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[imaginary friend]

I'll post my answer(s) when I have more time; for now, this'll have to do: 

jdfu!

[RatsRGods]

During sex   

[Molotovna]

In a mosh pit at a show.

[colordeaf]

Coming home from hitting tennis balls. Watching something bizarre unfold (like seeing two guys waving a Confederate flag and screaming out the window of an SUV in a sleepy woodland town).

[Bad Kitty]

When I'm dancing.. when I'm crying.. when I'm laughing so hard I make snorting noises and my sides begin to hurt.. when I open my bedroom window in the middle of the night and breathe in the cool night air.

[dangerpants]

When I realize that, despite my size, I can still fit in one of those little kid cars on the fronts of some shopping carts. 

And when I run until I cannot breathe.

[tonic pancake.]

my most life-affirming experience was skydiving.  i've been craving going again, because it was truly fantastic.

[imaginary friend]

There's a point when I'm improvising/soloing when I start seeing the notes as if they were written out on paper, only in 3D and color. The further ahead I'm seeing what I'm going to play, the better the experience is. There have been times when I'm starting a 16 or 32 bar solo where I'm already seeing the end. Being that tied in to the source...it's like a current flowing through you, completely controlled and uncontrollable at the same time.

If that's not when I'm most alive, it's Top 3 for sure.

jdfu!

[Holmes]

There's a point when I'm improvising/soloing when I start seeing the notes as if they were written out on paper, only in 3D and color. The further ahead I'm seeing what I'm going to play, the better the experience is. There have been times when I'm starting a 16 or 32 bar solo where I'm already seeing the end. Being that tied in to the source...it's like a current flowing through you, completely controlled and uncontrollable at the same time.

If that's not when I'm most alive, it's Top 3 for sure.

jdfu!

it's strange, but i know almost exactly how you feel.
whenever I get a 32-bar drum solo, i see it from start to end before i've even started it, and the further i look, the better it gets.
drumming makes me feel like the most powerful person in the fucking world!

hugo, what do you play?

[SeeAnne]

When the colour of a song embraces me whole....when I laugh and I actually mean it.

[Musings]

Real laughter, yes.  Even hearing it. 

This was posted on my myspace blog, and elsewhere, but this is a description of the last time I felt most alive (maybe a week ago?):

I had this moment - I have these moments, in the spring, only a few times but they are so precious - when I stepped outside after doing lab work and I was buzzing.

I think this passage from Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a good one to explain this feeling:
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"Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with lights on it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I'm still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until that moment I was lifted and struck. I have since only very rarely seen the tree with lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam."


I am not Annie Dillard, but I have these moments, when the air and the ground and my mind swirl together and it is as if the world has opened up and is waiting for me to reach in.

I stepped outside tonight, and I tasted and smelled sweetness in the air, the sweetness of not only of flowers but also of spring, the possibilities of spring, the freshness that it brings to the day. The grass pressed against my feet and I could feel the earth swell, hum at the edge of my toes, and for a crazy moment I thought of lying down, bringing my face to the ground and tasting the dirt. Tasting life in between my teeth.

I was thinking, not about the day, but about color and how amazing it is that red will never be the same to me two times in a row, that red is vibrant and immense and live, and that that was so beautiful, more beautiful than I could write or read, but I could see, and I could push against that red and watch the ways in which my mind moved around it, played with it, drew it from my surroundings.

I rediscovered Wallace Stevens today: "The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself." We understand each other.

I had a flashback to when I was maybe 7 or 8: who is this person inside of my head, who does it belong to? what if it's not me that's experiencing this?

And then I was coming down the hill, and my mouth opened involuntarily, and I was laughing, because the moon was full and so golden, and the sky this light purple that extended down to the horizon. I reached for my camera, but then I thought, this yellow, this yellow is inside of my head, and so this camera is useless at capturing whaere the yellow in my head begins, and shifts, and reworks. The moon was so beautiful and big, and I almost wanted to grab it, and hold it, but it was perfect right there in the sky.

This is my religion, this playground between mind and world, that I take in light of different worlds and reconstruct realities, that I can feel, on a night like tonight, with every fiber that I am connected, that my imprint is felt somewhere, that the world is beckoning me to see, see. Why look for something more when it is all laid out here, like the best puzzle you could every ask for, and you can just play with the pieces?

I am so wide-eyed. I have so many questions to figure out but I am overjoyed that they exist, that my thoughts are speeding, and I only catch a bit now, but I know that they exist, and I exist, and somehow everything works in this utterly beautiful way, and I can be a part of that working.

[imaginary friend]

There's a point when I'm improvising/soloing when I start seeing the notes as if they were written out on paper, only in 3D and color. The further ahead I'm seeing what I'm going to play, the better the experience is. There have been times when I'm starting a 16 or 32 bar solo where I'm already seeing the end. Being that tied in to the source...it's like a current flowing through you, completely controlled and uncontrollable at the same time.

If that's not when I'm most alive, it's Top 3 for sure.

jdfu!

it's strange, but i know almost exactly how you feel.
whenever I get a 32-bar drum solo, i see it from start to end before i've even started it, and the further i look, the better it gets.
drumming makes me feel like the most powerful person in the fucking world!

hugo, what do you play?

Guitar, primarily. It's the only instrument I can solo on with confidence, so it's what I was referencing in the post you quoted.

jdfu!

[murmur]

When im doing something dangerous or illegal. Something that could possibly result in bad bad bad bad things including death or scrapping knees. 

[85283-071]

Several activities, such as high speed motorcycling and running in meadows, make me feel most alive. The list is longer but there is a common thread. They all work best in warmth and sunlight.

[caddy]

when i'm at the height of my suicidal mood swings.