Published: April 2022
List Price: £20
Format: ~ Paperback - 98 pages
Size: 21 x 21cm 
ISBN: 978-1-913743-51-2
Tags: movement, dance, somatics, embodiment, Sawdde, Tywi, Towy, Llandeilo, performance, Suprapto Suryodarmo, Amerta Movement
Picture
Rock Songs at The Poetry Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye
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Related titles:

Attending to Movement
​Body and Awareness
Covert
Nine Ways of Seeing a Body
Embodied Lives
Body & Performance
​Suomenlinna | Gropius

See our other titles in:
Movement & Somatics
Mythogeography & Walking
People in Society

Rock Songs
story about walk about story about walkabout story

Nick Sales

Rock Songs starts as a walk of a few miles between the valley of the river Tywi/Towy and the heights of Y Mynydd Du/Black Mountain in Wales.

It takes millions of years, meeting along the way the rocks and water that have formed the land, together with the trees, red kites and otters who pass through. Humans crowd in as well – saints, drovers, Romans, bikers and tourists.
 
The great zen monk, Dōgen, is also walking and learns that mountains themselves walk, if you
know how to look.

Rock Songs started as a one-man movement performance of a river by Nick Sales and has become a book of poetry, reflection, ecology and zen reflection. It's illustrated with extensive photography by Steve Hopkins and beautifully designed by Christopher Binding.
Another Walking
 
A warm April day and we are clambering up down around boulders tumbled as giant misshaped marbles, marking the course of a series of pools and waterfalls that is the Sawdde, its beginnings in the waters of Llyn y Fan Fach a few hundred yards further uphill...
  
The Towy is famous for its sewin - sea trout - a fish that somehow knows that it's worth leaving behind the meagre food supplies of the pools of an upland stream to chance the journey to the rich feeding grounds of the estuary waters and the wider sea.  If fortunate, it returns after a few years as a silver god, powering back upstream to spawn. The trout that prefer to stay in the brackish waters, weighing the odds of food supply and risk, stay brown.  A wonderful story, except that the choice - to stay or to go - no longer seems to work...
 
A combination of events, a collection of theories - changing water temperature, dredging, drift-netting, disease - few trout that head for the sea now return.  A river may look healthy but ask the fish - they see the result of sewage spills and agricultural run-off. The sewin that do make it up the main river, heading for the gravel beds of feeder streams, find their route can be blocked by dams of rubbish - a fallen tree, debris brought down in a spate, yards of discarded baling plastic. If a fish gets past that lot to spawn, the decline in the insect population may not provide enough sustenance for the growing fry...
 
Llyn y Fan Fach beckons up the track. The surface of the lake is perfectly still, mirroring the mountains and the sky. If you doubt mountains' walking, you do not know your own walking. Traditionally in Chinese thought mountains and waters denoted the whole of the natural physical world. Our own word landscape, in its evolution from the land we belong in, to the picture that we observe from the outside, does little justice to the richness of the original Taoist concept. Dōgen walked those mountains and, step by step, they entered his bloodstream...
 
For Dōgen the mountains belonged to the sages who inhabited them, and many would have swapped the precarious life of court privilege for the different hardship of a realm where the Emperor's remit did not reach. This is not ownership, but a mutual belonging, monk and mountain both engaged in their own practice, respecting each other...
 
Now and then, here and there, the solid appearance of the lake shows a circle of ripples - a trout has risen to a fly. Looking down, from this distance, the fish is invisible, just the track of its movement is marked. Ripples emerge, spread, disappear again into the emptiness of the mirror calm of the lake. The continual gentle breathing of the mountain.
 
Dōgen, returning from China, set about the teaching that still forms the foundations for the school of Sōtō zen.  Instruction in meditation practice, philosophical teachings, advice for the monastery cook - the scope is enormous. But in his more poetic writings he seems closer to describing his own realisation of living in the natural world. Sansuikyo is not a teaching about mountains and rivers - mountains and rivers are themselves the teaching.
 
It is not only that there is water in the world, but there is a world in water. It is not just in water. There is also a world of sentient beings in clouds. There is a world of sentient beings in the air. There is a world of sentient beings in fire. There is a world of sentient beings on earth. There is a world of sentient beings in the phenomenal world. There is a world of sentient beings in a blade of grass. There is a world of sentient beings in one staff.