Living the Question Blog - Paul Reynolds Kauai » life

Are You looking for me?

Paul Reynolds — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 19:06:27 +0000

Reading at Koloa and Kapaa classes 7/12/2010

Are you looking for me?

I am in the next seat.

My shoulder is against yours.

You will not find me in the stupas, not in Indian shrine rooms, nor in synagogues, nor in cathedrals:

Not in masses, nor kirtans, not in legs winding around your own neck, nor in eating nothing but vegetables.

When you really look for me you will see me

Instantly—

You will find me in the tiniest house of time.

Kabir says: Student, tell me, what is God?

He is the breath inside the breath

— Kabir

Share and Enjoy:

Luminous tease

Paul Reynolds — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 19:56:13 +0000

Reading at Koloa and Anara practices 7/8/2010

Change yourself in the way you want everyone else to change

Love your enemies in case your friends turn out to be jerks
Avoid thinking about winning the lottery while making love
Brainwash yourself before someone nasty beats you to it
Confess big secrets to people who aren’t very interested
Write a love letter to your evil twin during a lunar eclipse
Fool the tricky red beasts guarding the Wheels of Time
Locate the master codex and add erudite graffiti to it
Dream up wilder, wetter, more interesting problems
Change your name every day for a thousand days
Exaggerate your flaws till they turn into virtues
Kill the apocalypse and annihilate Armageddon
Brag about what you can’t do and don’t have
Get a vanity license plate that reads KZMYAZ
Bow down to the greatest mystery you know
Make fun of people who make fun of people
See how far you can spit a mouthful of beer
Pick blackberries naked in the pouring rain
Scare yourself with how beautiful you are
Simulate global warming into your pants
Stage a slow-motion water balloon fight
Pretend your wounds are exotic tattoos
Sing anarchist lullabies to lesbian trees
Plunge butcher knives into accordions
Commit a crime that breaks no laws
Sip the tears of someone you love
Build a plush orphanage in Minsk
Feel sorry for a devious lawyer
Rebel against your horoscope
Give yourself another chance
Write your autohagiography
Play games with no rules
Teach animals to dance
Trick your nightmares
Relax and go deeper
Dream like stones
Mock your fears
Drink the sun
Sing love
Be mojo
Do jigs
Ask id

—Robert Brezny

Share and Enjoy:

All Paths are Honored Here…

Paul Reynolds — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 16:21:05 +0000

Yoga Reading at Anara and Waimea 07/01/2010

“Broken hearts and broken wings

bring it all and everything
bring the song you fear to sing,

all is welcome here.
and even if you broke your vow a thousand times

come anyhow,
we’re stepping into the power of now and all is welcome here.

see the father and the son
reunited, here they come
dancing to the sacred drum,
they know they’re welcome here.
I see the shaman and the mighty priest
see the beauty and the beast
singing I have been released
and I am welcome here.

I stood alone at the gateless gate
too drunk on love to hesitate
to the winds I cast my fate
and the remnants of my fear.
I took a deep breath and I leapt
and I awoke as if I’d never slept
tears of gratitude I wept
I was welcome here.

so bring your laughter and bring your tears

your busy lives and your careers
and bring the pain you carried for years,

all is welcome here

Freedom is not so far away

and there’s only one price we have to pay
live our dreams “til they fade away”
and let them go.

waking up……and let them go.

all is welcome here.

—–Miten and Premal from their album Satsang

Share and Enjoy:

Why Music?—

Paul Reynolds — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 16:20:57 +0000

Welcome address to the freshman class at Boston Conservatory given by Karl Paulnack, pianist and director of music division at Boston Conservatory –

“One of my parents’ deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not properly value me as a musician, that I wouldn’t be appreciated. I had very good grades in high school, I was good in science and math, and they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer, I might be more appreciated than I would be as a musician. I still remember my mother’s remark when I announced my decision to apply to music school – she said, “You’re WASTING your SAT scores.” On some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value of music was, what its purpose was.
And they LOVED music, they listened to classical music all the time. They just weren’t really clear about its function. So let me talk about that a little bit, because we live in a society that puts music in the “arts and entertainment” section of the newspaper, and serious music, the kind you are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment, in fact it’s the opposite of entertainment. Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works.

