The Hundred Lights, 46th Day of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Castor): Ausar Temple is a track by the musician Angel Deradoorian (Deradoorian, Dirty Projectors, Slasher Flicks) from her highly recommended 2017 album Eternal Recurrence. The track consist of 2½ minutes of more-or-less random gongs, symbols, and drums. Ausar, also known as Osiris, was a member of the ancient Egyptian gods and the offspring of Seb and Nut. He held a close relationship with Isis, who was both his sister and his wife (eww). The track sounds a lot like the gongs in a Zen temple.and since August 2024, I have been using it as a timer for my kinhin (walking meditation) between my period of zazen (sitting meditation).

Without any fixed rhythm and although still ambient in general tone, I nonetheless found all the clanging and crashing in the track a little too disruptive even for my walking mediation  That's not a knock against the piece itself - I easily tolerated it for over a year, and even came to enjoy the chaos - it's just an observation of its utility for something for which the composer had no intention.  But I still wanted to use the opening, Zen-like gongs as timers for my home meditation practice so last October I fired up that music-file editing software mentioned in previous posts and spliced two minutes of Annea Lockwood's sound collage World Rhythms to the opening of Ausar Temple and, voila, created the perfect (for me) timer for kinhin between the audio timers I use for zazen.

Today, the fourth day of the Rohatsu practice period, I sat for three and a half hours. The timers were very nearly the same as yesterday, although for the additional 30 minutes, I slipped in the whisper-quiet electronic track i come out of your sleep by the artist Ruth Anderson after the three Caves. The track appears on the same LP, Sinopah, as Annea Lockwood's World Rhythms. 

Also, instead of Eno's 60-minute Reflections, I substituted all four 15-minute tracks from his Sisters album. The tracks are generative music similar to Reflections and very similar to one another (hence the title, Sisters). The silence between tracks is shorter and less pronounced than some of the silences or near-silences within the tracks themselves, so it didn't feel like sitting (literally) through four different compositions. And the great part is, one can easily delete one or two of the tracks to create 30- or 45-minute timers as desired.

Here then, is the playlist of timers for today's sitting:

Laraaji - Twenty Five-Minute Cave, zazen, zafu (0:25)

Deradorian/Annea Lockwood - Ausar Temple/World Rhythm (edit), kinhin (0:30)

Ana Quiroga - Ten-Minute Cave (edited to 25 minutes), zazen, zafu (0:55)

Deradorian/Annea Lockwood - Ausar Temple/World Rhythm (edit), kinhin (1:00)

Will Epstein - Fifteen-Minute Cave (edited to 25 minutes), zazen, zafu (1:25)

Deradorian/Annea Lockwood - Ausar Temple/World Rhythm (edit), kinhin (1:30)

Ruth Anderson - i come out of your sleep, zazen, zafu (1:55)

Deradorian/Annea Lockwood - Ausar Temple/World Rhythm (edit), kinhin (2:00)

Brian Eno - Sisters, zazen, seiza bench (3:00)

Deradorian/Annea Lockwood - Ausar Temple/World Rhythm (edit), kinhin (3:05)

Annea Lockwood - World Rhythm (60-minute edit), zazen, zafu (3:35)

All times above are approximate; the entire playlist of timers was actually 3 hours and 32 minutes.         

 

High Paralysis, 45th Day of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Betelgeuse): Then, on the third day of the Rohatsu practice period, he sat for three hours. 

Today, I sat for three, 30-minute periods using a zafu (round meditation cushion), then one 60-minute period using a seiza (kneeling) bench, and then another, final, 30-minute period using the zafu again. My timers were three Caves stretched out to 25-minutes each (with five minutes of intro/outro ambient music), an hour-long Brian Eno ambient composition (Reflections), and then a 30-minute edit of Annea Lockwood's World Rhythms. Even though it was aggressively ambient, the Eno piece called too much attention to itself - or to be more precise, my mind was able to focus on it too easily - and I probably won't be using that one again.

Since it's Betelgeuse, a walking day, I got my steps in today too, another Madisonian 4.1 miles.

The Stable Genius probably did something stupid today, I'm sure of it, but I was too busy with my sitting and my walking to notice. In other words, it was a good day.   

