A time of pilgrimage, because a pilgrim travels differently. Always in a pilgrimage there is a change of mind and a change of heart.The outer landscape becomes a metaphor for the unknown inner landscape.
To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not, rich; to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart; to study hard; to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common--this is my symphony. William Henry Channing
When love inhabits the heart, nothing appears difficult and one draws profit from anything that happens. Thankfully, this comes from the fact that love erases the veil that separates us from Reality. As this veil becomes thinner and thinner, one experiences a profound joy that emanates from this proximity with Reality. One is captured by the perception of beauty. The Sufi Way- Sidi Hamza Qadiri Boutshishi
One of the deepest feelings in intimacy is the impression that we are being seen, that we are unveiled, understood, revealed to our partner. In the inevitable complications or endings of love, the revealed self retreats into wounded corridors of pain, defeat, disappointment. Who isn’t despairing the loss of a lifelong friend to death or circumstance? Those of us displaced by death always have to recreate the spaces where we once lived, when people we lost were in our lives, into the places we are forced to live now, without them. Yet through depression we enter depths and in depths find soul. Depression is essential to the tragic sense of life... It reminds of death. The true revolution begins in the individual who can be true to his or her depression. To really grow up, you can’t avoid what your soul is trying to tell you in response to pain. You must observe it, accept it, and allow it the healthier channels of a more connected or evolved self. We begin to see that spiritual relaxation could happen when our deepest spiritual armour is mindfulness rather than defense and denial If our self is fully present and mindful through its experiences, big and small, individuation can occur. If we rediscovered the sensibility of the magus, we might not only esteem those moments of magic but seek them out and treat them as the real stuff of life...the soul would be conjured back into daily experience. The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life
When the structures of the society become outdated, in regards to the natural evolutionary journey, then it is not the leaders of the time who will know how to make the change. It’ll come from the different set of values and visions. Our lack of vision or lack of understanding that our true nature is divine would keep us limited in a cycle of pain. We were functioning with parts and not the whole of who we are. The shedding of the old can feel quite confusing but the appearance of limitation exists only in the eye of the spiritually blind. Becoming Conscious Co-creators with Tanis Helliwell
If we are to survive, we must have ideas, vision, and courage. These things are rarely produced by committees. Everything that matters in our intellectual and moral life begins with an individual confronting his own mind and conscience in a room by himself. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
The work of man is only just beginning and it remains to conquer all the violence entrenched in the recess of our passion and no race possesses the monopoly of beauty, of intelligence, of force, and theres a place for all at the Rendezvous of Victory. Aime Cesaire
The Paradox of Fact vs Fiction. Which is the best way of depicting the world as it is? The Enright Files with David Grossman
Yuna's Dance - Eternity (Memories of light and waves)
Confusing or not, Lum’s childhood seems to have seeded in him a keen sense of social justice. The issues of class and race he addresses, the nature of home, the expectations of parents, the anxieties of children, the conditions of sorrow and alienation and the self-questioning that accompanies them, all these themes and emotions resonate with his viewers. “I think sadness, isolation, ontological questions about who one is—these are universal. It’s part of living—you can’t progress through life unless you question who you are, constantly.” Ken Lum straddles the great divide. By Robin Laurence
In music, counterpoint is the relationship between two or more voices that are independent in contour and rhythm and are harmonically interdependent. Counterpoint involves the writing of musical lines that sound very different and move independently from each other but sound harmonious when played simultaneously. Counterpoint focuses on melodic interaction—only secondarily on the harmonies produced by that interaction.
