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.