 

Day of the Waste Arena, 44th of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Aldebaran): The Stable Genius warned today that any country he believes is illegally manufacturing drugs destined for the US is vulnerable to military attack. Great. Because the War of Drugs worked so successfully here (sarcasm) that it's time to take it global.

It's the second day of the Rohatsu practice period and I added a half hour to my now daily (for this period) sitting. Two and a half hours, consisting of two 30-minute sits and two 45-minute sits. 

I use timers for my meditation rather than stare at a clock. I used to use the timer app on my iPhone for a timer, but no matter how gentle the alarm I selected, I still found it jolting when it went off, and then I had to scramble and fumble around with my phone to turn it off. That made for a rude ending to a graceful sitting period.

A few years ago, I came across a compilation album by the label Other People titled Caves, a "compendium of timers for every-day use." Each track starts with some gentle, wordless, new-age/ambient music for a minute or so, and then fades to silence for five, ten, or more minutes. At the end of the silence, the music gently returns for another minute or so. The "caves" are the silences between the sounds. One track by the ambient musician Laraaji is a 25-minute cave, and with the intro and outro, the whole track is 30 minutes in length, perfect for a half hour of zazen and kinhin (walking meditation). The other tracks are all of shorter length, but I used some music-editing software to expand the silences of those other tracks to 25 minutes and for a year now have used three of them as timers for my 90-minute meditation periods.

Meditating while listening to music isn't Zen meditation, or shikantaza ("just sitting") as the Japanese call it. Just sitting is exactly what the words describe - nothing other than simply sitting still, and anything added to it - sitting and chanting, or sitting and practicing mindful breathing, or sitting and thinking about a koan - is not "just sitting." Just sitting, with no "and." So sitting and listening to music is not shikantaza, but with the Caves tracks, the music quickly falls away just as I'm settling in, and the "and" disappears. 

But sometimes, especially during this Rohatsu practice period, I also use some extended-length recorded tracks as my timers. It's not shikantaza, but in my experience it can still be a form of meditation. It won't work if I'm listening to anything with words or singing, or instrumental melodies, or even a fixed rhythm. But there's some drone music that consists of little more than a single tone sustained for extended lengths and there's some ambient music that's so ephemeral and nebulous that there are no hooks or anything else for the mind to latch onto, and those tracks can make good timers. The sound simply disappears into the background, not unlike the other ambient sounds of the house on an afternoon - the fan from the HVAC, the birds outside, the occasional passing car, sometimes (and annoyingly) some landscapers working their gas-powered leaf blowers somewhere in the neighborhood. 

Today, I used three of those 25-minute Caves and two 45-minute ambient tracks for my sitting. The first ambient track was Elaine Radigue's Occam XXV performed by the organist Frederic Blondy. The entire 45 minutes is one long sustained note played on organ that slowly, imperceptibly, rises up out of silence and then fades back again by the end - now that I think about it, the exact opposite strategy as the Caves. It's the aural equivalent of watching paint dry, perfect for meditation (Radigue, it should be noted, is a practicing Tibetan Buddhist). 

The other 45-minute track was Annea Lockwood's sound collage World Rhythm, consisting of field recording of various nature sounds - a babbling brook, lapping waves, bird songs, honking geese, occasional rumbles of thunder, with moments of silence or near-silence. To some people, it might not even qualify a "music," although the counter argument is that sounds arranged from field recordings of nature is no less arbitrary than sound arranged from plucked strings, drum beats, and vibrating columns of air.

FYI, I'm off Spotify now, and all my timers today were ethically purchased off of Bandcamp, including the Caves, Occam XXV, and World Rhythm.      

 

 

The Living Help, 43rd Day of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Helios): Forty-third day of Hagwinter, first day of Rohatsu practice period. Even though I sat yesterday (90 minutes), I sat again today for 120 minutes - four sitting periods (zazen) of 25 minutes each, with five minutes of walking meditation (kinhin) in between. 

Also, since Helios is officially a walking day for me, I went out and walked a Madisonian 4.4 miles, the shorter distance necessitated by the extra time needed for all that sitting.

tl/dr: another day in paradise