keepin' it real

"You've climbed many mountains in search of the Dharma. Rowed many boats hoping to catch the other shore. So many long hours sitting, breathing, breathing...

The gravity of Emptiness and the profundity of Non-Conceptuality make for heavy baggage, no?

Here! I've picked you a bunch of wildflowers. Their meaning is the same but they're much easier to carry."

--Hsu Yun (an old hag)

Our band just played a pretty good show at a restaurant called Soho. Drinks and a meal are included with our pay, but it was so hot that I only drank water and I could only finish half my dinner. We did, however, have a good time playing.

When I studied jazz music at McGill University, I remember learning that a band only develops its own sound after it has performed in public a number of times. This is our third gig in as many weeks and our repertoire is definitely coming together in a good way.

We had also intended to record tonight's show, but a snafu arose with the mixer board and alas, it was not possible. We'll record our next rehearsal again though, just for practice, and I might use this technique to record some jazz Christmas arrangements for that idea I've had about a jazz Christmas CD since last Christmas. If we have some nice demo cuts of good arrangements, I'd like to see if some label (or maybe even CBC) would record it professionally for us and allow us to distribute it this Christmas season.

My main musical objective with the band right now is to tighten up our arrangements; our sense of time (or at least, the tempos for each tune); and the grooves. There was a few moments tonight when we were all locked into the same groove, but those were rarer than you might like.

See, when the groove locks in for a whole set (or at least a few tunes in a row), something quite transcendental occurs. At least it does with me. The music just lightens up, detaches itself from us, and floats up on its own breath of air. Not unlike a soap bubble you blow for your little girl in the backyard: you focus your energy on it, you watch it grow and take shape, and then you let it go to lift off on its own and float the way it's designed to float.

every subsequent moment unfolds as it should

killing more "shoulds"

Don't look for peace.  Don't look for any other state than the one you are in now; otherwise, you will set up inner conflict and unconscious resistance.

Forgive yourself for not being at peace.  The moment you completely accept your non-peace, your non-peace becomes transmuted into peace.  Anything you accept fully will get you there, will take you into peace.  This is the miracle of surrender.

When you accept what is, every moment is the best moment.  That is enlightenment.

-- Eckhart Tolle, from Practicing the Power of Now (New World Library, 2001)

The Definitive Explanation of the Origin of the Saying "I AM What I AM"

The answer finally became clear to me after I read Harold Rosenberg's wonderful volume, "The Book of J," a translation and interpretation of the children's stories in the Old Testament.

Yes, I said "children's stories." Rosenberg suggests -- and once you read what he says and take a fresh look at Genesis and Exodus, you realize that of course he's right -- that all those wonderful weird stories about Adam, Eve, Sarah, Jacob, Isaac, Rebecca, Joseph, Moses, etc., are being told by an adult to a child.

Moreover, the adult is telling those children's stories in the special way a person uses when another adult is in the room listening. The teller puts in jokes that go over the child's head, but make the other adult smile.

The reason hardly anybody notices this is because most of the jokes in these stories are puns. Word play. The author of these stories was crazy about puns. And unfortunately, puns don't translate. So when the Old Testament went from Hebrew to Greek to Latin to modern languages, the jokes were lost. (Also, people don't expect a religious book to have jokes in it. But when these stories were written, they weren't "religious" in the modern sense.)

This is exactly what happened with "I Am What I Am." It's a joke, a kind of pun, for an adult who is overhearing a story being told to a child. And the joke got lost because you only hear it if you know the original Hebrew. But if you look at the place where it occurs in the Bible, Exodus 3.13, and you know the original Hebrew words, you can hear the joke for yourself. It goes like this:

God tells Moses to inform the other Israelites that Moses has been sent to them by God to free them from bondage.

Naturally, Moses is worried that the other people won't believe him. Why should they? It sounds a little grandiose, don't you think? So Moses asks God, "If they ask me your name, to prove I really talked to you, what should I tell them?"

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