Category Archives: Science

Listen to Your Life, the Holy, Hidden Heart of It

22 Monday Aug 2022

Posted by in books, Science, Spirituality

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Alix Ayme, 1894-1989

Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and the pain of it no less than the excitement and the gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace. —Frederick Buechner

I never heard of Frederick Buechner before reading The Man Who Found His Inner Depths by David Brooks in the New York Times. He was a novelist with a “religious slant” who died last week at the age of 96. This quote struck me as “true” in an existential way—this need for each of us to listen to our life, our own particular life, as well as to Life in the more expansive sense. To touch “the holy at the heart of it”. And to realize that “all moments are key moments.”

I’ve been doing a lot of that “listening” lately, and looking back at key moments of my life, as well as those that fall in between. Perhaps because I’m of a certain age when there are more years on Earth behind me than before, or because at this stage I have the time and leisure to contemplate such things. And with the contemplation of life, alas, comes also that of its twin, death.

Buechner had some interesting things to say on this subject as well: “What’s lost is nothing to what’s found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.”

Interestingly, that aligns with something a scientist said, when explaining how abundance is a fundamental truth of Reality.

[A] full human lifetime contains far more moments of consciousness than universal history contains human lifespans. We are gifted with an abundance of inner time.—from Fundamentals, Ten Keys to Reality by Frank Wilczek, Nobel Prize winner in physics

This “abundance of inner time,” of time without end, seems fundamental to my own experience of “time” these days. Even as my own timespan here on Earth would appear to be narrowing, it feels like a widening, an opening up into something larger. Timeless, you might say.

Which brings me to something else Buechner said. When imagining a conversation with his late aunt, he asks: “You’ve already set sail. What can you tell me about it?” To which she replies that it’s misleading to think of people as having passed away. “It is the world that passes away.”

Is it we or the world that passes away? Perhaps its only this limited way of perceiving the world that passes away. Perhaps we simply slip from one perceptual experience—one sliver of reality—-to another that is just as real, just as holy. Another hidden heart to explore. This idea too may have a hidden scientific corollary in what the newer sciences are telling us about the nature of reality and its fundamental truths.

“We like to think that we humans, with our five marvelous senses, are in full receipt of what this world has to offer in all its glory. But in reality, like all creatures, we tap into but a tiny slice of its vast fullness.”

So I wrote in Slivers of Reality in a More-Than-Human World, after reading Ed Yong’s An Immense World about how animal senses reveal hidden realms around us. Breakthroughs in science and technology are showing us more about the vast reality that lies outside our physical ability to perceive it. And who’s to say there aren’t hidden realms outside our physical bodies to experience beyond this world? As we do in our dreams when we see and touch and feel things that have no physical form. Or as people who have had near-death experiences claim. Experiences that scientists are beginning to study seriously. And those who have are questioning whether the brain is truly the source of consciousness or merely a temporary conduit through which it passes, operating in reaches far beyond that.

Who were you before your parents were born?

This is an old Zen koan, whose study is meant to break students out of their limited way of thinking about themselves or experiencing reality. It’s another way of saying the fundamental key to reality lies within.

Listen to your life. Experience for yourself the “fathomless mystery” of Life’s “hidden heart.”

Slivers of Reality in a More-Than-Human World

14 Sunday Aug 2022

Posted by in Deep Ecology, Nature, Science

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The Secret Garden, by Deborah J. Brasket

We like to think that we humans, with our five marvelous senses, are in full receipt of what this world has to offer in all its glory. But in reality, like all creatures, we tap into but a tiny slice of its vast fullness. We each are trapped within our own perceptual bubble, or Umwelt, that part of our surroundings we can sense and experience.

