Hello and welcome back to The Lunation Report - I'm your host Adam Robinson and I practice shakuhachi, drink tea, and look at the sky (sans telescope for now)

I want to thank my readers for allowing me to take a break from writing a December edition of The Lunation Report. It was too busy of a month for me to organize any nice thoughts about my practice or about tea or about looking at the sky. So now we have a couple of months of back log to go through. According to my here-and-there record taking and estimations these past 2 months I practiced consistently but I didn't do any marathon sessions. I'm more and more on the side that the 10,000 hour rule from that one Malcolm Gladwell book is wrong and the thing that really builds skill and confidence is just doing something regularly enough that it feels like part of your life.

If you would like some musical accompaniment to this email I've taped a bit of a practice session today that I'll post HERE I'm working on a big Jiuta piece called Yaegoromo it's so long and complicated that it's been eclipsing the horrors of day to day life for me - more on that later.

Some key take away's from how I have been practicing lately have been about practice under the stress of doing your dayjob and a rehashing of how music practice, rehearsal, and performance can do so much for us during hectic and depressing times.

This month was very busy at work for me - I work as a sales person for a small tea company and December is our proverbial "superbowl" season. Between packing 100's of orders a day, doing customer service, and maintaining wholesale client relationships the whole time seems like a dark tunnel. The spike in covid cases added an extra wrinkle making bars and shows out of the question for most of the month.

I found solace in practice, a lesson that keeps repeating. The times even (especially) when the music sounds bad and it's been a few days since I've worked were like digging in the cold ground. Through sheer willpower sometimes a nice sound and a nice practice session would emerge and then all of a sudden things would not seem as hard to deal with. Coming back to a totally depressing world was less hard after working on something that takes you away.

There's a King of the Hill episode where Hank talks about fishing in a similar way ...

We don't fish for the fish. 90% of what I like about this sport, and it is a sport, is sittin' in the boat for 5 hours doin' nuthin'. And the icing on the cake is when God smiles on you and you hook one. And when you're reeling it in, everything else falls away. You don't think about taxes, or traffic, or that pushy gal that's tryin' to get into The Citadel, or who's gonna take care of you when your mother and I are old and incapacitated. All there is is a man, a rod, a lake, and a fish.

It's exactly the same when I practice the music I'm working on. 90% of it is basically labor - trying to make a nice sound, figuring out where and when to breathe, etc. It's that tiny moment where it all falls away and you hear something that I'm chasing. Shakuhachi music has this inside it and when it really "hooks" it's a transporting feeling.

All of this is to say that I love practicing and even without shows or lessons or being famous and having to sell NFT's because the world is insane I'm getting exactly what I've always wanted to get from it.

TEA FEATURES OF THE MONTH

FEBRUARY

"In the lingering piercing cold, the taste of tea is sought after. On such a day it should be the cardinal principle to display old and dignified brush writings as follows:

『直観清浄』
Chokkan seiijo
intuiton is pure

However, tea people who are sensitive to the change of the seasons see a harbinger of spring in the color of the sky, an occasional snowfall or the sunlight on the paper sliding doors. Sen no Rikkyu [the inventor of the tea ceremony] loved a poem by Lord Ietaka which explains this sentiment:

Hana onomi / matsuran hito ni / yama-zato no/ yuki-ma no kusa no / haru misebaya

To those who lust after only cherry blossoms, I want to point out the mountain hamlet spring grasses breaking through the snow

I hope some of you can enjoy the warmth of a cup of tea this month, in 2022 we may need something stronger so enjoy that too. I'm using my music and my work to stay positive even though so much is hard right now. I wish everyone on this list a healthy, safe, and positive new year. Please write back to me if you feel you want to, you can always reply to this email.