The main battle in imperialism is over land; but when it came to who owned the land, who had the right to settle and wor on it, who kept it going, who won it back, and who now plans its future -these issues were reflected, contested, and even for a time decided in narrative. Two children of the same cruel parent do not necessarily love each other. They often see in each other the image of the past oppressor. Watching your home turned into a prison. You, Samid, choose to stay in that prison, because it is your home, and because you fear that if you leave, your jailer will not allow you to return. Living like this, you must constantly resist the twin temptations of either acquiescing in the jailer's plan in numb despair, or becoming crazed by consuming hatred for your jailer and yourself, the prisoner. Shehadeh 1982
Nations themselves are narrations. The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them. Edward Said - Culture and Imperialism
Employing a musical term that denotes the interplay between two "independent but harmonically related melodic parts sounding together", Said's notion of contrapuntalism, read against his notion of imperialism and resistance. Said reasserts the need that such contrapuntal analysis be modeled not on a symphony but rather on an atonal ensemble, one which emphasizes and highlights the disjunctions, not to overlook and play them down. Said's contrapuntal reading strategy, is an attempt to avoid the pitfalls of a rigid and even pathologically inclined resistance which demonizes the West, at the same time that it highlights the disjunctures and fissures within imperial culture-that which has been forcibly excluded. Said wishes to pose an alternative to the emergence of fundamentalisms as a tactic of resistance (particularly religiously coded fundamentalisms)-whether Western neoliberalism or Islamic fundamentalism. This contrapuntal analysis raises a systematic and conceited challenge to the imposed chronology of what Fredric Jameson has called 'master narratives,' ideological paradigms which contain within their plots a predetermined ending. In other words, resistance writers have adapted the novel form as a way of telling other stories, not only sapping master narratives former hold over their own destinies, but also by changing the way the stories are told, and what possible endings might emerge from them, in which each citizenry might resist the logics of unending conflict, and move into mutual futures. What Edward Said has called the "permission to narrate"-what has been most denied, the power to communicate their own histories both to themselves (a people displaced, exiled, or occupied), and to the world outside hypnotized by the imperialist narrative. Seizing this "permission to narrate" itself has been an act of resistance and an act of cultural survival. Vexing resistance, complicating occupation, Philip Metres
The Rise and Fall of Islamic Spain Al-Andalus was the Arabic name given to those parts of the Iberian Peninsula governed by Muslims, or Moors, at various times in the period between 711 and 1492. It refers to the Umayyad Caliphate province (711-750), Emirate of Cordoba (750-929) and Caliphate of Cordoba (929-1031) and its "taifa" ("successor") kingdoms. As the Iberian Peninsula was eventually regained by Christians re-expanding southward in the process known as the Reconquista, the name Al-Andalus came to refer to the Muslim-dominated lands of the former Visigothic Hispania.
Andalucian culture was deeply influenced by half a millennium of Muslim rule during the Middle Ages. The Moors established universities in Andalucia, and cultivated scholarship, bringing together the greatest achievements of all of the civilisations they had encountered. During that period Moorish and Jewish scholars played a major part in reviving and contributing to Western astronomy, medicine, philosophy and mathematics. Many tribes, religions and races coexisted in al-Andalus, each contributing to the intellectual prosperity of Andalusia. Literacy in Islamic Iberia was far more widespread than any other country of the West. The brilliant Saracenic civilization of Moslem Spain rendered the Moors, even during their declines under the Reyes de Taifas, the most cultured people of the West. C.W. Previte-Orton
Yann Tiersen - Atlantique Nord - Palestine There is no days without praying the end of the nightmare you leave in for 60 years now. But to every nightmare there's an awakening.
Now in Vienna there are ten pretty women. There's a shoulder where death comes to cry. There's a lobby with nine hundred windows. There's a tree where the doves go to die. There's a piece that was torn from the morning, and it hangs in the Gallery of Frost - Ay, ay ay ay Take this waltz, take this waltz, take this waltz with the clamp on its jaws.
I want you, I want you, I want you on a chair with a dead magazine. In the cave at the tip of the lily, in some hallway where love's never been. On a bed where the moon has been sweating, in a cry filled with footsteps and sand - Ay, ay ay ay Take this waltz, take this waltz, take its broken waist in your hand.
This waltz, this waltz, this waltz, this waltz with its very own breath of brandy and death, dragging its tail in the sea.
There's a concert hall in Vienna where your mouth had a thousand reviews. There's a bar where the boys have stopped talking, they've been sentenced to death by the blues. Ah, but who is it climbs to your picture with a garland of freshly cut tears? Ay, ay ay ay Take this waltz, take this waltz, take this waltz, it's been dying for years.
