Over the years, some on this forum, given my...uh... sometimes dismissive nature, have asked me what *does* still get me off, spiritually. This post is intended to address that question.
Tonight I synched my review copy of Bruce Cockburn's new album Small Source Of Comfort to my iPhone and then jacked the headphones into my brain and walked around my new home town in the Netherlands on a foggy Friday night, listening to the whole album while doing a kind of self-invented walking meditation. My kinda Nirvana. Some would consider it "settling." How, they might say, can he foresake the constant stiving for enlightenment or higher states of consciousness that we live for, and settle for a walk around a sleepy Dutch town at night, doing nothing more spiritual than listening to music? And they've got a point. Yet tonight's walk got me higher than anything I've done in recent months. Go figure. I walked along the canals, reveling in the visuals of houses and trees reflected in the still surface of the water, occasionally broken up and turned into dazzling CGI-enhanced versions of the same houses and trees, as passing ducks stirred the surface of the canal. Although the night was, on the surface, gray, foggy and uninviting to the adventurous, adventure lay around every corner. I saw more drama and mystery and adventure in one short, album-long walk around my town than most folks see on TV in a year. It was like walking through a holo- graphic landscape formed by the intersections of beams of golden light. The night was literally on fire with light. Again, go figure. Then again, much of this effect may be due to moodmaking, and the fact that I actually consider Bruce Cockburn one of my spiritual teachers. I've only met the dude a couple of times, and yet I credit his words and music with shaping my life easily as much as I credit Maharishi or Rama. Go figure. Bruce is Christian. I'm quasi-Buddhist, with a soupçon of Taoism, occultism, atheism, and polypantheism thrown into the pot to add some spice to the dish. And yet. And yet, his ruminations about the Road Trip of his life resonate with the Road Trip of my life, and get me high as a kite. What more could one ask of a musician, or for that matter, a spiritual teacher?
