Go is a very popular board game played all through Asia. It probably originated in China, where it is called Wei Chi, which means something like "the surrounding game". In Korea it is called Baduk, and in Japan, Go. There are many variations of rules, but the basic game is played on a wooden board with perpendicularly intersecting lines, up to 19 in each direction.

Go is a two-player game; each player starts with a bowl of black or white stones, and players alternate placing the stones on the intersections. Enemy stones can be captured by surrounding them with your own stones, but capture is not really the object of the game. The object is to surround empty spaces in such a way that it will be to the other player's detriment to place stones in the territory you control. Players receive a score at the end of the game based on how many pieces they lost and how much territory they each control.

The Didjeridu originated in Australia among the Northeast sections of the continent's aboriginal people. It is called Yidaki by many of the tribes, though due to the diversity of languages throughout Australia there are upwards of forty words for it. Though the size and form of the instrument differs from one part of Australia to the next, it is basically a long hollow tube of wood that can be used as an instrument to play a low droning, buzzing sound.

Through the use of controlled breathing, guttural sounds, voice, and changes in mouth and tongue positions, the droning sound can be given rhythm and formed into very strange, sometimes even eerie, music. Traditionally Didjeridu music is used (in addition to simply being music) as an aid to tell stories, declare tribal affiliation, or provide imagery (for instance, nighttime with frogs chirping, and dingos yelping in the distance). Larger, lower sounding Didjeridus are often used in sacred rituals.

Didjeridu and Go are so old that we aren't exactly sure when they began or how. Estimates of the game of Go have dated it between a very conservative estimate of 1000 years to a questionable 5000 years, either of which is pretty old for a board game. In fact, it may be the oldest board game still in existence. Likewise with the Didjeridu, which may be as old as 10,000 years or more, and is quite likely the planet's oldest woodwind. The inventors of each have been long forgotten, replaced by myths and legends.

It is the simplicity of each that has probably contributed to their great ages. A flat piece of wood and some stones. A tube made by termites boring through a tree branch. Yet each becomes surprisingly appealing in the seemingly infinite symphony it can produce. Each is, in its own way, an organic feedback machine.

The game of Go can be taught in less than half an hour, and the rules are simple enough that a six-year-old child can learn to play.

Didjeridu has one basic note, the drone, which can be taught to anyone who can make a "raspberry". Again, young children can learn to play the instrument in a very short while.

Yet soon after playing either of these, one may become intuitively aware of the mountains of variation that Go or Didjeridu can accomplish. Restriction, in these art forms at least, breeds diversity, and anyone who sees this early on becomes, well, a bit captivated.

As in most activities, skill comes with playing. There are, of course, books, videotapes, workshops, and schools that one can attend to improve, but the real learning comes from doing. As the Aborigines say: "let it teach you."

This self-teaching never stops. Didjeridu players are constantly attacking new sounds, pushing the boundaries of their skills, long after they have become excellent players. There are professional Go players who have been competing for over forty years, absolute masters of the game, who profess to still be learning.

Circular breathing; vocals; harmonics; power barks; ladders; ko fighting; recognizing good shape; life and death. All of these exercises and skills lead to more advanced skills, which in time may lead to that elusive, almost unattainable "perfect play" that every experienced Go and Didjeridu player must see just -- over there.

Not only are Go and Didjeridu best mastered by playing (as is the case of most activities), but they are best experienced by playing as well. This is not as interesting when contemplating Go because it is true of most board games -- the players are watching the drama, and interacting with it too.

Go is unusual in that it is one of those few board games that attract spectators. In many Asian countries Go is very popular; games can even be watched on TV. Even so, I'm sure that for those people who do not play, the Go channel might be a little boring.

For a musical instrument the Didjeridu, at least in the western world, has a unique "low tolerance" among spectators, but players often become intensely fascinated. This fascination often goes a little beyond treating it as just a musical instrument.

Many Didjeridu players in the Western Hemisphere claim a "spiritual connection" with the Aborigines, and make up all sorts of stories that deal with the "sacredness" of the instrument. I think that's going a bit far myself, but I understand how non-aboriginal people can misinterpret the "spirit" they feel as a direct connection to a culture that we know little about. After all, that's where the instrument came from, right?

