The metaphors and imagery in Taoist literature are all about flow and attuning oneself to the natural order of things. When you're playing improvised music, and everyone present is feeling that it's really working (an incredible, unmistakable feeling) and a recording later bears this out...then you were probably about as close to being "in Tao" as you'll ever be.

When sailing a boat, the idea is to work with the powers of wind, wave and tide, not to struggle against them - to "go with the flow", as the over-used adage suggests. But you don't just remain passive, you use minimal force to achieve maximal results, by skillfully harnessing the flow. This is how the vegetative world operates. If you observe the structures of plants, the results of aeons of evolutionary process, you'll see that everything is optimally arranged and achieved with minimal energy. Yet it has a 'flow' to it which we find beautiful unlike our modern human manifestations of 'optimisation' (sweat shops, nuclear power plants, 'functional' architecture etc.) which, to most humans, are the epitome of ugliness.

When the music is 'flowing' it seems effortless. It's as if there's an environment already there, and we're just exploring it. Trying to to make the music work through conscious effort tends to have the opposite effect. After a COTD session it's often the bits that didn't work which get remembered, since during the passages which flowed, we were barely conscious of being present. The starting point is silence. Just as the Tao Te Ching describes the Tao as a kind of "background field" which supports "reality", silence isn't just a lack of sound, but rather the ground from which all music must grow. We start from silence. At any point in a session, the appropriate attitude should be one of intense receptiveness, listening to the whole field of sound, responding according to the consideration "What does this sound need me to add to it?" Sometimes the appropriate answer is "nothing". At other times, the sound seems to need a more well-defined rhythm, a particular harmonic or melodic input, or just a few delicate, barely-audible notes. Sometimes it seems to need to be disrupted and sent flying off in a wildly different direction. All of these responses are regularly occuring, but it's not generally due to any conscious intent. When it works, it's the result of us surrendering to something, catching the flow and just riding it.

This ties in with the Taoist concept of wu-wei (rougly translated as "not doing"). That should be what's happening in a session. But it also applies to COTD as an entity - not trying to mould it into any particular form, just letting it evolve. It has already manifested enough beauty to convince us that this can be a fruitful approach.