These last days of summer have a peculiar flavour for me. There is a taste of salt in the air and on my tongue, kitchen smells and cooking clatter, the cry of gulls and a taste of freshly caught fish. Each day rises like a smoke ring, spreads itself out thinly, before fading into the breath from which it came. At the end of one week and the beginning of another, I practise the pure act, or art, of sitting. Sometimes when I sit, alone or with people, outdoors or in a coffee shop, a faint awareness arises of something more true to the course and meaning of life, a fine connection to an underlying mystery.
On one occasion, I was fortunate enough to be sitting in an open square at the heart of the city’s great piping festival. I had just eaten a sandwich and was watching the pretty girls walk by, when a cloud of dense, undifferentiated sound rose up behind me. From the sonic maelstrom, snippets of melody, patches of tone and colour emerged and disappeared at random, chased in and out of hearing by a hairy sound beast. My individual consciousness was ransacked, pushed out into the air around the square, into the energy and vibration of sound, into pure abstraction; melting, merging, welling up like the colours of the dawn, like a bliss poem.
I remember the girl who sat opposite me. I remember the stillness of my body. Who needs to move? Yet the vision of the girl and the physicality of passers-by felt wholly present and elevated in my mind as it lapped all around the square. The energy of movement became a dance, a play, held together as one in the wholeness of sound and mind I occupied. I remember my mother sitting beside me, trying for all her life’s worth to re-adjust a setting on her mobile phone. I remember trying to help her, hopelessly failing.
2 comments:
great work, poetic text. enjoyment.
Thanks again, Piotr.
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