The day a friend introduced me to his Didjeridu and showed me how to play the drone, I was taken aback. I had played a violin when I was younger, and I had taken lessons for other assorted instruments. When I played those instruments, I often felt that I was wrestling them, or that they were instruments in the technical sense, and that I was learning where the "buttons and switches were". Not so with this one. I had the immediate sense that the Didjeridu, though difficult to play in the beginning, was helping me from the moment I first held it to my lips. This was my instrument, my newfound friend.  And it certainly helped to think there was only one note!

Eventually my wife bought me a Didjeridu and I learned a few more sounds, but I still needed to hear real sounds. Surfing around one day I found a tribal site on the web that had solo sound bites. I was (to say the least) humbled. However, if I had not played the little I had until then, I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't know what little sounds to listen for, and I might not have even remembered listening. I might even have become -- dare I say it -- bored.

What had I learned that made me listen so carefully? Just this: Didjeridu is something other than music, something more than sound. Didjeridu has magic and spirit, and it has these in very noticeable, perceivable (and by that I mean "real") ways.

For those of you who are more grounded in western thought, you might substitute the terms "trance and hallucination" for "magic and spirit". In other words (in my culture's words), sometimes when you play a Didjeridu you get high. You enter an altered state of thinking. I remember feeling on one occasion that the drone was the real and powerful "Om" -- the "Word of God" being played through a tube of wood, and through me.

I'm not alone in having these kinds of experiences. There are many accounts of Didjeridu players losing touch with the world they normally see around them, losing self-awareness, or becoming caught by what the Aborigines might think of as a direct line to "Dreamtime", that mysterious mythical beginning place where all creation comes from; the Oneness.

Coming out of such a state brings on a pleasant transitional cusp of trance with light and sound from the real world. Psychologists have proposed that the combination of drone, circular breathing, and concentration combine to put the player in a hypnotic trance. Whatever, it feels like magic, and at this point for many players Didjeridu becomes an entity, a spirit.

Similar yet perhaps more subdued experiences are noticed by Go players, who, through intense focus and concentration on the whole game approach what is called the "no-mind" by Zen philosophers. The trick, they say, to good play is for both players to become part of the game -- to abandon aggression (and even self awareness to a point), and to only exist within the bounds of the game.

I don't think it is a trick so much as inevitability. For Go players, the game becomes the universe. All other concerns are pushed aside for a few hours, as the board demands more and more attention. Strategies lead to tactics which in turn lead to a beautiful kind of symbiotic interactive Rorsache, a display of two psyches.

For me the game often feels like we the players are participating in a (seemingly dichotomous) competitive/cooperative work of artistic communication. It is no wonder that one of the slang words for Wei Chi is "handtalk".

One of the most attractive qualities about Go is that it is so organic. For such a static, grid-oriented flat board (with stones that are placed and never "moved" as in chess) to produce perceptions of growth and movement is fascinating to me. A Go game is its own little developing world.  The patterns created by a good game are incredibly complex -- so much so that even though computer scientists have managed to make formidable computer opponents for professional chess masters, no computer opponent has yet been programmed to beat even highly ranked amateur Go players.

They may not be far off the mark in the future, but computers that play Go and synthesize Didjeridu sounds are, at present, inferior to the real things. And I doubt that when they eventually do manage to play well (I sure hope I'm wrong about this), that the computers will feel what humans have experienced for thousands of years. It is the game's soul that has kept traditions of etiquette alive for Go, and soul is the reason Didjeridu has been the centerpiece of esoteric Aboriginal rituals for millennia.

It is the soul of these activities that attracts Didjeridu players to other Didjeridu players, and Go players to Go players. And it is with this reverence and humility for a soul of ages past that many people play Go and Didjeridu. And Time, for either activity, slips by quickly.

This is not to say that Didjeridu and Go are serious. They are, at a very basic, simple (and therefore strong) level, fun. I have enjoyed many jam sessions -- just me, my dog, my didge, and the woods all playing together -- the kind of simple fun that is giddy and peaceful. Likewise, I have come out of Go games exhausted and happy, stress drained away. They both produce peace of mind for me.

To an outsider, a partially completed game of Go looks like something other than a "game", just as the sounds from a Didjeridu don't quite seem like "music". This "something other" perception is actually touching the main point I want to make here: Go is not just an old game, and Didjeridu is not just weird music. Both pastimes venture much deeper than the mundane turns and drones we witness before getting "sucked in" to their respective worlds. They are ultimately artifacts that describe nature and play with it too -- and in doing so they each, with different approaches, give their players an awe of this world.