This place is a dream only a sleeper considers it real, then death comes like dawn and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief.
A man goes to sleep in the town where he has always lived and he dreams he's living in another town. In the dream he doesn't remember the town he's sleeping in & his bed.
Humankind is being led along an evolving course, through this migration of intelligences and though we seem to be sleeping there is an inner wakefulness, that directs the dream and that will eventually startle us back to the truth of who we are. Rumi
At one time or another we have all felt lonely or isolated. We have all had times were we felt misunderstood; standing on the outside looking in, just longing to belong. The Anam Cara eases that feeling of loneliness and isolation. Our Anam Cara understands us at a deep, spiritual level, and reminds us that we are never alone. They provide shelter from the storm and a light in the darkest of places.
May you be blessed with good friends: May you learn to be a friend to yourself. May you be able to journey to that place in your soul where there is great love,warmth, feeling, and forgiveness. May this change you! May this transfigure that which is negative, distant, or cold in you. May you be brought in to the real passion, kinship, and affinity of belonging. May you treasure your friends. May you be good to them and may you be there for them; may they bring you all the blessings, challenges, truth, and light that you need for your journey. May you never be isolated! May you always be in the gentle nest of belonging with your soul-guide. A Friendship Blessing from “Anam Cara” By John O’Donohue
May you realize that holiness is mindful, gazing, feeling, hearing, and touching. May your senses gather you and bring you home. May your senses always enable you to celebrate the universe and the mystery and possibilities in your presence here. May the energy of the earth bless you.
There are stories within stories, whispered in the quiet of the night, shouted above the roar of the day, and played out between lovers, enemies, strangers and friends. But all, all are fragile things made of just 26 letters arranged and rearranged – Neil Gaiman
Doing Time, Doing Vipassana. Vipassana which means to see things as they really are. The Art of Living: Vipassana Meditation From time to time we all experience agitation, irritation, disharmony. Unwanted things happen and we create tension within. Wanted things do not happen, some obstacle comes in the way, and again we create tension within; we start tying knots within. And throughout life, unwanted things keep on happening. How can we stop creating tension and remain peaceful and harmonious? By learning to remain balanced in the face of everything experienced inside, one develops detachment towards all that one encounters in external situations. However, this detachment is not escapism or indifference to the problems of the world. Those who regularly practice Vipassana become more sensitive to the sufferings of others, and do their utmost to relieve suffering in whatever way they can-not with any agitation, but with a mind full of love, compassion and equanimity. They learn holy indifference-how to be fully committed, fully involved in helping others, while at the same time maintaining balance of mind. In this way they remain peaceful and happy, while working for the peace and happiness of others.
Don’t tell me of love everlasting and other sad dreams I don’t want to hear. Just tell me of passionate strangers who rescue each other from a lifetime of cares because if love means forever, expecting nothing returned then I hope I’ll be given another whole lifetime to learn. Joan Baez
Antoin Sevruguin's photography portray people of all sorts of social classes and ethnic backgrounds. He portrayed members of the Persian royal family as well as beggars, fellow countrymen of Iran or Westerners, farmers working fields, womenweavers at work, army officers, religious officials...
J.D. McClatchy's Seven Mozart Librettos by twisting the literal meaning occasionally makes the lines rhyme and come alive with imagery. Here is as an example the aria Dove Sono from Le Nozze di Figaro:
Where are those happy moments Of sweetness and pleasure? Where have they gone, those vows of a deceiving tongue? Then why, if everything for me is changed to tears and grief, has the memory of that happiness not faded from my breast? Ah! if only my constancy in yearning lovingly for him always could bring the hope Of changing his ungrateful heart!
Here is McClatchy's version...
Where are they now, the vanished days, the moments of pleasure's afterglow? Where are the vows, the murmured praise spoken by that liar so long ago? Why, if sweetness turns to regret, if every hope becomes a grief, Why is it still I cannot forget the love that vies with disbelief? If only my waiting, my long endurance, the patience that true love imparts, could bring the slightest reassurance of changing his ungrateful heart!
