Last night, a friend who shall remain nameless and I sat in my music room talking and making music for a while.
At a certain point, we both took our cell phones outside and turned them off.
It's strange that we both had the same thought at the same time. It wasn't that we were planning anything terroristic, but more that we wanted this special time to be all ours and nobody else's.
Music is an amazing blessing in my life. When I go to my music room, everything falls away and I am there in the presence of The Creator, my instruments, and my self in all its glory. I get to witness all of my talents and all of my drawbacks, because music, for me, is a very powerful spiritual practice, which rivals psychoanalysis in its ability to reveal the self, in all its glory and (sometimes) horror.
in that music room, which is the ultimate alchemical laboratory, I am confronted with such qualities as laziness, inventiveness, inertia, inspiration, fear of criticism, great joy, and many others that are the result of a spiritual practice whose intensity and complexity I am still learning about, even after 71 years of life in this body.
Last night, after all the information about spying that has come out in the last few weeks, my friend and I both looked at each other after a moment, and then we both turned our cell phones off and took them outside, setting them down on some rocks. We then returned to our seats in my music room, where we had a very interesting discussion that took us into the wee hours of the morning.
One of the interesting things we both realized was the fact that leaving our cell phones outside and having no Internet or telephone connection to the outside world, we were both a little more uninhibited than we had been before. The recent revelations of the extent to which both our national government and international entities listening in on what we do through these various tools that we use frequently, such as cell phones and computers, has had an inhibitory effect on very ordinary conversations.
last night, sitting in my music room without the benefit of my cell phone nearby, I realized how important it was for me to establish a cell phone–free area, perhaps temporarily. I'm going to start to do that much more, asking people to leave their cell phones outside my music room. Not only do I not want to be interrupted by someone's cell phone ringing, but I also want to feel uninhibited about whatever I may want to discuss or practice.
I would love to know how everybody here feels about all of this. Thank you for reading, and let's have a lively discussion.