There's an attic where children are playing, where I've got to lie down with you soon, in a dream of Hungarian lanterns, in the mist of some sweet afternoon. And I'll see what you've chained to your sorrow, all your sheep and your lilies of snow Ay, ay ay ay Take this waltz, take this waltz with its "I'll never forget you, you know!"
And I'll dance with you in Vienna, I'll be wearing a river's disguise. The hyacinth wild on my shoulder my mouth on the dew of your thighs. And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook, with the photographs there and the moss. And I'll yield to the flood of your beauty, my cheap violin and my cross. And you'll carry me down on your dancing to the pools that you lift on your wrist O my love, O my love Take this waltz, take this waltz, it's yours now. It's all that there is.
Take This Waltz Leonard Cohen Tribute to Federico García Lorca
Dalannah Gail Bowen & Thelma Gibson: In good times and in bad, music provided the courage and strength to make life more pleasant for everyone. We sang sorrow songs and social songs, freedom songs and glory songs and most of all we sang the blues. East End Blues and All That Jazz. "Whatever the occasion, whatever the hardships, there was the music". Denis Simpson
A bird that stalks down his narrow cage can seldom see through his bars of rage, his wings are clipped and his feet are tied so he opens his throat to sing. The caged bird sings with fearful trill of the things unknown but longed for still and is tune is heard on the distant hill for the caged bird sings of freedom. Maya Angelou
Beloved, you are everything to me. You are my love. You are the love that guides and nourishes. You are the love that comforts and heals. You are the love that takes my hand and leads me through the times of fear, of grief, misery, and despair. You are the love that sustains me in time of doubt. You are the love that coaxes me forward, calling me on to be bigger, more alive. You are the burning bush which calls me – yes, me – to step forward into the unknown and to risk letting you move through me so that I may bring to life more than I ever thought possible
Forgive me, Beloved. Forgive me my moments of selfishness, of resentment, of dishonesty, and of fear. Forgive me the moments when I close down – when I don’t acknowledge the smile of a stranger on the bus, when I avoid the eyes of a panhandler, when I just haven’t got time to be kind! Forgive me the stories I tell myself of why, exactly, it was somebody else’s fault. Forgive me all the time I spend rehashing the past, seething with resentment, but avoiding responsibility for my own healing. Forgive me my love of playing the victim, comfortable in passivity. Forgive me the small part of me, way down deep, which takes a certain satisfaction in the drama that accompanies the crises in my life – now, at least, I know that I am important!
And in opening to you, Beloved, I find forgiveness. In bringing my shame, my small self, the dark spots of my soul before you, I am bathed in light, and I can go on, renewed. For this, I thank you, Beloved. I thank you that I am here today, Beloved. And, Beloved, most of all, I thank you for every instance of love in my life, for it is through love that I most know you. Frances Kitson
The cattle quietly grazing at the grass down by the river where the swelling mountain water moves onward to the sea: the builder of the castles renews the age-old purpose and contemplates the milking girl whose offer is his need. The young men of the household have all gone into service and are not to be expected for a year. The innocent young master - thoughts moving ever faster - has formed the plan to change the man he seems. And the poet sheaths his pen while the soldier lifts his sword.
And the oldest of the family is moving with authority. Coming from across the sea, he challenges the son who puts him to the run.
I've come down from the upper class to mend your rotten ways. My father was a man-of-power whom everyone obeyed. So come on all you criminals! I've got to put you straight just like I did with my old man - twenty years too late. I'll judge you all and make damn sure that no-one judges me. from Jethro Tull - Thick as a Brick
"The Great Game: Afghanistan" is about the history of modern foreign intervention in that region. The name of the production comes from a phrase used to describe a historic rivalry between the British and Russian empires to take over as much of Central Asia as each could.
Music isn’t just about music, It’s the rhythm of child running a stick along a fence, the sound of their bubble gum popping and the skipping rope as it hits the ground. You find music in trying to capture that sound and the energy that comes from the city. Shauntay Grant
