the Divine Ms. L...

Last week, my teacher asked us what we are doing when we make sound (what does it mean, why's it important). She told a story of a beautiful sand mandala on a drum. Someone gave a tone and the design was shattered; but as they continued, it found a new design. It had been disrupted towards a new perfection. She answered herself that we sound to shake things up; to break up the stickiness of form---I thought about it as sort of returning to our elements with out their patterns, so that our same basic stuff can form something new...something more appropriate to the resonance of this tone.
This morning, a university student came to interview me about my experience of yoga. One of the questions had to do with---I think she said--"the course of my education", She had already gotten the idea that the cosmology I was talking about included more than asana, more than any single practice; an idea of path which trascends any particular path. Maybe she meant, "what texts had I read", but I started talking about yoga as being a student of your own life--a disciple to the part of yourself that glows, even when you can't see it. yoga gives us something to look to (even if at first we only see the superficial, at least there is something to see) when we "hear a call", "begin a hero's journey", or whatever. But its not an answer, its a request, a catalyst---life gets harder, not easier---and then (in the words of another of my teachers) "your life becomes your cirriculum".
"....education"?: okay, you take a pose and an energy channel starts to open, or you do a purification, or you hear a word, or you're just in the room and there's transmission: its a catalyst, and karma cracks open that was just waiting for you to be ready.
The tone is sounding and the crystals are dancing on the drum. I try to remember the old design and try to predict the new one. I try to judge the forming of the next by my memory of the last. And all I can see is the messiness. I call this place "transition", "formative", even though I know its all transition and its all formation as it all just reflects from what simply Is. In that moment, I think, the hardest thing is not to judge--and this fits in with yoga and its risks of "spiritual materialism" and your same old shit disguising itself as your practice--as you start to know more, you start to think you know how things should be. Beliefs, morality, loyalty as holding on?--gosh--I've noticed that, once the tone sounds, its hard not to check out based on some decidedly empirical "truth". To not pick the crystals off the drum and, one-by-one place them how they "ought to be".
I remember many conversations about the existance of free will. The other day, I found an old note book where I had written on the cover: "free will is not the question--it just simply exists as universal law. What it is that we must have, or, what we must chose to have, is willingness."
So. I got my sister to listen to me when I talked about sound waves. Wave height...frequency, etc. She talked about pitch and volume and texture, and we wondered where these "things" were located---in the origin, in the reciever, in the space between?. But when the tone sounds and the salt starts moving, or, when you look even closer and notice the salt is always moving...what does it mean, why's it important? Maybe it means that the space isn't empty and that we are so much bigger than we think. Maybe it means that our chains of consequence are so vast that we must resign ourselves to intention and not design. Maybe its important because the tone is always sounding, if willing, our elements are always free and any pattern, any picture we see emerging is only a snapshot in time.