Practice; Prayer; Ritual

-       At the Rainbow (hippy) Gathering in Brazil, before food, we would stand in a circle holding hands and sing songs. The last song was always the same: "Esso es familia (this is family); esso es comunidade (this is community), esso es sagrado (this is sacred)."

-       On the stero somewhere a couple of days later I heard a kid singing hip-hop. One of the lines was “not much is sacred.”

      I put my head back to think. What in my life is sacred? I scoured. Ah! The yoga mat. That is sacred. Most of the time. That’s a start.

-       Reading Chatwin p200, about the dearth of ritual among Baseri nomads of Iran. It's noteworthy because tribal life tends to be laced with ritual. Norweigan anthropologist Frederick Bath, Chatwin writes, “concluded that the journey itself was the ritual, that the road to summer uplands was the Way, and that the pitching and dismantling of tents was prayer more meaningful than any in the mosque. (Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines, 1998:200-1).

I lie back in my hammock and think.

Ritual tends to be symbolic.

There is a dial, a spectrum

One end: loads of symbolism – for example, Indian Hindu rituals.

Other end: no symbolism, eg Baseri journeys.

I pick up my guitar and begin to play some scales. I started yesterday. I’ve been playing a lot here in Brazil and the tips of my fingers are starting to edge away from the composition, wanting to explore and improvise, but they don't know how. I started playing scales as a way in to the instrument, to get to know some of its forms and ways.

As I steadily play the scales up and down the fret board, I think

Maybe practice is prayer.

Not symbolic prayer, but actual.

I think of Atul’s image of the practicing musician as the railway track layer. God is the train that comes through you when you improvise, he says. The better you lay your tracks, the further they go, the more that God can play through you.

In playful practice you are learning to play creatively and freely with the instrument.

But in scales you are not playing or being creative.

You are being steady, repetitive, focused, humble, smoothly concentrated.

It is a form of meditation.

And if musicians are the architects of heaven as Bobby says, then maybe our practice is our prayer.

(Thanks to vanarts for the picture)