Re-Entry

I know some people will be looking for a Bass/Nature Camp entry on this blog. It has been hard to imagine how to wrap words around such an experience. At first I felt I didn't know how to talk about it, yet found that it's all I was talking about.

If you'd like to see pictures on the website of our week at camp, take a look here.

Next week I will speak in my brother's Jazz Workshop about my experience. Hopefully for those students, I might inspire just a glimpse of what was awakened in me at camp.

Here are words that come to mind when I think of it:
intensity
immersion
vulnerability
senses
awareness
fear
joy
letting go
mindfulness
listening
connection
magic
opening
channeling
freedom
heightening
release

The primary experience I took away from camp, and which will remain with me in some way throughout my lifetime as a musician, is one of being connected to music itself. There is only one way to produce the music that comes through my fingers, my voice, my heart, my hands ... and that is to open up and let it out. There is so much fear that keeps us from expression. Technique, theory, memorization, muscle memory ... they are all wonderful tools, but they only help to shape what is truly beautiful and pure, and that is the wonderful musical uniqueness that springs from every person. I have something to say musically, and only I can say it. You have something to say too, whether you want to call it music, or some other kind of art, or just the way you move or speak or make your way through your ordinary day.

There is only one song, and we are all playing it. If you could expand yourself into a being which wrapped around the entire Earth, you would hear the most magical, bizarre, harmonious, dissonant, ever-changing, beautiful piece of music. It is made up of all of us and all the other roaming creatures, as well as the wind, the oceans, the mountains, falling leaves, shifting continents, flowers wilting, seeds stretching roots through the soil.

Do you get it?

All this has reinforced so deeply in me the need to save this place. Though I've become self-absorbed and I've drifted from my purpose, I'm also aware and forgiving of my humanity and I am getting back on track.

Again and again my circumstances are reminding me to ask what is important.

What is important to you? And how much do you really need to derive joy from this life? Can you have joy and peace without causing destruction?