11.32
Bredonborough.
The Minx has left for a recording session with Simon Darlow, despite my pleading & entreaties for her to stay.
The street I…
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From an e-correspondent in the US…
I began work with GC in the autumn of 2000, and four years later – four years of faithful but clueless sitting – the light came on…
It is sometimes funny, sometimes touching, to me when I think about those early days of sitting, learning to hold still and sense my left foot. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, although I imagined it had something to do with “relaxation” for the sake of smoother guitar playing. When I first started reading and learning about the work, I wondered why you didn’t explain these things more explicitly, why GC did not guide the intermediate student toward focus on the feeling and thinking centers, etc.
I do not claim to understand how GC ultimately operates on its students, but I can report that for me it was surely a good thing that I spent all those years just focusing on sensation. In my fifth year of sitting I came to understand what it meant to make contact with my feeling center, and after seven years I had a pretty clear taste of the collected state. What is available to me now feels very big, and I suspect it would not have been possible if I had not established and maintained the simple practice of sitting with sensation for so long.
From the reply…
a practical difficulty with presenting systems of explanation to the head is that, once the head knows, it believes itself to know. GC is primarily experiential. once there is a basis of experience, in such a manner as you describe, the work you are doing… is valuable & meaningful & useful - and practical. understanding becomes possible.
the very first GC course, during the inaugural meeting, i made a formal presentation such as you might have found explicit. yet, as courses have developed, most of the beginning students have absolutely no idea what they are doing, to quote a philosopher friend. the emphasis stayed on experiential. now, after many years, with more committed Crafties for whom the light comes on from time to time, i am beginning to be more explicit. but, only where there is a reliable, repeatable, response-able foundation established in personal practice.
no doubt, an essay of further explanation is possible...
11.48 E-flurrying pauses.
18.08 Packing for DGM HQ. A haircut – mutton once again doesn’t quite make it to lamb, but the mutton is tidier.
Practising, even.
More e-flurrying. And the Minx is home! Yippee!
20.54 A walk down the garden…
… to the water’s edge I…
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A Minx-walk around the town. Along the way, a natter with neighbours over ghostly arisings, which are commonplace in their home & ours.
"With craft the musician can copy something old.
With discipline the musician may copy something new."