The first people to understand how music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you; the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this works.

One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940.
Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany.
He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940, sent across Germany in a cattle car and imprisoned in a concentration camp.

He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose. There were three other musicians in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist, and Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.

Given what we have since learned about life in the concentration camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape t orture-why would anyone bother with music? And yet-from the camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn’t just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, “I am alive, and my life has meaning.”

On September 12, 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. That morning I reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the world. I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice as was my daily& nbsp;routine; I did it by force of habit, without thinking about it. I lifted the cover on the keyboard, and opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my hands off the keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter? Isn’t this completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless. Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs a piano player right now? I was completely lost.

And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journey of getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, and in fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano again. And then I observed how we got through the day.

At least in my neighborhood, we didn’t shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We didn’t play cards to pass the time, we didn’t watch TV, we didn’t shop, we most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity that I saw in New York, that same day, was singing. People sang. People sang around fire houses, people sang “We Shall Overcome”. Lots of people sang America the Beautiful. The first organized public event that I remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief, our first communal response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular, that very night.

From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part of “arts and entertainment” as the newspaper section would have us believe.
It’s not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can’t with our minds.

Some of you may know Samuel Barber’s heart-wrenchingly beautiful piece Adagio for Strings. If you don’t know it by that name, then some of you may know it as the background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie Platoon, a film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn’t know you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what’s really going on inside us the way a good th erapist does.

I bet that you have never been to a wedding where there was absolutely no music. There might have been only a little music, there might have been some really bad music, but I bet you there was some music. And something very predictable happens at weddings – people get all pent up with all kinds of emotions, and then there’s some musical moment where the action of the wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or something. And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn’t good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of the people who are going to cry at a wedding cry a couple of moments after the music starts. Why? The Greeks. Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we feel even when we can’t talk about it. Can you imagine watching Indiana Jones or Superman or Star Wars with the&n bsp;dialogue but no music? What is it about the music swelling up at just the right moment in ET so that all the softies in the audience start crying at exactly the same moment? I guarantee you if you showed the movie with the music stripped out, it wouldn’t happen that way. The Greeks: Music is the understanding of the relationship between invisible internal objects.

I’ll give you one more example, the story of the most important concert of my life. I must tell you I have played a little less than a thousand concerts in my life so far. I have played in places that I thought were important. I like playing in Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed playing in Paris; it made me very happy to please the critics in St. Petersburg. I have played for people I thought were important; music critics of major newspapers, foreign heads of state. The most important concert of my entire life took place i n a nursing home in Fargo, ND, about 4 years ago.

I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We began, as we often do, with Aaron Copland’s Sonata, which was written during World War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland’s, a young pilot who was shot down during the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about the pieces we are going to play rather than providing them with written program notes. But in this case, because we began the concert with this piece, we decided to talk about the piece later in the program and to just come out and play the music without explanation.

Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was clearly a soldier-even in his 70’s, it was clear from his buzz-cut hair, square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his l ife in the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone would be moved to tears by that particular movement of that particular piece, but it wasn’t the first time I’ve heard crying in a concert and we went on with the concert and finished the piece.

When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to talk about both the first and second pieces, and we described the circumstances in which the Copland was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed pilot. The man in the front of the audience became so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium. I honestly figured that we would not see him again, but he did come backstage afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.

What he told us was this: “During World War II, I was a pilot, and I was in an aerial combat situation where one of my team’s planes was hit. I watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes which had engaged us returned and machine gunned across the parachute chords so as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop away into the ocean, realizing that he was lost. I have not thought about this for many years, but during that first piece of music you played, this memory returned to me so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I didn’t understand why this was happening, why now, but then when you came out to explain that this piece of music was written to commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could handle. How does the music do that? How did it find those feelings and those memories in me?

Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between internal objects. This concert in Fargo was the most important work I have ever done. For me to play for this old soldier and help him connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect their memories of their lost friends, to help him remember and mourn his friend – this is my work. This is why music matters.

If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you’d take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at two AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you’re going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft.

