How do you make beautiful music?
[[I am writing a book/guide/manual on Circling — this is a poetic close for the chapter on “Attune,” which is one of the 3 fundamental gestures of Circling that I teach.]]
We can clue in to what Attunement is by looking at the word’s roots. In English, the earliest uses of the word meant “to tune an instrument.’ You can get a sense of this in paying attention —really paying attention — to something: sitting actively, and waiting, you come into a kind of resonance with what you’re paying attention to. Your inner world begins to shift towards it. Your mind settles around it. You tune the instrument that you are by touching the world with your awareness. We ‘tune’ our mind by paying attention.
The poet Rilke used this method to great effect. He would sit, for example at the edge of a pond, and just open himself as fully as possible to a swan. His great poem “The Swan” is the result of a stroke of insight while practicing this — by holding attention and intention open towards life, and letting life leave an imprint.
That attunement and attention feel like cousins is no accident. They share a family resemblance in their roots: a sense of touching, of stretching toward, of holding. You can feel this even in the word tension, which has the same underlying gesture — that reaching, that connecting, that faint electricity of contact, an intention-ality. And in the word-cloud around it — integral, integrity — there’s another clue: to attune is not only to notice something, but to bring yourself into a kind of coherence with it. Into tune. Into wholeness. A kind of connection and contact that isn’t mental, nor is it passive.
While we tend to think of the practice of concentration – that is, of paying as close attention as one can to a single object — as involving a great deal of effort. Early in practice, it can feel like this. But in the state of mastered concentration, or samadhi, the mind becomes calm, entering a kind of coherence and alert restfulness. Translations of ‘concentration practice’ in various lineages come out to something like ‘pacifying the mind,’ or ‘calming practice.’ The deeper you go, the less it feels like force, and the more it feels like a kind of restful intimacy.
You don’t need years of meditation to experience this — as noted in the intro to this Chapter — something in you knows how to do this already. Whenever your attention is captivated by something, there’s simply not much else going on internally. This is the case no matter what you’re actively paying attention to: whether lovemaking, or dancing, or laughing, or whether you’re simply engrossed in some show on Netflix. The mind gets pulled into coherence when it’s genuinely with something. We all know these experiences, but the point of practicing is to gain some mastery over our mind’s capacity to enter this kind of state: to be able to Attune consciously and purposefully, not only when one’s attention is ’captured.’
To “attend”
To “attend,” in the slightly specialized way I’m using it here, points to a polarity. There is activity, and there is receptivity. There is doing, and there is being-done-to. There is seeking, and there is being found. The French helps here: “attendre” means “to wait.” Attending is an active kind of waiting, not how you would wait for a bus. Like a waiter in a restaurant: ready, responsive, sensing what’s needed, without hovering or controlling.
You’ve probably experienced both failures of this polarity. On one side: the waiter who isn’t really there. You have to flag them down; they miss the moment; the meal proceeds without care. On the other side: the waiter who is too attentive, interrupting every bite. “How’s everything?” “I don’t know — I’ve barely started!” In both cases, something is off. The sweet spot is responsiveness without intrusion. Presence without pressure. Touch without grabbing.
Think of attending to a garden. If you are purely passive, the garden will do what gardens do: it will overgrow, quickly, and not in the way you meant. There’s a beauty in that — but it’s not the beauty you were after when you decided to garden. If you are purely active, the extreme becomes ridiculous. How do you “make” a flower grow? Pull it by the stem? Constantly caress it? You’ll choke it long before you help it. To tend a garden is to participate without force. To be present enough to respond. To shape without violence.
When we attend to the flower, we’re helping it become something, giving it water and care, checking the soil, clipping anything that’s not thriving, pulling any weeds that might crowd it out.
Our culture’s model for action — the ways we as a culture think of ‘doing’ — is more violent than this. But anyone who’s engaged in any craft in a meaningful way will have come to a similar realization at some point: you can’t force growth. You can attend to your craft, your child, your garden, but you can’t force them to be what you think they should be. More on this in the Chapter on Mastery.
When we Circle, action matters, a great deal. But it’s often slight. We say something, we ask a question, like a flower might need some water, or a bit of trimming. A flower needs attention more than manipulation.
All of which is done in relationship, even when the object is internal to us. Attuning assumes a kind of relationship, and otherness — but an otherness that is not separate from a sense of one’s own self and experience. A touching that is prior to the one touching and the one being touched. A point of connection out of which comes the self, and the other.