When we watch a bird coursing through the air, we might try to imagine what it feels like to fly, to have a birds-eye view of the world as it does. And yet what a bird in flight actually experiences with its wraparound vision, seeing in all directions at once, surfing air currents that are as palpable to it as they are invisible to us, tapping into the Earth’s electromagnetic fields to guide its migrations, seeing colors we can’t see and hearing sounds we can’t detect—it’s full bubble of experience—is beyond anything we can experience, even if we could fly.

This is true for all the other creatures that inhabit our backyards and the world around us, as revealed in Ed Yong’s An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. “Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality’s fullness,” he writes.

The thing is, while a mocking bird will never know what a bee sees, nor a cat know how a bat navigates, or a mosquito see a spider’s web even while caught within it, for all our sensory limitation, we humans are the only creature who can pierce to some degree beyond our own sense bubble. Through our curiosity and imagination and intellect we can create the tools and technologies to penetrate, at least to some degree, this more-than-human world. We can begin piecing together all these slivers of reality into a much fuller sense of the world in which we are embedded. The technologies we create are just crude tools for piercing that darkness. But they open up windows into the far reaches of reality where our minds and imagination can soar.

I wish I could experience the wraparound vision of a bird, or the 3-D hearing of a dolphin, or smell the smorgasbord of earthly delights wafting up the hill as my dog does. I can only imagine what it might be like to do so. And because of this—my imagination—I expand my sense of the world’s vast potential, and deepen my appreciation for all its marvels. It’s an amazing gift, to be able to tap into other creatures Umwelten. This is our greatest sensory skill, Yong tells us. It carries with it an enormous responsibility for cherishing and protecting all those life-forms that expand our understanding of reality. We must ensure they do not perish from this Earth through our own neglect or indifference or ignorance.

That is one of Yong’s main messages in his final chapter about noise and light pollution: “Save the Quiet, Preserve the Dark.” He reminds us that as “the species most responsible for destroying sensory realms, it falls on us to marshal all of our empathy and ingenuity to protect other creatures, and their unique ways of experiencing our shared world.”

A Deep-Dive Through Time and Space

17 Sunday Jul 2022

Posted by in Human Consciousness, Nature, Photography, Science, Universe

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Deep space, 13 billion years ago. Photo From Webb Space Telescope

By now you’ve probably seen the stunning new images from the Webb Space Telescope, which takes us 13 billion years back in time. That’s 8 billion years before the Earth was born. We stand here now looking back at a time before there was ground to stand on, or a human consciousness to see or grasp anything at all. We are looking at a speck of sky no bigger than a grain of sand, they say, yet filled with millions of galaxies and trillions of stars, and who knows how many planets or moons or intelligent life-forms looking back. Only they wouldn’t see us. For we don’t exist yet.

It’s mind-boggling. And certainly puts the turmoil we’re experiencing here on Earth into a new perspective. No less urgent or relevant for our fire-fly timespans. But it points us away from the personal and relative “here and now” into one that is infinitely larger than our selves and the tiny blue marble we call home. Our “here and now” encapsulates not only the present moment but the “here and now” 13 billion years ago. We are the link that spans that distance through time and space. Our consciousness. Mine. Yours. Now. Enfolding all that. Surely it means something significant.

When we turn the eye inward rather than out, into the micro-universe of atoms and particles swirling inside us and everything that exits, we grasp a new paradox. Quantum physics has shown us that those inner worlds at the most infinitesimal level exist only as clouds of potentiality rather than as concrete substance. These clouds of potentiality only become “real”—that is, fixed in time and space—when observed. Unseen they exist only within a hazy realm of the possible.

In comparison to the infinite universe swirling around us and inside us, we humans may seem pathetically insignificant. Not worth a mention in the footnotes of atomic and astronomic legers of Science. And yet we seem to play an essential and outsized role.

Without the human mind to grasp the universe there would be no universe to be grasped. Our bodies may have been evolved from star-dust. But it’s our minds, our own conscious grasping of such, that moves “star-dust,” and all else, out of the realm of the potential and into the realm of the real.