You’re not here to become an entertainer, and you don’t have to sell yourself. The truth is you don’t have anything to sell; being a musician isn’t about dispensing a product, like selling used Chevies.&n bsp; I’m not an entertainer; I’m a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You’re here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well. Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don’t expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that’s what we do. As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives.”

PS.

What if … we as a community were to kickstart a new era of daring self-expression?

What if… it’s the crisis of imagination we need to address above all Else?

Share and Enjoy:

A Meditation and Psychotherapy Story

Paul Reynolds — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 16:45:48 +0000

Reading at Koloa – 6/3/10

Two friends met at a cafe one day and began to talk over tea. They told each other of the dissatisfaction in their lives, how life was not what either had expected, how despite their best efforts, they seldom woke up happy in the morning, how they did not want to feel this way for the rest of their lives.

One said things were so bad he was thinking about going to see a psychotherapist; the other said things were so bad he was thinking of taking up meditation; perhaps he’d even enter monastic life. They wished each other well and did not see one another for 10 years.

Then they happened to meet each other again in the same cafe, and once again they sat down over tea. The one asked the other, “So, how are you? What have you been doing?”

The first said, “Well, I did go into therapy. I discovered a lot about myself through the process. I learned how frightened my inner child had been all my life and how I had defended against that fear by being angry and depressed. I learned how much I had projected unresolved stuff from my childhood onto my bosses and my lovers. I learned to value my feelings and express them. I learned to value who I was. You know, my whole life I’d thought that deep inside I was nothing and nobody, and now I know that I am somebody. I’m feeling much better than the last time we met. How about you?”

“Well, I did take up a meditation practice. In fact, I traveled to Asia and joined a monastic order. I sat for hours and days and years in a forest monastery. I learned to concentrate my mind and go without much sleep or food. I learned a lot about myself through the process. I experienced pain and loneliness. I experienced moments of indescribable bliss and joy. I learned how to make my mind peaceful. I contemplated the nature of Reality, and I learned that life is an illusion and everything is impermanent. I learned there is no self. You know, all my life I’d thought I had to be somebody, and now I know that I am nobody. I’m feeling much better than the last time we met.

His friend replied, “So it sounds like you had incredible experiences there; you were able to make your mind peaceful. Why did you leave then? Weren’t you happy?”

“Well,” said his friend, “I was content there in many ways. I didn’t have to decide when to get up or when to meditate or what to wear or what to eat. I didn’t have to earn a living or relate to women. But I started to wonder how it would feel to do those things. Could I maintain peace of mind in the world? And so I came back.”

“And?” asked his friend.

“Well, it’s been difficult. Traffic is so loud; there is crime on the streets. Meditation can still be wonderful, but I can’t seem to maintain much peace of mind when I’m dealing with my boss. And women! I don’t seem to have a clue! Maybe you could give me the name of your therapist. You seem pretty happy.”

“Well, my friend, let me be honest. My relationships are better and I’m not nearly so afraid to be myself, but if the truth be known, I still have deep longings despite my years of therapy. I long for the ability to still my mind and experience different states of consciousness. I long for something to help me understand the meaning of life, the nature of Reality. I wanted to ask you where I could find a meditation instructor.”

The two friends exchanged information, wished each other well and went on their ways.

Many, many years passed and the two friends once more met for tea in their old cafe. They walked more slowly now. Each looked older and wiser. Their faces were etched with life and experience, yet each could notice a sparkle in the other’s eyes. They sat in silence for a long time after the tea arrived. Finally one said, “My, the tea tastes good.” The other nodded and said, “It’s so good to be with you.”
* * * * *
(And they sat contently in one another’s presence, ~ sipping tea and enjoying not having to be somebody and not having to be nobody, but just being.)

Copyright Dorothy S. Hunt
San Francisco Center for
Meditation and Psychotherapy
1719 Union Street
San Francisco, California 94123 4406
September 17, 1993

Share and Enjoy:

This Traveling of Which We Speak

Paul Reynolds — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 17:34:35 +0000

Reading at Waimea practice 4/20/2010
(Thank you to Twi Chi for the finding)

BEFORE

Before…

you cling.

