Celtic greetings

A rich version, steeped in the exotic and accentuating the mystery.  My opinion.

From the YouTube post:
This is an old english carol; the composer is unknown.

Loreena McKennit is a is a Canadian singer, composer, harpist and pianist most famous for writing, recording and performing world music with Celtic and Middle Eastern themes.

Two Bobs and a bit of fringe

A little holiday fringe to distract you from all the other things on your list.  If you are not familiar with what is called lucid dreaming, here is an introduction.  I am not the least offended if you find this unlikely at best and deranged, delusional at worst.  As a friend once said, "Time is long and space is big."  There is room for more than we can ever imagine in the multiple universes of the cosmos.

In what I will call a lucid dream night before last, I found my ideal self:  young enough to be entirely mobile, without depression or depletion, possessing a certain appeal and knowing everything that I know now.  She exists somewhere as the continuum flexes, hidden in a sharp crease of the cosmic fabric.  I marvel at the way in which our minds can bring along misery and its twin handmaidens, cortisol and adrenalin, or allow us to appear in fully realized fantasies, knowing we are dreaming, yet gamely playing along to see how it all turns out.  I picture my mind cooking up a treat on its little hotplate, using its one well-seasoned, cast iron skillet and holding it out for approval, like Ratso Rizzo saying, "G'head.  I want you to have it."



Dylan says it, "The human mind can only stand so much."  For escape, even illumination.  We dream.

Keep moving, even just to shift your shadow.  Keep singing along.  Stay out of places that steal your spirit and know there are rooms where you dance and laugh and know it will all, somehow, be all right.

Rose balm

Posted yesterday on FB by my friend and lover-of-the-beautiful, Tricie, I was able to carry this rosy image, and a second gift of rose photo-by-phone, in the front of my mind as Real Life tried to overtake me during the day - and the night.

Surely I am not the only one with a case of the soul shivers, not the only one for whom Christmas as we seem to observe it stirs ambivalence.  I must be wearing my thin winter skin.  I feel as though I have no defense against the dark arts other than conjured visions of roses, then music and sleep.  My weariness amazes me.

It is a risk, to write of ache and bewilderment and not be seen as complaining.  These are not complaints but observations, experiencings, the owning of disturbance in the surrounding air not as an anomaly but a state of things from which we can, at times, distract ourselves.  Pull the proverbial wool over our own eyes.  Tragedy, trauma, loss and grief are not occasional visitors, they are the haints that circle our beds at 3:30, prodded into being by reminders that they are part of us and ours.

What I wish to declare is we possess the ability to hear our own authentic voices above their moans.  The roses appear - I've found them woven into socks, printed on a cotton shawl, embroidered on a pillow - and whatever their form represents, they fill the screen effectively.  Roses are anti-venom distilled from another corner of ordinary reality, matter, the definition of which is being studied and refined.  It all exists simultaneously, roses and tears, rest and pain, delight and sorrow.  It is not an option to pick out the juicy bits and leave the gristle on the plate, not if we're going to see this assignment through in a way that can't be called half-assed.

Last week on her blog Elizabeth shared a poem reminding us of how fully round this life is, how we find ourselves at odds with it and with us, what we wish to be true and what we know we actually have to work with.  If this post rambles and adds to the confusion, I'm sorry.  This was the clearest path I could carve on short notice.   xo

A Brief for the Defense

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only 
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront 
is three shuttered cafes and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

from Refusing Heaven by Jack Gilbert

The moon, un flambeau

"Moon River" is medicine for melancholy.  It is gentle and, either by its own power or its connection to Audrey Hepburn, "Breakfast at Tiffany's" and other times and places, it reverberates with the power of love, of dreaming, of how, in spite of everything, we endure and, perhaps, thrive.  We are altered, not defeated.

After two years of Latin in junior high school, French - in high school - seemed so much more sophisticated, lent itself more easily to dreaming and the vocabulary, shaped with such unfamiliar care in the mouth, so much more succulent.  Other than the occasional word and how nearly to pronounce it, the portion of poem below is what I remember best.  It sidled up in curiously continental fashion today to address itself to countless heavy hearts.

Alfred de Musset
CHANSON (SONG)

Quand on perd, par triste occurrence,
      Son espérance
      Et sa gaieté,
Le remède au mélancolique,
      C’est la musique
      Et la beauté !
 

When you lose, by sad occurrence,
His hope
And gaiety,
The cure for melancholy,
This is the music
And beauty!

I nearly forgot.  This is the other thing I remember.


Credit goes to:

Sacred Heart Choristers - Sacred Heart Catholic Church - Warner Robins, GA - Mrs. Lindsey Skinner, Director of Music - May 8, 2011

What if there was no such thing as music?

With thanks to the friends who shared this on Facebook.  With the wonder of it all.

If the video doesn't play full screen (which it seems not to, due to my template) you can find it and more on YouTube under LANDFILL HARMONIC.

Flashmob, the good kind

With thanks to my brother and niece for sharing this.
On the 130th anniversary of the founding of Banco Sabadell we wanted to pay homage to our city by means of the campaign "Som Sabadell" (We are Sabadell) . This is the flashmob that we arranged as a final culmination with the participation of 100 people from the Vallès Symphony Orchestra, the Lieder, Amics de l'Òpera and Coral Belles Arts choirs.

Who could refuse to turn up for the music of joy?  Ahhhhh.

Here on Earth and other places

Unknown to me until yesterday, introduced by my friend Melissa, this is Darrell Scott.  His music dovetails handily with a recent conversation or two about feeling enlisted as banner carriers  for the Perfection of Chaos.  I walk a crooked road.

I have issues with any view of life as a linear experience.  This is not a secret.  I am cheered when what seemed to be a solitary trudge turns out to be more companionable, when information zooms in and says I am not alone in my notions of what any of this is or is not about or how it works.

Last week my son and I began watching STARGATE UNIVERSE upon his friend's recommendation.  Having seen the movie and tried watching the other series, we had missed this, something altogether different.  Without, I hope, revealing too much, the two, 20-episode seasons are going to pass too quickly.  If sleep wasn't one of our requirements, we'd be well into Year Two by now.  Any television show that could push the pleasure and surrender of a night's sleep to second choice has to be way beyond ordinary.  Brief synopsis of what particularly caught my attention: ancient space ship powered by ancient wisdom, its course known only to it, Destiny, by name.  Sound familiar?  In my unwritten manifesto, one of the first observations is that what happens to any and all of us is just life being life.  And that's just one aspect of the show.  Power struggles and choosing of sides that remind me of an ill-fated newspaper guild drive in another life, believers, non-believers, creative pseudo-and-real science and plots worthy of Shakespeare or Machiavelli lurk in every under-lit passageway.

We will grow even wearier than we otherwise might, waiting for life to straighten up and let us do it our way.  The ship IS in control, the road IS crooked and we are capable of being happy and lonesome at the same time.  Perhaps we are closer to The Mystery in December as hours of light shorten.  It reminds us we are in the dark much of the time without noticing.