🌿 About Clarelynn Rose & Guitar Dharma

I fell in love with the redwood forest while studying at UC Santa Cruz. The quiet there resonated deeply — a way of listening not just with the ears, but with the whole body. Many nights I played guitar in the (heated) library atrium until dawn, emerging into the morning air with a kind of gentle, blissful stillness in the heart.

My path has been anything but linear. For many years I worked as a forester — writing stewardship plans, helping landowners care for their trees, and spending long days in the field. That work taught me patience, respect for the rhythms of nature, and the humility of tending what grows slowly.

When I compose, there’s a felt sense to each piece — a quality of energy or presence. I match that inner sense with felt memories that I recognize from the natural world, especially forests, and that’s often how the songs find their names. In the end, music is simply another way of listening to, and connecting with, life.

Music has always been part of my life. I grew up surrounded by instruments — violin, viola, piano, harp — and loved the feeling of simply sitting down and playing. When my main instruments were suddenly lost in a fire, I went and bought myself a classical guitar. That was all I had.

In those first days, I longed only to make sound again and had no patience to learn chords or guitar tabs. So I began to play by ear, following what resonated. Inspired by Joni Mitchell’s use of open tunings, I started exploring tunings of my own — not to reproduce anyone else’s music, but to find my own resonances with the guitar. From the beginning, I was composing my own pieces. The first one was “Phoenix”, because the music was rising from the ashes of my violan and harp.

One tuning led to another, and another. An early one I call “The Doorbell Tuning” because it reminds me of a doorbell chiming. Others are named after natural places and creatures — “Waterbird Tuning” has the shimmery feel of a bird moving over water. I don’t think in terms of string names or chords. On my first CD cover, I even wrote the string names wrong — that’s just not how I think. I think in shapes, colors, and movement, and I simply cannot tell you the names of the notes I’m playing.

I never studied music theory because that would have constrained my process. Once, at a guitar workshop where they were teaching chord progressions in DADGAD, I quietly slipped out and went for a walk. I didn’t want patterns overlaid in my mind — I wanted my expression to stay free, unbound by formula. That freedom has been central to how I play and compose.

This approach — listening, experimenting, letting sound lead — has shaped everything I’ve done since. The guitar became both companion and teacher, guiding me toward the same kind of natural rhythm I find among the trees.

Inspiration has always come through relationship — with nature, with mentors, and with the quiet voice inside that asks to be heard.

During my years as a forester, I often played for the trees, where nobody could hear. One of my colleagues once laughed and said, “Sometimes I think the only reason you do this job is so you can play guitar in the woods.”
He wasn’t entirely wrong. Those moments of solitude, playing with the smell of the pines and the warmth of the sun, a strong tree at my back, deeply nourished me and my music.

Another turning point came when I was playing outdoors at UC Santa Cruz and a friend passing by said, “That sounds just like Alex de Grassi!”
“Who?” I asked. She later gave me a tape, and I fell in love with Alex’s music. Of course, I didn’t sound like him at all in terms of virtuosity, but something in the movement of the heart felt resonant. Years later, I ended up dog-sitting for Alex and his wife in exchange for a session of feedback on one of my compositions. The pieces always went into those sessions solid — and came out sparkling.

Another inspiration was John Renbourn, whose gentle encouragement — like causaully making reference to “your first three CDs” before I had even considered recording — helped build confidence that what I was creating mattered.

And beneath it all, a deeper current: giving voice to what had been silenced. After early traumas, music became the way my heart could speak in its fullness. The guitar provided a language, a way of expressing the heart, that healed me, note by note.

Stillness, calm, patience —these are the thread that tie everything together for me. The stillness of a forest at dawn, the stillness before the first note; the calm of a creek flowing in its own time, the calm of a melody sweetly moving in an unhurried way; the patience of a tree taking decades to grow, the patience of learning a difficult passage. When I play outdoors, I love the peaceful, calm presence of the natural world around me. In those moments, music isn’t something I make; it’s something that flows through, like wind through the leaves.

When I first began Buddhist practice, I remember a moment during a ceremony when the mind fell completely quiet. A clear recognition arose: I know this feeling — this is the feeling I get when I play guitar. That’s when I understood that, all along, playing had been a form of meditation. The same stillness, different form.

Stillness also found voice in a Taizé group I sang with in Edinburgh. We sang in places like Rosslyn Chapel, Craigmillar Castle, Seton and Crichton Collegiate Churches, and Dunfermline Abbey — old stone spaces that seemed to welcome us, and themselves sing. The sound was intimate and meditative, the voices weaving together so gently, so delicately that no single one stood apart. A Buddhist nun who heard us once said she could hear every voice, yet couldn’t pick out any one of them — and that, to me, was the essence of harmony: a deep attunement born of deep listening, to one another and to the stones of those sacred spaces in which we sang.

Sound as Practice

I first wrote about Guitar Dharma years ago as a way of describing music not as performance, but as a natural process that had arisen in me. That process begins not with notes, but with intention: to listen, to soften, and to let sound become a mirror for the heart.

When I investigated what I was doing, it was clear there were three aspects: body, speech, and mind. These are the three fields through which awareness expresses itself.

With the body, I relax and feel the muscle tension associated with “result thinking” melt away.
With speech, I bring gentleness to the inner words, aware that unexpected movements or notes aren’t necessarily mistakes, but might be the seed of a beautiful new phrase. There is discernment without criticism.
And with the mind, I return again and again to the intention to serve beauty and connection rather than ego or display. To listen and attune rather than carve my ego into the notes.

Technique has its place, but I’ve learned that the quality of attention shapes the sound far more than dexterity ever could. A single clear tone played with mindfulness carries more truth than a flurry of notes played to impress. Guitar Dharma is about showing up fully, practicing patiently, allowing each tone to arise and fade without grasping.

Zen Guitar

When I later came across the book Zen Guitar, I laughed out loud and thought, Who downloaded my brain and wrote a book about it? So many of the ideas I had been living through my own practice were right there on the page. It felt like meeting a kindred spirit — proof that this way of approaching music as awareness was part of a much larger conversation.

When I sit down to play, the practice is simple: be present, listen with relaxed diligence, and stay kind. What emerges is not mastery, but a field of presence — where body, breath, and sound all weave together in a single awareness.