Create

I have a million connective thoughts. Mostly when I'm driving. Something about the mixture of motion with static (the world whizzing by vs. sitting in the cockpit).

So why, when it seems it is flowing so freely at 11:00pm as I'm driving home from the gig up the West Side of this amazing city, do I struggle when I get in front of this machine to recreate those thought-fractals?

Write it down (or these days, speak it into the cell phone).
I do remember some of the main ideas. But they are more like the major trunk or limb of the fractal. The best thoughts are those tiny, unintended loops that bring everything back again. Back to symmetry. Back to some kind of order. Not an Imposed Order. The natural order. The celestial order (if you like). Not a phony religion of self satisfying, self serving rules and regs. The order that is inherent in the overtone series for instance.

The wave frequencies of light (color), sound (harmony), the ocean (gravity), these are all realities. Fundamental, physical realities. We, if we are going to be in tune at all, must attune ourselves to this order. This order will not bend and change it's properties to suit us.

There is that middle way. Gotama Buddha called it as such. Surfers (when they're surfing) physically render it.
Not the extreme of austerity, nor the luckless lot of the lazy lout. But in the middle. You've got to take that step towards it and the rest as they say, will take care of itself. What does that mean, though, 'Take care of itself'?

I think it has to mean that you don't have to re-create the laws of gavity and light, just get to work on building the cathedral. Just make patterns framing what already exists in some no-place that has no-time. Use the achievments and advancements of the craftsmen that came before you and get to work.

I think good music sounds good to us not because "gee whiz, that guy's a magician", but because it suggests a possible way of being that was there all along, but it had never been pointed out.

Like the profile of JFK, naturally occurring in the rockface on the way to the Iao Valley in Maui. We recognize it. Someone just happened to look up one day and see it. It was there long before anyone named John F. Kennedy walked the face of the earth (and ironically, come to think of it, I think I heard about 5 years ago that it had fallen down in a rock slide).

This is a rather mundane example.

Geniuses that well-understood the laws of vibrating audible waves were able to craft windows onto the play of sound (Bach, Mozart, Coltrane, Louis Armstrong, etc etc). The don't come along so often. The thing is, many times it feels to me that the marketplace is glutted with what I would call magicians employing tricks and sleight of hand to achieve a triggered response.

This may be veering off course...?

I think my point for now is only to get busy with the work.

For me, that means the Gaikyoku and Honkyoku pieces for the shakuhachi, Bach flute sonatas, the myriad standards of the Great American Song Book (on piano, guitar, flute, singing), and the great Bossa Novas of Brazil (on nylon string/singing). And accompanying all this, of course, is the life blood that can run through (nearly) all of it - the musical language of jazz and be-bop.

There are tons of other things. Life is not long enough to get to all of them. But the world of musical exchange is opening up like never before, facilitated by the revolutionary age of internet communication that we are now living through.