community: no sustenance.

The bird thus is the epitamy of the exemplification of the throat chakra. Highly expressive, communicating over vast distances, with acute sight and the freedom of flight. I sat and listened and tried to imagine that day when the first creature on the earth spoke in reverence to the morning light... that simple daily miracle of the returning sun.