Joshu asked Nansen, “What is the Way?”
“Ordinary mind is the Way,” Nansen replied.
“Shall I try to seek after it?” Joshu asked.
“If you try for it, you will become separated from it,” responded Nansen.
“How can I know the Way unless I try for it?” persisted Joshu.
Nansen said, “The Way is not a matter of knowing or not knowing. Knowing is delusion; not knowing is confusion. When you have really reached the true Way beyond doubt, you will find it as vast and boundless as outer space. How can it be talked about on the level of right and wrong?”
With these words, Joshu came to a sudden realization.
~ Case 19 from Gateless Gate (Mumonkan) translation by Katsuki Sekida
It was a beautiful April Sunday morning in Granada, and I had the day to myself to explore. My watch read 11:56 AM, and church bells had been echoing through the city every 15 minutes all morning. I readied my recorder, hoping to capture the full symphony of the 12 o’clock bells.Even though I started rolling a bit early, the moment I touched the red button the first set of bells rang out. Then, from off in another direction, the second. Then the third. Pressing the headphones against my ears, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing – and recording! Five or six different churches from around the city, bells pealing, ringing throughout the valley, blending with birdsongs, the soft shuffle of passing feet, voices speaking Spanish, insects buzzing past the microphone, all layered over the gentle hum of the city. It was pure magic.
I was in Granada after completing a 3-week residency at Joya:Air – an Arts and Ecology Retreat Centre. I had originally applied to go work on songwriting. In the wake of the pandemic, during which most of my musical projects and partnerships had dissolved, I wanted to recover/reinvent my relationship with music-making. But as the residency approached, I was losing interest in writing songs. Actually, more like dreading it. I was already feeling the weight of trying to prove myself (to myself) – and it was exhausting. Besides, if I wanted to push myself in that way again, I could just stay home and do it. I didn’t need to fly to Spain.
Instead, my imagination started wandering towards field recording. There was something intriguing about exploring a new place through sound, appreciating and capturing the found-sounds and ambient ‘music’ that was already there, rather than imposing my own. Since I’d never done any field recording before, I could approach it without any expectations, fixed outcomes, or goals other than to simply follow curiosity and record. It would be a new creative practice!
So that’s what I did. Everyday I’d get up before sunrise, grab the handheld recorder I’d rented, out on my headphones, and head out to explorecord™️. Frogs croaking in the dark early hours; birds waking at sunrise, the sputtering boil of a moka pot on the stove, the sounds of other artists—writers, painters, weavers, metalsmiths—working in their studios. I’d record my strides on the dirt and gravel roads; the wind stirring reeds and trees, and rattling the metal gates of abandoned buildings. I used a geophone to record the vibrations of jackhammers planting new trees. I used a magnetic contact mic to record the mechanical movements of the wind turbine and solar panels as they adjusted to track the wind and sun. I even accidentally recorded the sound of my pocket as I went on a hike, and it sounded amazing! Every sound felt beautifully complete, just as it was.
Reflecting on that incredible experience, I realized that it wasn’t any of the sound sources themselves that made it extraordinary. They were no more remarkable than the rumbling of streetcars in Toronto, the ducks on Grenadier Pond, or the sound of my keyboard as I type this. What made it special was that the ordinary sounds were being experienced in an extraordinary way – with deep equanimity. In other words, I was simply being with the sounds exactly as they were; Free from expectations – I didn’t need the sounds to be special, unusual, or in any way different than they were. Free from comparison – I wasn’t comparing them to sounds I’d heard in the past, or an idea of how I thought they should be. There was no good or bad, right or wrong, better or worse, ordinary or extraordinary. Free from ego – I didn’t make it about ‘me’ or an identity as ‘artist’ or ‘musician’. And free from control – I simply let the sounds come and go without resistance.
In that sense, the absence of interference (another way to describe equanimity) made the ordinary experience so pure that it became extraordinary.
And so now I understand that the deepest rewards from my field-recording adventure in Spain weren’t the sounds themselves, or the recording of them. It was what those experiences pointed to – the freedom, spontaneity, and deep equanimity that are already always available in ordinary life, ordinary experience, ordinary mind. And since then, I’ve been bringing those insights into the challenges of songwriting, and into my meditation practice, welcoming deeper equanimity to what might be the most ordinary experience I can think of: sitting in silence.
PS. At the end of those glorious five minutes of church bells, I went to shut down my recorder, only to realize it hadn’t been recording. A surge of panic hit me, as if I’d lost something precious. And then I realized: of course, I hadn’t. The bells had already done their work.