Such is the circular and utterly paradoxical wonder of a world we live in.

The cloudy realm from which stars are born. Photo from the Webb Space Telescope.

The Enigma of Being Both Watcher and Watched

06 Sunday Feb 2022

Posted by in My Writing, Poetry, Science, Short Story

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By Gertrude Friske

Enigma

I am both watcher
and watched.
The woman walking in her garden
and the one watching her walk.
Two halves, back to back.
Both named and namer.
I am the cat in Schrödinger’s box
and the one lifting the lid.

Deborah J. Brasket, 2021

I came across this poem in a notebook I keep and decided to share it.

I’ve always had this sense of twoness. But the more I’ve learned about the nature of reality, the metaphysical as well as the quantum mechanics of it, the more sense it makes. And the more comfortable I’ve become with it, the more comforting it seems. I rather like it now. This sense of spaciousness.

It wasn’t always so. It’s something I struggled with when I was young. A sense that I wasn’t quite normal, or even quite real. I felt like I was loosely “tethered” to reality. I was in it, but also floating a bit above it at the same time.

It was hard to be in the moment, because I was always standing at the side of myself, watching. It was a bit like trying to carry on a telephone conversation when you hear the echo of your own voice at the same time.

I wrote a short story about that experience called “Fine and Shimmering,” which is how the character Sheri experienced the “tether” that kept her somehow connected to earth, to reality. I blogged about the story in “The Lightness of Being, Unbearable or Otherwise.”

Sheri was always tempted “to take that fine and shimmering thread between sharp teeth and snip it clean through. To drift aimlessly, like the merest wisp of cloud, a lingering trace of dawn, upon an otherwise immaculate sky. Awaiting that final dispersal, into the blue.”

My actual experience of the “twoness” I felt growing up was nothing nearly so drastic or literal. And in the end, I never actually “let go” of it. Instead I settled into it more comfortably by embracing the Zen notion of “not-two.” Now it’s the division between subject and object that seems more ephemeral and “not real.” I wrote at the end of my blog post this:

When that wall of “otherness” disappeared, I felt deeply connected to this ephemeral world. I felt a lightness of being that is “unbearable” only in the sense of being too sweet, too rich, too beautiful “to bear.” And so I didn’t try to hold onto it. I just let it wash though me.

I read an article in Scientific American yesterday called “Does Quantum Mechanics Reveal That Life Is But a Dream?” and discussed it with my husband. Then last night I had a dream in which several strange things were taking place and so turned to my husband, who was also in the dream, and said with amusement, “Maybe that article was right and this really is a dream.”

Only I didn’t think I was dreaming at the time. It all seemed quite real. Until I actually woke up, of course. Now it’s kind of like that old conundrum: Am I a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming I’m a man?

I rather like the idea that we could be both. And perhaps we are, or will be, when this wall of otherness finally does fall away. Maybe there is just “not-two.” Maybe the enigma is all there is.

Wrapped Around Schrodinger’s Cat

11 Monday Feb 2019

Posted by in Creative Nonfiction, Family, Human Consciousness, Science

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Призрачные коты - Все интересное в искусстве и не только.

Watercolor by Endre Penouac

That’s where I’ve been these last ten days or so, wrapped around Schrödinger’s cat in that state of unknowing. My son went missing and I did not know if he was dead or alive. Both possibilities seemed so potent. I wanted to know and not know at the same time. I wanted to peek beneath that lid and keep it securely closed forever.

I’ve always been fascinated by the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat, that something can be and not be at the same time. That it exists within a perpetual state of ambiguity until the lid is lifted and someone peeks inside. The act of observation is what breaks the spell and catapults a thing, a cat in this instance, into a single state of being– either alive or dead.

Apparently, according to quantum physics, at the level of the infinitely minute, where atoms and quarks and such are the substance of reality, things exist in a fluid state of infinite potentiality. Yet at this macro level where we experience reality, all appears fixed and certain. Only during heightened times, such as when loved ones go missing, does the dilemma of Schrödinger’s cat become not only real, but preferable.

