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.
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| 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.
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| Anoushka Shankar |
I moved from fear and and the desperate need for isolation, to connection, joy, and curiosity.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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)
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You can watch the magic here
(sorry, there is an ad about a quarter of the way through):
Happy New Year!
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