I mainly wanted to let Dominic know that he's not alone in starting the
shakuhachi as an "old fart", though at some point everybody will hit 40
and I suspect a lot of us feel like beginners no matter what our age and
how long we've been playing. Also, it's been my experience in the SF bay
area that a lot of us started "late". Also re. practicing when your wife
is out, that sounds like another part of a common phenomenon that Nancy
Beckman came up with a great title for: Shakuhachi spouse syndrome.
Although my wife enjoys shakuhachi in small doses we're constantly going
back and forth re. things like practice time, how many consecutive
honkyoku CD's I'm allowed to put on...
With respect to the great and enlightening discussion about shakuhachi
and hocchiku I was struck while reading some of the descriptions of the
differences by something Suzuki roshi said about zazen. To paraphrase he
pointed out that there would be no zazen without "problems" (leg or back
pain, strange images,...). In some sense those were the essence of zazen
and what provided the focus for setting things in a larger context.
Perhaps that's similar to what people are saying about dealing with the
characteristics of a particular hocchiku.
-- KY
Karl Young kyoung@slac.stanford.edu
SLAC M/S 71 PO Box 20450
Stanford, CA 94309
650-926-3380 (voice) 650-926-2923 (FAX)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Feb 03 2003 - 09:09:51 PST