The hope that my son might still be alive seemed too fragile and fleeting to hold on to. Instead I wanted to wrap myself within a state of unknowing, where there was neither life nor death, being or non-being, but just this rich, potent potential with no edges.

I wanted to remain in that limbo forever because I knew that once the lid was lifted, the dilemma did not really end. If he was dead the long, anguished darkness would descend. If he was alive, the joy would be brief and mixed, because the eventuality of his death was so certain and could come at any instant. Life is fragile and fleeting. Death is the one great certainty.

The lid to my dilemma eventually did lift. The whole time of my unknowing was his as well, it appears. He had been in a hospital in a coma. They called me when he awoke and I went to him. But he was clearly not fully awake. He was in purgatory he told me, neither alive nor dead, and he could not tell if I was real and really there or just a figment of his imagination. He truly believed that he had died and was existing in some hellish limbo. I cannot tell you, but you may well imagine, the anguish I felt hugging a son who thought he was dead.

By the next day the lid was raised for him as well, and he knew that he was indeed alive and that I was really there. His recovery was swift and he was discharged from the hospital.

So all is well, for now, at least.

But I cannot shake this sense of uncertainty about the nature of reality. I would rather live in that quantum field of endless potentiality, rather than being stuck in this macro world of duality where the cataclysmic forces of right and wrong, good and evil, life and death, clash so ferociously, and appear so fixed.

I wonder if it truly is that lifting of a lid that “fixes” a thing? That ties it to one end or the other of an apparent duality, and makes a thing dead or alive?

Or rather, is it our firm belief in a dualistic reality that forces our rational mind into “seeing” either one thing or its opposite, and not the state between?

Is this another paradox to puzzle through? Another box to open?

Let all six sides fly apart.

Let all  hard edges dissolve.

Let me wrap my mind around the soft warm body within where nothing is fixed or final.

Blogging, Another Way of “Breaking Bread”

08 Sunday Jul 2018

Posted by in Blogging, Culture, Science

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Recently I wrote about blogging as virtual “love-making,” riffing on the new science which defines love as a“micro-moment of positivity resonance.” 

But there’s more to it than that, it now appears.  According to an article in The Atlantic, “The Selfish Meme – Twitter, dopamine, and the evolutionary advantages of talking about oneself” by Frank Rose:

“Researchers have previously shown that certain online activities—such as checking your e-mail or Twitter stream—stimulate the brain’s reward system. Like playing a slot machine, engaging in these activities sends the animal brain into a frenzy as it anticipates a possible reward: often nothing, but sometimes a small prize, and occasionally an enormous jackpot.”

Apparently this behavior of constant searching taps into a primal food-hunting drive and the reward we feel when the sought-after food is actually found—it’s matter of survival.

But even more interesting is the discovery that sharing information about ourselves as commonly done on Facebook and on blogs can be even more pleasurable.  It can, in fact, give the neurochemical equivalent of an orgasm, according to an article on the Web site for the Today show “Oversharing on Facebook as Satisfying as Sex?”.

So beyond the reward of the hunt, it seems, is the deeper pleasure of sharing what we have (our catch, ourselves) with others.

In that case, blogging may be a new form of “breaking bread.”

We’ve all experienced the pleasure sharing a meal we’ve created with people we care about, and we know how this stimulates conversations in which we share our thoughts and stories.

In a sense, when we blog, we’re inviting others to our “table,” and sharing the best of what we have to offer that day—our thoughts, insights, images, poetry, memories.  We’re feeding each other and inviting responses.  And, while things we find on other sites may create those deep resonating connections we call “micro-moments of love,” the deepest pleasure comes from our own offerings: sharing ourselves with others. Giving more than receiving.

It all makes sense. Blogging, after all, is about creating community.  Creating bonds of interest, of mutual satisfaction, mutual admiration.

