Cues

DC bought me a Sony MP3 player for Christmas. His plan to get me to take more interest in the music I like seems to have worked and having up loaded CD's on to it I've started down loading stuff from the net too. Having it plugged into the HiFi I find I play more music in the house too. It's something to do with the availability of the music in one compact handheld sliver of a thing. And it has an 'intelligent' shuffle which lets one pick tracks by mood, that certainly makes me listen to more stuff.

Anyway, listening to the radio the other day I heard a track by the Eagles. I recalled that I'd always liked that music and so decided to download some from the net. Playing the albums 'One of these nights' and 'Hotel California' I recalled the 70's. I must have had a slight sense of the 70's that was generating such tracks- California and the watered down version that reached the English perhaps left leaning middle classes, as a kid, but that was not my world. No, it was just a hint of something I sort of liked the look of but did not know and could not have; my 70's did not come as an extension to the 60's people think of as the 60's. My 70's were of the Northern working class and short of cash. The left was of tabloids and trade unions not of the broad sheets and the party either political or dinner...

I can enjoy the music and there is no visceral wrenching of the past. It's of a time when I was a sensitive loner but not yet in adolescence. So the innocence is sweet. It's music of the 80's that can generate the wrenching feeling. But the pattern started sooner...

But, the Eagles music left me in good spirits and feeling quite alive. Interesting to muse how I liked that music both sides of sexual awakening.

And, a copy of 'I Heart Huckabees' arrived today in the post. DC and I have just watched it and it's GREAT! So many of the metaphors match my own! Thanks to Jenny (who I met on a course last year) for the recommendation. The movie is based around a couple of existential detectives... Funny and heart warming.

Thoughts, emotions, our stories, our aloneness our interconnection, the triggers or cues that set us off spinning our webs...

I didn't have the childhood or the adolescence that I as an adult fancy I would have liked then or is it now? But that past did lead me to the present and a probably deeper understanding of the meaning of the desires around all this than I might have had. After all, the electrical and electronic engineering books are replaced on the shelves by titles by Huxley, both Suzuki's, Sekida, Kapleau, etc. I practice TaiChi and dance to music feeling the energy in ways I would describe with reference to chakras, have explored the Red thread koan, sit zazen each day and try to practice throughout the day, write like this, live in a very pleasant 60's townhouse with my partner, I have been out as a gay man at work since a time when that was an issue, DC and I were at a Wesak festival at a local Zen Buddhist abbey at the weekend and I am back off to Findhorn at the end of the week. How close I am in many ways to that other world I might have had as a kid. And looking back, is it not the same koan now as then?