We continued our Live Stream Composition here on Thursday, October 1st at 7:oopm MST. and enjoyed it! Cheers to those who joined us.

We're harvesting Retrograde, our first live stream of this composition process, so we'll be recording new layers onto the original track we recorded on the April 4th conjunction. Zak Stein's words that we were contemplating and wove into the mix feel alive now in a way they couldn't have then, so I'm transcribing them below. Maybe someone out there will need just this arrangement of words as much as I did. If so, may they hold you. Remember, we're all in this together, aye!

We'll also be harvesting the track Public Domain, which we recorded...sometime, I can't remember exactly when, in between now and Retrograde.

First samples on Retrograde: Alan Watts and hummingbirds (not transcribed)

Second voice:

"We are living in the liminal, a time of pure potential and change, a time between worlds. And I feel this.

~ Peter Lindberg, host of The Stoa

Third voice:

The things we're looking for are the things we do with our bodies, our voices. Which is actually deeply organic. A return to the - turn to the ritual of living together, is what we're asked to do.

A natural process that is actually like a rediscovering of an organic reality, an always already existing reality within the living body of the human, within the bones and the DNA, is the possibility for the forms of consciousness that we are getting when we dance, or when we hold each other with the proper language.

… a certain kind of deepening into the always already present capacities of the human organism that are there. And so meditation is one of the classic ones, but dialogos is another.

Many of the rituals which we have inherited from the great traditions could be repotentiated.

Self clarification, and basically having communities of practice. It is the way that practice conditions your choice, the impact of the practice on your choice making, it's effect on others. If it makes you feel good that's wonderful. I'm not saying that's bad, but I am saying that the payload, the delivery, what we're looking for at the end of the day is a right action, is the condition for the possibility of right action. Sometimes that will actually require going deeper into pain that someone else is experiencing. In order to say the right thing to this person, I need to understand their interior state more. I need to understand their pain.

But the practices that allow you to do the right thing, to be the person who you need to be, to say what needs to be said, and so that's about clarifying who you are, clarifying the realities in the field of your experience. And it gets harder to do that as the realities in the field of your experience become more intense, emotional, more unpredictable, more frightening. But this is where all the tricks we learned from Stoicism and Buddhism and other things to regulate and to ground allows you to experiment with other practices. Slowing down -- that's a good one. Reflecting -- that's another good one.

Once you've cleared the air and you're in the tragedy, but you're transcendent but still in it, then you can laugh again. Then you have post tragic laughter, You can have post tragic tears that are not self interested "woe is me" tears, that are tears for the world. And so there's a humor possible, there's a levity that is possible, but it has to be the levity of the other side of tragedy. It can't be the levity before we actually confront it.

When am I choosing out of a basic orientation of separation and selfishness and when am I choosing basically to lead with love and care and concern?

As the situation gets more difficult can you continue to be who you want to be? Can you continue to be committed to the things that allow you to be an integrous person, someone committed to your ideals?

~ Dr. Zachary Stein from this conversation at The Stoa