It’s all about connecting.  Hooking up. Taking risks. Being vulnerable and open.

Blogging may not be “orgasmic,” but if you think about it, it’s pretty darn sexy.

This was originally posted in 2013.

Virtual Love-Making, Why We Blog

01 Sunday Jul 2018

Posted by in Blogging, Culture, Human Consciousness, Love, Science

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public domain bee

Often when I leave comments on a blog posts that moved me, I write “I love this post” or “I love the way you do [this]” or “I love that quotation.” Lately I’ve been wondering if I’m overusing the word “love”.

Am I really feeling this strong emotional attachment, or am I just being lazy, unwilling to take the time to precisely articulate what strikes me about a particular piece?

After reading an article in The Atlantic on the science behind love, I’m inclined to believe that, more often than not, I use the word “love” because that’s what I’m actually feeling– a “micro-moment of positivity resonance.”   That’s how Barbara Fredrickson defines love in her new book Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do.

In The Atlantic article “There’s No Such Thing as Everlasting Love (According to Science), author Emily Esfahani Smith writes:

Fredrickson, a leading researcher of positive emotions at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, presents scientific evidence to argue that love is not what we think it is. It is not a long-lasting, continually present emotion that sustains a marriage; it is not the yearning and passion that characterizes young love; and it is not the blood-tie of kinship.

Rather, it is what she calls a “micro-moment of positivity resonance.” She means that love is a connection, characterized by a flood of positive emotions, which you share with another person—any other person—whom you happen to connect with in the course of your day. You can experience these micro-moments with your romantic partner, child, or close friend. But you can also fall in love, however momentarily, with less likely candidates, like a stranger on the street, a colleague at work, or an attendant at a grocery store. Louis Armstrong put it best in “It’s a Wonderful World” when he sang, “I see friends shaking hands, sayin ‘how do you do?’ / They’re really sayin’, ‘I love you.”

PenguinsSo when I say I “love” Louis Armstrong’s song, now I know why—because I feel such a strong positive connection to what he’s saying, as well as with how he says it, and the music he says it with, that I experience a triple love-whammy!

What I feel when reading things by fellow bloggers, or see the images they’ve created, is similar—a deeply-felt resonating connection, often on several levels.

In “Tao and Creativity” Chang Chung-yuan describes this connection between poet and reader as a “spiritual rhythm.”  It is the means by which the reader participates in the inner experience of the poet. He writes:

In other words, the reader is carried into the rhythmic flux and is brought to the depth of original indeterminacy from which the poetic pattern emerges.  The reader is directly confronted with the objective reality which the poet originally faced. The subjectivity of the reader and the objective reality of the poem interfuse . . . .

This is very interesting because Fredrickson discovers a similar phenomenon when she compares the brainwaves of a storyteller and listeners. Smith describes this in her article:

 What they found was remarkable. In some cases, the brain patterns of the listener mirrored those of the storyteller after a short time gap. The listener needed time to process the story after all. In other cases, the brain activity was almost perfectly synchronized; there was no time lag at all between the speaker and the listener. But in some rare cases, if the listener was particularly tuned in to the story—if he was hanging on to every word of the story and really got it—his brain activity actually anticipated the story-teller’s in some cortical areas.

“The mutual understanding and shared emotions, especially in that third category of listener, generated a micro-moment of love, which ‘is a single act, performed by two brains,’” as Fredrickson writes in her book.

Big Sur and Mothers Day picnic 111Fredrickson also discovered that the capacity to experience these daily love connections in our lives can be increased through simple loving-kindness meditations, where, as Smith describes, “you sit in silence for a period of time and cultivate feelings of tenderness, warmth, and compassion for another person by repeating a series of phrases to yourself wishing them love, peace, strength, and general well-being.”

