Happy Friday!
I attended (took?) my first sound bath this week, at a Greenwich Village meditation studio. (They’re not just for West Coasters!) As the name suggests, the experience immersed me and several other attendees in soothing sonic resonance. The music came from a dark-haired woman named Sara Auster who exuded the cool, kind authority of a childhood friend’s hippie older sister. She played singing bowls, tuning forks, and probably other instruments I didn’t see, because my eyes were closed.
And then I was asleep. At least I think I was asleep. My mind, which had been racing when I first lay down on two cushions beneath a grey tweedy blanket, eventually slowed and dropped into a space where I was only mildly aware of my thoughts passing by. (Similarly, my dad used to love sleeping through the performances of the St. Louis Symphony.)
I’m terrible at taking naps; I find it hard to quiet my mind at yoga. I’ve never done a full hour of meditation (or, let’s be honest, more than ten minutes). But the sound bath worked for me. I slept like a baby Wednesday night, and am checking Sara’s schedule for the next opportunity.
One perk of my sonic immersion was the hour spent away from my iPhone. Andrew Sullivan’s feature in this week’s New York Magazine, “I Used to Be a Human Being” is about the scourge of chronic distraction, mostly wrought by our smartphones, and it’s worth the long read. (Also available in print!)
Sullivan explores the value of silence, particularly in a secular world where the “roar and disruption” of capitalism have replaced religion’s stillness:
But just as modern street lighting has slowly blotted the stars from the visible skies, so too have cars and planes and factories and flickering digital screens combined to rob us of a silence that was previously regarded as integral to the health of the human imagination.
How to quiet the digital noise. In a follow-up Q&A (on Twitter, of all places) Sullivan suggested “exercise; walking dogs; just walking without a phone; real time with friends w/o phones; digital sabbath weekly.”
Quartz’s first professional-in-residence, Khe Hy, has disabled his notifications and created an absurdly long password to avoid mindlessly logging in. When temptation level is at a fever pitch (I see you, Milan Fashion Week!) I fall back on Quartzy designer Elan Kiderman’s suggestion, and sap the color from my screen with the grayscale setting.
All that said, without the US Department of the Interior’s Instagram account, I would never have known we’re in the middle of Sea Otter Awareness Week.
Events-wise, this is understandably more of a West Coast thing. But at least I’m aware!
NY vs. LA. If all this sounds like I’m one step from joining the exodus from New York to Los Angeles, well, I’m thinking about it. The New Yorker’s Susanna Wolff made me laugh out loud at what sort of sadomasochists choose to live in New York City, however superior our theater:
I once saw ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ performed entirely by rats and a pigeon on a G train that was being held by the dispatcher between stations. It was magnificent and repulsive.
Stronger than a sound bath. Also in the New Yorker was Ariel Levy’s piece about the ayahuasca boom underway on both US coasts. Ayahuasca, if you haven’t heard, is an intense, plant-derived hallucinogen from the Amazon that is now the preferred vehicle for the personal journey, however vomit-inducing. The psychoactive science (ie: plants speaking to our brains) is fascinating but really, read this for the hilarity at the end, when Levy partakes at a ceremony in a Williamsburg yoga studio with characters she calls Crazy Pants and Helper Angel.
Speaking of Crazy Pants. “Relax,” commanded a voice over the speakers at Gucci’s spring 2017 show Wednesday in Milan. “Let all tension and stress just melt away.”
I was listening through earbuds, live-streaming the event from my desk, where I tried my best to comply. Outside, sirens blared and trucks barreled up Sixth Avenue. On screen, models in impressive Margot-Tennenbaum-meets-Elton-John-on-Elizabethan-acid outfits stepped along a hazy, hot pink runway. You can enjoy the show—complete with a soundtrack of Florence Welch reading William Blake’s beautiful poem, Night—on Gucci’s website.
Have a great weekend! May it be filled with silent delights and lovely nights.
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If you weren’t able to get tickets for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture’s opening this weekend, take solace in Smithsonian Day Live Saturday, when more than 1,000 US institutions—The Millicent Rogers Museum in Taos, NM; Chicago’s Adler Planetarium, and Storm King Art Center in New York’s Hudson Valley among them—will open their doors for free. Just get your tickets here in advance. (Storm King has yoga at 10:15 am if you’re a New Yorker really going for it.)