Hi R,
I just played my bagpipes on Monday evening for the first time with the Open Band (with some 'orchestral' and other instruments), in addition to playing 'second keyboard’ which has meant playing bass lines very enjoyably, at Scottish Country Dancing in a pretty hall at St. Clement's Episcopal church in south Berkeley, which was very fun, so my Monday was good, thanks. I've been playing ‘2nd piano” to PC's main piano for many months now on Monday evenings, building on what I learned piano-wise from ages 6-12, - and SCD music is very melodic, so music-making is very enjoyable, and ‘happening’ there, even with my "{Zen Mind}, Beginner's Mind" with the piano playing bass lines in particular. Music happens through making it so it might be fun to explore music-making together sometime in a low-key way.
I'm interested in exploring music making for bliss-generation explicitly (e.g. raga, Grateful Dead, chamber music can all improvise, and play harmoniously and closely and beautifully together, leading to 'real' and far reaching neural cascades of pleasure and bliss at times), and not just metaphorically.
I'm enjoying our email correspondence, and wonder how this might be, or could become, akin to "blog-riffing" ... especially enjoying here the synchronizing aspects of our communications writing-wise, and wondering how that might 'work' or be.
It could be fun to explore a kind of "blog riffing" together. (Is this generative conversation?) I'm exploring here – http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/ - in an ongoing way many ideas in my daily blog ... from WUaS to bliss to poetry ... often quite enjoyably and somehow creatively.
Stanford University is somehow inspiring creatively and intellectually as well. How might this happen {that Stanford is inspiring}, I ask myself, and anthropologically too? Two of my most recent poems (Sun, April 13 and Mon, March 3) are Stanford-inspired ...
http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/search/label/poetry… :)
I continue to explore growing World University and School into a flourishing MIT OCW-centric, as well as people-to-people, idea conversation, partly thanks to wiki, - and when it eventually blooms, it will be exciting and generative (especially in all languages, with Wikipedia's at least 300 and MIT OCW's at least 8). I'm curious too to learn more of your thoughts about being a graduate student instructor in the online courses you've taught, as well as favorite aspects of learning and thinking for you at Stanford, especially in terms of Stanford's ethos (excellent and somehow funky or relaxed or N. California?), in which I revel at times. How might you begin to characterize Stanford's ethos?
Harbin's warm waters significantly influence its culture I think. In what ways has swimming, or water even, influenced you ... besides perhaps in your wellbeing? By bliss I sometimes mean 'neural cascades of pleasure' (music can cause this, for example, and so can conversation and here are some more 'practices' even ... http://scottmacleod.com/LovingBlissPractices.htm ... I put on a kind of anthropological hat sometimes in writing:) ... How do you get to neural cascades of pleasure ... specific music or swimming or ... ? (And in a related vein, how do you get to kinds of releasing meditation for a kind of attunement to bodymind neurophysiology ... Do you often get into a kind of {meditative or fugue-like} 'zone,' or "flow" experience (per Csikszentmihalyi's "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience"), even, when swimming ... so, into these kinds of greatly enjoyable qualities of bodymind neurochemistry?).
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