“Fredrickson likes to call love a nutrient,” Smith writes.  “If you are getting enough of the nutrient, then the health benefits of love can dramatically alter your biochemistry in ways that perpetuate more micro-moments of love in your life, and which ultimately contribute to your health, well-being, and longevity.”

So remember, fellow readers, as you go meandering from one blog site to another like busy little bees, making those “micro-moment” connections with people whose work you admire, that you are engaged in a kind of virtual love-making.  You are distributing a pollen-like “nutrient” that nurtures others, as well as yourself.

As Louis says, “what a wonderful world” we live in!

This essay was first posted in a slightly altered version in 2013.

The Rich and Sensual World of Scent

24 Sunday Jun 2018

Posted by in Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, Science

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Lately I’ve become obsessed by scent.  Perfume, to be more precise.  I seldom wear it, which is why this obsession is so strange.

It all started with the quest to find the perfect perfume for my daughter’s bridal shower.  I wanted something intimate and earthy, something that would literally become her.  A signature scent that would be all her own. It had to be perfect, like her–warm and rich and exciting, and deeply satisfying.  Something that made you want more.  That you would never forget and never forget wanting.

And in this quest I tumbled down a rabbit hole into a rich and sensual world where one single sense seldom privileged—smell—was given full rein to romp and roam and sate itself in scent.

We humans rarely give ourselves that pleasure.  We privilege sight, touch, sound, taste, and the feel of things.  Poor scent is a step-child to the other senses, neglected, forgotten.  Not so for other species where the sense of smell is primary with a full palette of colors and a symphony of sounds.

Often when I sit on our front patio overlooking the surrounding hills and valley below, my little dog sits with me, looking out as if as mesmerized by the beauty of the landscape as I am. She seems totally enraptured, her nose raised, nostrils quivering, her whole body trembling in delight.  But she’s reveling in smell not sight.  She’s drinking in that delicious flood of scents flowing uphill from the valley below.

I imagine her savoring each scent the way we savor each note when listening to a symphony, carried away by the trill of arpeggios, deep thundering drums, long sweet notes like violin strings, the soft low moans of cellos, blasting trumpets, cascading piano keys, all washing over her, tumbling together, fading away, like movements in a symphony of scent that I am deaf to.  How I envy her!

We’ve long known how smell and taste are intricately connected—in fact, we can distinguish far more flavors through smell alone—inhaling and exhaling—than we can by our tongues.

What’s new and interesting is how scientists are discovering a similar interconnection between smell and sound that gives rise to a new sensory perception quaintly coined “smound.”  If this new science bears out it will only confirm the old science.  In 1862, the perfumer G. W. Septimus Piesse noted how “Scents, like sounds, appear to influence the olfactory nerve in certain definite degrees,” and he developed an “octave of odour” to measure those scents.

Musical metaphors are used in describing perfumes, which are said to have three sets of “notes” that unfold over time, each interacting with the others to create a “harmonious scent accord.”

As I wandered along countless cosmetic counters in the search for the perfect perfume for my daughter, spraying sample scents on slips of paper and waving them in the air, or daubing them on my wrists and forearms and inner elbow, knowing how scents change when applied to skin, mixing with our natural pheromones and warm pulses, I was savoring those musical notes: light florals steeped with sandalwood floating on a musky base.  Amber and lotus blossoms with a hint of peach.  Cardamom married to rosewood.  Lavender and rosemary.  Vanilla and violets dampened by oak moss.

But there was more to the whole process than scent–the name had to be perfect too, evocative and mysterious, lyrical and alluring.  The shape of the bottle had to be sensual or simple, daring or dreamy, as fitted the fragrance and the name.  It all had to flow together.

I finally found it, amazingly. The perfect perfume for my perfect daughter.  She loves it, and her lover loves her in it. So I’m happy.  But still hungry.

Still wanting more. More of my own to daub on earlobe and wrist, to line along the window sill like colored glass or exotic orchids.  Scents to soothe and stir, arouse and savor.

