Large Fierce Mammal

If you want to be a musician, but the only time you play your instrument, or even think about it, is during your half-hour weekly lesson, you’ll never become a musician.   You have to think about it all the time.

Eat it, breathe it, dream it.

You practice constantly, even when you have no instrument with you. You listen. You become aware of music on many levels. You hear music all around you in the nickering of horses, in the roaring traffic swoon, in the silence of your lonely room, you think about it night and day. You become aware of rhythm. The rhythm of the seasons, sunrise and sunset, the wind in the trees playing weird melodies, the rhapsody in the rain.  The rhythm of your heartbeat, fast or slow. The heartbeat of a lover. The oceans. The heartbeat of the earth.
 
“Musician” isn’t a job or a hobby. It isn’t something you do part-time, neatly compartmentalized away from the rest of your life. It is your life. A way of being in the world. And once you know it, experience it, feel it, thereafter, wherever you go, whatever you do, you do it differently, as a musician, than a non-musician would. And you can never go back to being the person you were before. ~ On Un-ringing the Bell by Adam Crown, M. d’A.

I’ve said here before that to arrive at an understanding of one Way is to open the door to understanding all Ways, to which I lay no claim of ownership for I am not unique in that realization.

I do assert, however, that The Way of the Wild is the point of convergence for the Ways of all things. With the exception of Man, all Nature’s creatures exist in oneness with the Way of the Wild as it is meant to express itself through their kind. For them, no road to understanding, as we would define it, is necessary. Only Man can live out an entire lifetime in blissful ignorance, or even in willful refusal, of the Way of the Wild as it is meant to express itself in human endeavour, but this is a temporary thing for it is only made possible through reliance on potentially transient conditions and influences that lie outside yourself.

To further illustrate this, I’m directing your attention today to The Swordmaster’s Grimoire, and most particularly to the 17 November 2012 article therein titled On Un-ringing the Bell, an excerpt from which was quoted at the top of this piece. You can bask in Adam Crown’s Wisdom by clicking here.