Hello my friends. Today is Day 9 of my Restorative Retreat. I am so happy and grateful that I can stay here for a while and not feel like I have to get up and go anywhere else for the time being. When it feels right and I feel ready and well rested I will take a ride up to RI and get some more of my stuff out of storage but I am not making a plan other than to pay attention and follow my guidance on that.
I have been absorbed in sound and music in various forms. I’ve spent quite a bit of time practicing the piano and playing the guitar, trying to break out and explore new possibilities rather than just sticking with what I know- which Is easy to do on the piano because I don’t know much at all other than the notes and basic scales. I do understand the basics of creating chords also so I have a little bit of very basic foundational material to work with.
… And… some time has elapsed since I wrote the above- I am now on day 13 of my stay-at-home retreat! I have completed a painting (see below!), created several very simple short riffs on the piano, painted a couple of stools for the breakfast bar in my kitchen, made homemade pizza (and had Mahesh & Mukta over to help me eat them), explored double drop D tuning on the guitar, taken a two-hour online yoga class on the day of the most recent full moon and been working on whitening the bones of a turtle skeleton and shell found down by the pond on the property where I live. I’ve also made a few short meditation videos intended basically to help my friends end their evening on a good note. I spent hours one day going through pictures from the Sound Body Wholistic Health Center- my old sound healing center in St. Pete- just to pick out a new cover photo for the Facebook page for the center. And I’ve watched a whole bunch of episodes of “Doctor, Doctor” on Amazon Prime- AKA “The Heart Guy”!
I have several plants that Mahesh and Mukta gave me waiting to be planted. Cannas and kalanchoe… and a rosemary plant that I bought at the market. My yard is very drab. Needs some new life for sure. It’s small but there’s plenty of room for some herbs and flowers to brighten things up. The truth is I’ve been nervous about digging around too much in the yard because the one day I did in the spring I was introduced to chiggers- not fun!
Last night before bed I had a teaspoon of honey with cannabis extract in it. It is supposed to help with sleep. It didn’t- in fact it had the opposite effect. I was up til somewhere around 5 a.m. At a certain point it occurred to me that perhaps I should focus on “waking up” rather than going to sleep. I am fascinated by my dream state… isn’t my “waking state” equally as important, if not more so? And what does it mean to be awake? So I picked up Francis Lucille’s book, The Perfume of Silence.
I have only just started it but I can pretty comfortably say that it is on the nature of consciousness and non-dual reality. In response to a question in the beginning of the book he uses the sound of birds and ambient outdoor sounds as a reference point. He says, “Ask yourself, ‘Where do they appear?’ If the answer is that the bird is singing 50 feet from here, see that this is not actually your experience, that it is a concept. The actual experience of the sound is happening at a zero distance from you, not 50 feet away. It is not happening there but rather here, always. Everything is always happening here and now.”
Immediately I tuned into the sound of the crickets “outside” and suddenly felt that i was floating in a sea of consciousness. Everything that “seems” to be happening to me and around me is happening within the consciousness of I AM. I picked up my journal long enough to write “There is no separation between ‘I’ and my experience of the world around me- around the body I seem to inhabit. I am in fact inhabiting everything I seem to come into contact with.” And then drifted back out into the sea of consciousness…