I want to collect scents the way I do books.  To sit quietly, alluringly, on my shelf, its richness and beauty and promise in full display, just waiting, waiting, waiting, for the perfect moment when I take it in my hands and lift the stopper and let the initial scent rise, and all its sweet layering, lingering notes play over me again and again.

I want scent to light up every neuron in my body.  To flow through me, light and airy, like champagne bubbles. I want to hear it taste it see it feel it popping all about me.

I want, I want to be, sated in scent.

This was first posted five years ago in a slightly altered version.

Playing Piano, a Full-Body Workout for the Brain

25 Monday Sep 2017

Posted by in Art, Culture, music, Science

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Related image

As I’ve begun learning to replay the piano, I’ve been amazed to realize what a complicated endeavor it is. It seems your mind has to be actively engaged full-tilt in at least nine different directions at once.

Learning to sight-read again is difficult enough in itself, memorizing all the keys and flats and sharps in the treble as well as bass clefts, then adding in the kinds of notes and how long to hold each, when to rest, when to repeat, when to go to an octave higher.

But all that’s child play compare to actually playing the notes as you scan the score, each hand going off in a different direction at the same time, while remembering the complex fingering of keys, as your fingers scamper up and down the keyboard, sometimes crossing over each other.

Then try adding the pedal to that, remembering when to press down to sustain the notes, when to let up. Never mind remembering where to speed up, slow down, play louder or softer. And all that with feeling, to express the emotional content of the score.

The thing we’re after, of course, is to learn to play the piece so well that our muscle memory takes over and the fingers themselves know what to do, where to go and how to play. Then you become the instrument through which the piece plays itself, so to speak. How peaceful that is. No wonder we go into ecstatic rapture when that happens.

But to get to that point is extremely difficult and complex, and time-consuming, requiring tons of discipline and dedication as well as pure love for the instrument and the music you are attempting to master.

Which is why performances like that of Martha Argerich, considered the finest living pianists today, is so mesmerizing. Watch how her hands fly over the keyboard, how her body leans into the score, how her face expresses the depth of her feelings as she plays.

Watching this, I wasn’t surprised to find in an article on Brain Pickings last week how “playing music is the brain’s equivalent of a full-body workout.”

Playing an instrument engages practically every area of the brain at once — especially the visual, auditory, and motor cortices. And, as in any other workout, disciplined, structured practice in playing music strengthens those brain functions, allowing us to apply that strength to other activities.

Robert Jordain in his book Music, The Brain, and Ecstasy agrees:

No human undertaking is so formidable as playing a musical instrument. Athletes and dancers may drive their bodies to greater exertions; scholars ma juggle more elaborate conceptual hierarchies; painters and writers may project greater imagination and personality. But it is musicians who must draw together every aspect of mind and body, melding athleticism with intellect, memory, creativity, and emotion, all in gracious concert.

A properly trained pianist plays all at once from fingers, wrists, elbows, shoulders, and spine, every joint in exquisite coordination as legs support and pedal. When the torso sways upon the bench, every joint continuously adjusts its relationship to every other in an enormously complex running calculus . . . Accurate movement requires that the brain monitor every result of its efforts in a perpetual loop of feedback and adjustment.

So every sensory system except those for taste and smell is put to work reporting what has happened after a movement is made.  . . . . Meanwhile, the visual system runs helter-skelter, one moment decoding dozens of dots on a printed page, the next aligning hands to keyboard, then darting off to gather timing cues from fellow musicians.

None of this commotion would be worth much were it not for emotions welling up through the mind’s floorboards. It is the joy of so pure an expression of emotion that draws musicians to the profession.

The musician at once commands the notes and is ravished by them.

Certainly all of this can be seen in Argerich’s playing. I am in awe when I watch her. And I wonder why I never heard of her until I was doing research for this post. Rubenstein, Horowitz,  Glen Gould, Van Caliburn, all great classical pianists, all household names, all male. But the greatest of them all, according to so many lists I’ve seen, is this beautiful, Argentine woman who I had never heard of before. How can that be?

