Getting Lost in the Familiar

I'm trying an experiment. I'm curious what it would be like to spend each week listening to a single album, starting a new one after the week is up.

I miss that feeling of knowing something completely, returning to it again and again, intimately aware of its flaws and strengths. I played a vinyl album so many times growing up that I'm a little disappointed with the digital version when that one song doesn't skip.

I hear music all the time, but not in that way that it becomes part of me, when a melody triggers a memory and I anticipate the next song as another ends.

The book Still Life with Oysters and Lemon by Mark Doty is a mediation on a single painting by the same name. The author writes beautifully about being consumed by one thing.

I have felt the energy and life of the painting's will; I have been held there, instructed. And the overall effect, the result of looking and looking into its brimming surface as long as I could look, is love, by which I mean a sense of tenderness toward experience, of being held within an intimacy with the things of the world.

There is great joy in abundance, possibility wrapped in a buffet of sounds, tastes, and experiences. There's also joy to be found in starting again at chapter one, clicking repeat, getting lost in the familiar, and looking and looking into its brimming surface as long as you can look.