Pavé Poésie is a big street fair with various poetry lectures and random readings thrown into a mix of children's carnival rides, street food and local shops sharing their wares. Dianne took hundreds of pictures she is culling to the essential right now. I am thinking about two quotes I read last night.
+ The first is from the photographer, Ansel Adams, that popped up in Fr. Richard Rohr's reflections on the 12 Steps: "Chance favors the prepared mind." Man, do I love those words - they speak to me on so many levels - and resonate with the other quote that follows.
+ The second comes from Jason C. Bivins book, Spirits Rejoice:Jazz and American Religion. It is longer, but just as wild:
While academics bristle at notions like "religious in nature," to performers this notion has helped articulate the belief that improvised music is distinct and authentic, a sound that cannot be captured by the market or undermined by racial misrepresentation. Indeed, this concern for authenticity - so indelibly a part of American desires for self-fashioning from the Transcendentalists to the New Left of the 1960s, among many others - is paramount to the musical articulations of religious thought this book... the religiosity of jazz is understood as the register of its transcendence of constraints. Even as the music is surely conditioned, many musicians have held the belief that through the open work of improvisation one can cut through the layers of artifice to encounter some kind of musical enlightenment or becoming.
Dianne asked me today what I was thinking about on our long walks while she was taking pictures. Mostly, I haven't be thinking. Just being. But these two quotes have been lurking in the background and probably will share their genius with me more as the time in Montreal ripens. I have an arrangement of "Peace Train" swimming around my head right now that I need to try out tomorrow - and then score if I can - as it speaks to my heart on so many levels.
Today Lucie did much better than yesterday - mostly because I was prepared to distract her almost constantly from her anxiety. I think part of my prepared mind is being ready to be present with her wacky self in a gentle and non-anxious way. In this, we can both enjoy our time in the park.
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