Apparently she is a legend in the classical world, “but she doesn’t act like one,” according to an article in the Washington Post last year.

She’s private, moody and unpredictable. She’s wildly beautiful, with a long, thick mass of hair — once dark, now gray — and a radiant, quick smile, and at 75, she still wears the peasant blouses and cotton pants of a teenager circa 1968. And she plays the piano brilliantly, ferociously and, perhaps, better than anyone else on Earth. 

Some say that her performances on U-Tube are responsible for a new resurgence of interest in and accolades for her work among the general public. I’m happy that I found her there. She demonstrates so beautifully what that full-body workout of the brain looks and sounds like.

 

 

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

12 Monday Jun 2017

Posted by in Art, Culture, Science, Spirituality

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DSCN2760

Dancing Poppies in a Blue Bowl by Deborah J. Brasket

I fell in love with the title of Milan Kundera’s novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” long before I ever read it. To me it evokes something unbearably joyful and rich, playful and profound.

So I was disappointed to find the novel itself, while a wonderful read, playful and profound in its own way, suggested a different interpretation of its title, a profound sadness at how fragile and transitory life is, how quickly its bright light fades.

I don’t see life that way at all. I mean, I see it, I understand why it may seem that way. But I don’t believe it.

To me, the beauty of  this “lightness of being” is not that it is “unbearable” as in too horrible to bear, but “unbearable” as in too delicious to bear, to contain. It spills over.

I think that’s what I was trying to convey in my painting of the dancing poppies in a blue bowl. The beauty of the seemingly solid things that surround us, that make up our lives, is that they are not “heavy” or “static,” but constantly in motion, “dancing” as it were through time and space.  Constantly dissolving itself and resolving into something else, similar, but not quite the same. The way the present moment dissolves and resolves instantaneously as we move through time.

There’s a wonderful analogy of the universe/reality by the physicist David Bohm. He sees reality and consciousness, what he calls the “implicate order,” as a “coherent whole, which is never static or complete but which is an unending process of movement and unfoldment.”  He likens this whole (all that ever was and ever will be) as a tightly woven ball of yarn, one infinite thread. Yet the way we perceive it through time and space is as if the ball of yarn is rolling away and unraveling before our eyes. We glimpse “what is” second by second, inch by inch, as it reveals itself to us in micro-bites and nano-seconds. It’s not that reality is actually unraveling, but that the illusion of its unraveling is how we come to comprehend it, see it, know it, love it. We are one with it all the while, even while it appears as something distinct and separate from our selves.

Another analogy that I love is Indra’s Net. Here the universe/reality is like an infinite net with a pearl at each interstice. Each pearl reflects every other pearl as well as the whole net itself. Each pearl contains within itself, as part of its own lustrous being, part of its own distinct individuality, all the others around it. The part contains the whole and vice versa.

This view of reality makes sense to me, not only from a scientific and spiritual viewpoint, but experientialy as well. I experience this every time I walk through the house and pass through one doorway after another and watch this interior landscape flowing past me, one room dissolving as a new one approaches. Every time I look out the window and take in the trees and hills and houses and sky and hold them in my mind’s eye even as I turn away. Practical, ordinary, experiences we all share.

I hold all those I love with me wherever I go as I know they do me. My breath is constantly circulating through my body as I breathe in the world around me and breath it out again. Nothing is still for even a second. All of life is in constant motion, the atoms within us and the galaxies swirling about our heads.

This is the unbearable lightness of being. Dancing poppies, dissolving bowl. Brush dipped in water and paint spilling images across a page. All this spilling together going on right here and now as you read this, my heart and mind spilling out to you.

What could be lighter, brighter, more playful and profound than that? This unbearably rich and joyful lightness of being.