The Listening Book

When you practice this over several days you learn to ride easy in the saddle. Your absorption in sound works like a trusty mule beneath you and a path of music emerges, one note after another.

Dancers need music, but walkers are their own music.

Our bones and the earth are lovers; they embrace when we sleep, they mate when we die.

But if you are shut tight against the world you cannot receive nourishment.

It might take only a moment to drop in. Or it might take many moments of slippery wrestling. But the nature of sound works in your favor and rescues you time and time again from the tether of the mind.

Build a protected zone of concentration around yourself, with the sound of your music as the wall. Listen more keenly and forgivingly to your work, and leave others to do their own work. Be an audience of one. This results in higher standards and is best for everyone in the long run.

The truth is, most of us have to learn specifically the single, pure act of listening to music.

don’t feel like it. Anything that requires uninterrupted consciousness seems like work. When we are actually practicing consciousness, like meditation or music, it feels like good work that does itself.

As sound is diffused and softened through space, so, when we listen to it, is our sense of self. We are spread out over the land, rarefied, free at last.