Raga Piloo: the transformative power of art

A poem for the New Year. 

Some time around October or November 2024 I was scrolling through the news and noticed that my brain was going into survival mode. My breath was shallow, my heart was beating rapidly. Part of the work I do is helping others transform these symptoms through somatic focus. One practice that can help is: focusing on the senses. 

I chose hearing.

 

Anoushka Shankar and Patricia Kopatchinskaja

I ended up on Youtube and found a duet between sitarist/composer Anoushka Shankar and violinist/composer Patricia Kopatchinskaja playing a work composed by Anoushka’s father, Ravi Shankar, Raga Piloo, that he originally recorded with Yehudi Menuhin in 1967.

 

Anoushka Shankar

 

I moved from fear and and the desperate need for isolation, to connection, joy, and curiosity.  

 

Patricia Kopatchinskaja

The poem that arose from this encounter is a homage to not just this work, and these artists, but to the incredible and lasting effects art has had on my life, pushing me into places I didn’t know existed, expanding my awareness of self and the world, helping me connect, in a deeper way, to the world’s beauty and pain, showing how self and world, beauty and pain, are intricately interwoven. A mosaic.

 

Andy Goldsworthy

Things are absolutely horrific right now. The US is indiscriminately bombing countries thousands of miles away (again, it never seems to end...), people are snatched off the street by racist thugs employed by a corrupt government, the lives of many are being shattered, so many are being dumped onto the street so that a small percentage of rich folk can slurp up more of the earth’s wealth, while floods and famine increase across the globe…

 

  

So, I encourage you to find the kind of art that lights up your spine, ushers you into a different world, pulls both joy and sorrow from that well of still, black water located in the dark valley between your heart and lungs.

 

Good art is not escape. It is grounding. It brings us into this world in a deeper way. 

 

 

Watching Anoushka Shankar and Patricia Kopatchinskaja
play Raga Piloo on Youtube after Scrolling Through
The News

 

How it all fell away,

how the raga’s slow weave

of shadow and light began to organize the chaos,

reveal those things that continually move unseen

inside me:

a cabbage moth

quick-beating pale-yellow wings

                 above a kale leaf, lung-bridge to heart,

 heart-bridge to intestines and spine;

       a raven feather

        falling from a clear blue sky,

tumbling vane over quill, into a clear blue lake;

mist from rain-damp pines;

        and all the wandering dreams

  of Laetiporus mushrooms clinging to dead bark;

listen,

listen,

the sitar and violin strings are the root threads

                               that connect everything above

                       to everything beneath; look,

look, a child is humming,

mimicking a fuzzy horned bumblebee

foraging for pollen on fireweed

   inside me;

see, see,

 the first Japanese maple leaves sail out

                                   over the balcony inside me;

leaving me without a without,

                 with no way out,

as the raga ends;

the last note a water-bead hung

                   from the tip of a lavender leaf,

                        after the rain, after the rain,

trembling,

full of potential energy,

          ready to launch,

                                       from sky to leaf to earth…

 

 

 (previously published in Clackamas Literary Review)

 

*********************** 

 

You can watch the magic here 

(sorry, there is an ad about a quarter of the way through):

 

Happy New Year!

 

Winter Solstice Poem 2025: Heron, December

 

The Solstice Poem this year came from a recent encounter at Delta Ponds in Eugene.

 

Wood Duck

 

Delta Ponds is a 150-acre waterway site consisting of numerous ponds, islands and wetlands. These features were first carved out of the floodplain of the Willamette River in the 1950’s and 60’s for gravel extraction. 

 

Green-winged Teal

  

The city purchased the quarry in the 1970’s but didn’t do anything with it until 2004. Between 2004 and 2012 the city and state engaged in restoring the ponds as a side channel of the Willamette River and now there are over 155 species of birds that pass through and over 60 western pond turtles. I saw a beaver there once. Otters have recently been sighted.

 

Pied Bill Grebe

 

The ponds are sandwiched by a highway on the eastern side and a row of apartment complexes on the west, next to the river. And yet when walking around the ponds it feels like being on the edge of the wild.

 

Bufflehead

I’ve written several poems from my walks around the pond, including one related to the great blue heron nests in four or five particular trees on one of the islands, along with the first poem I ever wrote in Eugene. Both appeared in my last book, The Next World.

The bird photos (not mine) are just a few examples of what we recently saw down at the ponds. But the great blue herons are almost always there. More numerous at certain times of the year, less so during the winter. I think of them as the guardian monks and nuns of the ponds…

 

Heron, December 

1.

Her long neck

is pulled deep

into a grey-blue mantle.

Yellow eyes stare

across dark water.

 

2.

I pull in.

The ground is cold.

Water, still.

A few feathers

lift and settle

as the moon rises. 

 

 

 I leave you with another one from Delta Ponds, written in Mid-December of 2024.

  

Fog

 

       There are shadows within shadows.

Something calls out. The call

                        comes from everywhere:

a bird, a person, a bobcat

          floating out there, on a log, adrift.

Now I know I have

    always been a shadow. Keep walking,

         this might be the edge of the water.

Water particles hang, suspended,

around us, as if the world has

               stopped turning.

A head without a face turns away. 

A lone tree appears, bare,

     like a distant word heard inside a fire.

Now I know this

 is how everything comes into the world.

Something calls out again. The call

               is absorbed, lost.

My hands and feet hang, suspended,

   merge with mist.

There are turtles sleeping the winter off,

     settled in mud on the lake floor below.          

                     Take my hand.

 

 ******************************************

Happy Solstice!

 

Other Winter Solstice poems can be found at links below:

2024: Freezing Fog

2023: What Calls

2022: Tidepool

2021: Snow clouds, Space, Silence & Snow ghosts

2020: The Space Between 

Links to previous Solstice poems going back to 2011 can be found on the tab marked “Series” on the banner at the top of the blog.

All Winter Solstice poems will appear in a collection called The Solstice Book. Hopefully it’ll be published at the end of 2026.