This is one way to say what Attuning is: it is a way of being in relationship where we are neither forcing nor drifting. Neither gripping nor spacing out. We are present enough to feel what’s happening, and responsive enough to move with it — and subtle enough to know when not to move at all. More than any single action, a flower needs our attention — our attunement.
How do you make beautiful music?
In Circling, as in life, we are music, instrument, performer, conductor, and audience all at once. Each of these roles contributes something essential. (And you probably can notice when someone is most comfortable only in one of those roles!) Sometimes you are the instrument — your body, your nervous system, your capacity to register nuance. Sometimes you are the performer — risking a truth, offering a sentence from the living edge. Sometimes you are the conductor — shaping the attention of the group with a small invitation. Sometimes you are the audience — receiving, letting yourself be moved. And sometimes, in the rarest and most ordinary way, you are simply the music itself: the moment playing through you.
How do you do that? You just do it! Earnestly engage. And again. You are all of them in each moment already.
Attuning, then, is not a single skill. It’s a mode. A stance. A kind of active openness. It’s the ability to hold a polarity without collapsing into either side: to be both receptive and engaged, both focused and spacious, both intimate and free. It’s the ability to sense what’s here — in you, in them, in the between.
Attuning is neither searching for something, nor merely looking. It’s a middle mode. We are seeing without hunting. We are open, but not vague. We are present, but not inert. We are willing to be surprised. We don’t need the moment to confirm our map. We don’t need coherence before contact. We can be with what’s happening without knowing what it means.
The Mystery of Relationship
This is fundamentally relational — even before we remember the context of this practice being a relational practice. As we are Attuning to another human universe, and using our own human universe as instrument, Attuning has an inherently empathic shape. Empathy isn’t “sweetness,” or “agreement,” or “validation.” It’s more a kind of willingness to let the other be real, just as they are. To let their experience have its own validity, even as we remember — as this whole book keeps reminding you — that experience is construed, interpretative, contingent, alive.
Two-ness doesn’t need to be erased to be intimate. The art is to hold two streams at once, without splitting them apart, and without collapsing them into one.
This is why Attuning is so close to the sense of integrity, and inclusion. When you Attune, you’re not only tracking what it’s like to be the other; you’re tracking what it’s like to track them. You’re in contact, and aware of how you’re relating to contact. You feel when you’re leaning too far into the other and losing yourself. You feel when you’re retreating into yourself and losing the other. You keep adjusting, keep tuning, tuning, tuning. Never perfect, never done — responsive.
Attention, in this sense, is to touch something with your mind. Attunement is to keep touching. To stay open long enough that impact can flow. To allow yourself to be shaped by what you are with — and to offer your shape back. To receive, and to be received. To listen, and to hear. To look, and to see. To sense, and to respond. To transmit without forcing. To care without grabbing.
Too much tuning to the other, and you disappear. Too much tuning to yourself, and the other disappears. The practice is learning to play the instrument of your own being in a way that includes them — includes the between — includes the whole field — without abandoning any part of what’s true.
Slowly, the boundaries you use to navigate life change. Inside and outside become less rigid. Past and Future become less compelling. Body, heart, mind, soul, awareness — all the categories you’ve been using (ahem! — that I’m using here!) start to feel less like separate rooms and more like one house. Attuning is no mere technique to be applied to life in the pursuit of some goal: it’s a way life becomes coherent from within relationship.
How do you make beautiful music?
You don’t force the note. You find it, you let it ring. You listen for what it wants next. You follow, and you lead, and you follow again. You allow silence to be a part of the song. You let the melody be shaped by contact, by the dance. You keep tuning — not to get it right, but to stay in relationship with what’s real.’
Sometimes, when you’re really attuned, something flips. You stop feeling like the one playing, or even the one being played. There’s just music. The instrument and the player, the audience and the hall are not separate. There is no right song, no right note. There is only this: living, responsible, intelligent, improvised coherence arising out of contact.’
Active and Passive. Open and physical. Giving and receiving. A present out of which time extends. A sense of intentionality. A touching, an intention.
Slowly, something happens that’s hard to say without sounding like a mystic, or a drunken poet. But since I’m both of these:
There is no inside, no outside. There is no future, no past, no now. No feeling, no thinking, no sensation. No doing, no being. There is only ‘this.’
Beautiful music.
