The smell of a sun-warmed apricot transports me backwards in time, reliving a day spent picking fruit fresh from the tree with my great-grandmother as she regaled me with stories of living in a sod hut on the Colorado-Kansas border. Orphaned at an early age, she traveled west with her relatives, rode in a covered […]
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The Theravada Buddhist monk Ajahn Sona describes the mind as an untrained dog. You call it and it doesn’t pay attention. It wanders around and barks and scratches, and it’s completely unreceptive to your interaction, assuming you’ve actually gotten to the point where you can observe it instead of thinking that this untrained dog is
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I once helped build a cabin on the side of a 10,500 foot mountain. The only power tool we used was a 10” circular saw powered by a small generator. We cut the trench for the foundation footing out of the granite mountain side with picks, sledges, and a big cold chisel named Steely Dan
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“Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the
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For me, the act of writing is like drinking from a tinted blue glass filled with clear, cold water, the sides of the glass condensation-streaked with ice shards clinking against the heat of a summer day. The experience is waxing organic, like a growth in the soul. Phrases appear as exotic plant sprouts, joining together
The first time Benny Goodman heard Bix Beiderbecke play cornet, he recalled, he wondered, “My God, what planet, what galaxy, did this guy come from?” (Skretvedt). Listening to him throughout my life, I’ve had the same feeling. So did hundreds of musicians who heard Bix during his short lifetime, and so have thousands of listeners
Like a Girl Saying Yes: The Sound of Bix Read More »