Tips on Playing (the Harmonica) with Records and Other People

I am currently rekindling a relationship with my harmonica, which has been living in the front pouch of my ukulele case for two and a half years after an inspired purchase during a road trip through Valencia.

Just learned that one of the holes is not broken, as I suspected was the case since I bought it.  This video has dissolved my harmonica worries, so now I'm on to bigger and better things.  Like playing Kumbaya for people over the phone and checking out  How To Play Country & Western Harmonica by David Harp from the library.

If you're interested in some excellent advice on playing with other people, see the clip from his book below.  

Excerpt by David Harp -- Appendix C: Playing with Records and Other People; p 58-59

"I could easily devote an entire book to hints and tips on playing with other people.  But I'll just mention a few of the most important issues here.

• Be honest about how experienced you are, before you start with people you don't know. 

•  Don't play too much.  Let the other musicians ask you to play more, rather than to play less. 

• Always know what key a song is going to be played in, before it starts.  When in doubt, ask the guitar player, or bass player.

•  Let the other musicians know that you mostly play "three chord songs" (more professionally known as "1-4-5" songs).   If a song has complex chords, you may want to wait for an easier one. 

•  Once you know the song key, make sure you have the right key harmonica to play in either first or second position.  Never try to "wing it" on the wrong key harp in public -- you'll be sorry!"

Things that everyone knows

Tomatoes are bustin' out all over!

Cherry tomatoes preparing themselves for my breakfast tomorrow

My mom's porch, July 2013

Endymion by Keats

“ But this is human life: the war, the deeds,

The disappointment, the anxiety,

Imagination’s struggles, far and nigh,

All human; bearing in themselves this good,

That they are still the air, the subtle food,

To make us feel existence."

Today's Daily Challenge - A Gratitude Walk

Every morning I receive a Daily Challenge in my inbox.  For more information, visit  https://challenge.meyouhealth.com.

My follow-through is inconsistent at best, but I stay signed up for gems like this one, which I took straight from the e-mail this morning.

Take a 5-minute gratitude walk: Stroll outside or in your home and note what you're thankful for.

How to do itSet aside a minimum of five minutes for taking a walk outdoors or in your home or workplace. As you walk, spend the time focusing on the things you see that you feel grateful for. Perhaps you're grateful for the beautiful flowers growing in a nearby park, a refrigerator full of food in your home, or a kind neighbor on your street. Maybe you feel grateful for a clean, safe place to work or a helpful colleague. Try to stay in the moment and concentrate on your feelings of gratitude until the walk is over.
 
Why it matters
We tend to see the same things day after day, taking people and objects in our lives for granted. But when we stop and really study everything around us, we often recognize that there is a lot to be grateful for. Taking a gratitude walk in your everyday environment can give you a lasting emotional health boost.

Care of the Soul: Rethinking exercise

In light of my recent "explorative running" phase and a very physically active morning of yard work, this passage from Thomas Moore's Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life seems relevant.

Enjoy!

"When we relate to our bodies as having soul, we attend to their beauty, their poetry and their expressiveness. Our very habit of treating the body as a machine, whose muscles are like pulleys and its organs engines, forces its poetry underground, so that we experience the body as an instrument and see its poetics only in illness.  Fortunately, we still have a few institutions that foster an imaginal body.  Fashion, for instance, brings a considerable amount of fantasy to the body, although modern dress for men falls quite short in color and variety of styles popular in former times.  Cosmetics and perfumery are available to women, and can be an important aspect of cultivating the body's soul.

Exercise could be more soulfully performed by emphasizing fantasy and imagination.  Usually we are told how much time to spend at certain exercise, what heart rate to aim for, and which muscle to focus on for toning.   Five hundred years ago Ficino gave somewhat different advice for daily exercise.  'You should walk as often as possible among plants that have a wonderful aroma, spending a considerable amount of time every day among such things.'  His emphasis is on the world and the senses.  In a former time, exercise was inseparable from experiencing the world, walking through it, smelling it and feeling it sensually, even as the heart got its massage from the exertion of the walk.  Emerson, a great New England walker, wrote in his essay 'Nature': 'The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestions of an occult relation between man and the vegetable.  I am not along and unacknowledged.  They nod to me, and I to them.'  In this Emersonian exercise program, the soul is involved in the perception of an intimacy between human personality and the world's communing body.

If we could loosen the grip we have on the mechanical view of our own bodies and the body of the world, many other possibilities might come to light.  We could exercise the nose, the ear, and the skin, not only the muscles.  We might listen to the music of wind in the trees, church bells, distant locomotives, crickets and nature's teeming musical silence. We could train our eyes to look with compassion and appreciation.  Soul is never far from attachment to particulars; a soulful body exercise would always lead us toward an affectionate relationship to the world.  Henry Thoreau, who exercised his body in the context of making a retreat at Walden Pond, writes: 'I rejoice that there are owls.  Let them do the idiotic and maniacal hooting for men.  It is a sound admirably suited to swamps and twilight woods which no day illustrates, suggesting a vast and undeveloped nature which men have not recognized.'  Body exercise is incomplete if it focuses exclusively on muscle and is motivated by the ideal of a physique unspoiled by fat.  What good is a lean body that can't hear Thoreau's owls or return a wave to Emerson's wheat?  The ensouled body is in communion with the body of the world and finds its health in that intimacy."  p 172-173

Running without a purpose

I don't know how fast I've been running and have only a vague idea of how far.  Here's what I do know:  I'm working on becoming a better noticer one run at a time.  Here are some highlights from this morning.

1.  A mother duck and three ducklings getting ready to cross the road
2.  Half a dozen perfect spiderwebs covered with dew
3.  The sun coming out and lighting up the fog that had settled onto a baseball field
4.  Three garage doors opening at the same time as people got ready to go to work
5.  Jumping and hitting low hanging leaves on trees near the end of a run, especially wet leaves, feels just like the universe is giving you a high five.
6.  A little patch of grass growing in the soil on top of a sprinkler head that had popped up to water someone's lawn.

Well worth watching