You cling to hopes and fears
and even people
without realizing
what you’re doing.

The Teacher says:

“Pull that straw out of their neck!

And out of yours while you’re at it!
Stop leaking life force.
The Age of Vampires is over!

Forget any notion
of enemies.

Your only jihad,
your only struggle,
is with yourself.

Until you burn the ego
once and for all
everything
will feel
like moving mountains
from one side of the world to the other.”

AFTER

After…
there is no peace like it.
Victorious-Through-Surrender
you see
there never really was a battlefield.
You melt all your swords
and turn your words
into iron.

Then,
yes really does mean yes,
no is just…no,
and no explanation is needed.

BEYOND

Traveling is so simple after that.
You become a child again,
smiling
as you work
as a shoe shiner,
rubbing out
the tears and scuffs
for your fellow travelers.

You become a quiet prospector
mining for diamonds
being shaken loose
in the honey stream
gushing from your chest.

Then, you wear an invisible cloak
and keep a secret name,
and you sit and speak
with every person
as if they were
a king or a queen.

—- Frank Owen

Share and Enjoy:

First Lesson

Paul Reynolds — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 17:08:06 +0000

Reading at Waimea practice 4/20/2010

Lie back daughter, let your head
be tipped back in the cup of my hand.
Gently, and I will hold you. Spread
your arms wide, lie out on the stream
and look high at the gulls. A dead-
man’s float is face down. You will dive
and swim soon enough where this tidewater
ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe
me, when you tire on the long thrash
to your island, lie up, and survive.
As you float now, where I held you
and let go, remember when fear
cramps your heart what I told you:
lie gently and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.

—Phillip Booth

Share and Enjoy:

My House…

Paul Reynolds — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 18:31:46 +0000

Reading at Koloa practice 4/12/2010

My house says to me.
“Do not leave me, for here dwells your past”
And the road says to me
“Come and follow, for I am your future”

And I say to both my house and the road,
“I have no past, nor have I a future,
If I stay here, there is a going in my staying;
And if I go there, is a staying in my going

Only Love and Death change all things”

Grains of Sand upon my shore….

They say to me in their awakening,

“You and the world you live in are but
a grain of sand upon the infinite see.”

And I in my dream say to them,

“I am the infinite sea, and all worlds
are but grains of sand upon my shore.”

—Kahil Gibran

Share and Enjoy:

Change

Paul Reynolds — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 06:16:37 +0000

Reading at Anara Spa practice 04/08/2010

“Change can be so constant that you don’t feel the difference til there is one.
It can be so slow that you don’t know that your life is better or worse
until it is,
or it can just blow you away,
make you something different in an
instant….”

From the movie – My Life as a House

Share and Enjoy:

A Musing….

Paul Reynolds — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 19:49:48 +0000

Reading at Koloa and Anara 10/26/09

Funny isn’t it….

How we’ve chosen
To be…
Led, shown, guided, taught, illumined, inspired….
While others choose
to be….

Shoved, tricked, cajoled, re-routed, mystified, shocked, mocked,

De-frocked…

For as many paths,

There are as many
Directions…
Up, down, this-a-way, that-a-way, in, out, time-linear, time-none

And for as many directions there are as many
Dances;
We can choose to
Skip, slink, crawl dash, climb, float, trip, skate, fall, grasp, samba, tip-toe…

We choose to ‘do-it’ with;

Tears and sweat, with love and laughter, patience, anxiousness, joy or sorrow,
in our dreams, in our realities, in other realities
This life, next life, past life
NOW

Six-a-one-half-dozen-of-another.
Name it
It’s yours
For the moment

And ya know what?

We all get there

Home.

—Paul Reynolds

Share and Enjoy:

Living the Question Blog - Paul Reynolds Kauai » life

Are You looking for me?

Related Posts

Luminous tease

Related Posts

All Paths are Honored Here…

Related Posts

Why Music?—

Related Posts

A Meditation and Psychotherapy Story

Related Posts

This Traveling of Which We Speak

Related Posts

First Lesson

Related Posts

My House…

Grains of Sand upon my shore….

Related Posts

Change

Related Posts

A Musing….

Related Posts