Without commas, one line touching the other I write poems the way I live, in darkness, blind, crossing the paper like a worm. Flashlights, books - the guards took everything. There's no mail, only fog drifts over the barracks. Eclogue VII
I'm a poet and nobody needs me, not even if I mutter wordlessly: u-u-u- no matter, for instead of me, prying devils will sing relentlessly. And believe me, believe you me, the cautious suspicion is justified. I'm a poet who's fit for the stake's fire because to the truth he's testified. Miklos Radnoti
Boris Malagurski's documentary film "The Weight Of Chains", concerning the breakup of Yugoslavia and the consequences of a decade of instability and war. What really happened? A lesson for turning the hatred and disunity among peoples to a powerful weapon of bravery and self-sacrifice among people coming together to each other aid, regardless of their ethnic background, against oppression and injustice.
بیداد چو شد میوه آزادی و قانون یچاره دلم عاشق ظلم و خفقان است این بانگ نه بانگی است که از یاس برآید حلقوم امید است که با جامه دران است
May you listen to your longing to be free. May the frames of your belonging be generous enough for your dreams. May you arise each day with a voice of blessing whispering in your heart. May you find a harmony between your soul and your life. May the sanctuary of your soul never become haunted. May you know the eternal longing that lives at the heart of time. May there be kindness in your gaze when you look within. May you never place walls between the light and yourself. May you allow the beauty of the invisible world to gather you, mind you, and embrace you in belonging. May you know that absence is alive with hidden presence, that nothing is ever lost or forgotten. May the absences in your life grow full of eternal echo. May you sense around you the secret Elsewhere where the presences that have left you dwell. May you be generous in your embrace of loss. May the sore well of grief turn into a seamless flow of presence. May your compassion reach out to the ones we never hear from. May you have the courage to speak for the excluded ones. May you become the gracious and passionate subject of your own life. May you not disrespect your mystery through brittle words or false belonging. May you be embraced by God in whom dawn and twilight are one. May your longing inhabit its dreams within the Great Belonging. John O'Donohue - "To Bless the Space between Us
Have you ever personally been in exile? I certainly know I have. To be down and out, disconnected, alone. To be lost and lonely, out of touch, with no direction home. To be torn and frayed, twisted about, with no sense of the center. To be grasping at phantoms, reeling on the edge, sensing the void. But it’s now time to come home out of our exile and begin living in harmony.
I can conquer the world with a blink, I can heal a broken heart with a smile. Rumi
The kindness of strangers is a wonderful thing, and renews faith in the world, and defies the scientific hocus-pocus of selfish genes. Not everything we do is for personal gain, thank god, or even because we hope one day that someone will be kind to us in return. Sometimes there is love - a very unscientific emotion that is always surprising. Jeanette Winterson
Many of us feel we have two sides to ourselves. Here Marion Woodman describes the split she has felt since childhood; a dance between two opposites that created the foundation of her life's work and how our addiction to stuff is killing us (with Andrew Harvey). Marion Woodman - Dancing in the Flames
The language that we use just to make sense to one another, has words that we've either borrowed, stolen or copied. What we do as humans is to rearrange these stolen words to describe stolen experiences. We describe these re-arrangements as personality.
Richard Wagamese's One Story, One Song presented in four sections: humility, trust, introspection and wisdom. These four principles are the cardinal points on the Medicine Wheel, and they represent the essential qualities each person needs to cultivate a principled life.
Music existed before language. There is in every particle in nature, a unity of melody and rhythm which continues with great order and harmony. In the harmony and rhythm perfection of bird sounds, in the movement of atoms, electrons and galaxies and in the amplified sounds of the fluids of our body, we can observe the relation and association of music with the created world at large. Music and music therapy history understanding of the present world, directs us to colloborate with sciences like anthropology, history, ethnotherapy, ethnomedicine, psychology, pedagogy, sociology, spirituality and parapsychology.
I have now seen and have pierced through the surface and have got beyond the shadow and the disguise. Everything is emptiness and everything is compassion. Thomas Merton
"The last evening was devastatingly sad as the heroic occupants of the death cells communicated to the prison in gentle melancholy song that their end was near... It was late at night when the singing ceased, and the prison fell into uneasy silence. I was already awake when the singing began again in the early morning. Once again the excruciatingly beautiful music floated through the barred windows, echoing round the brick exercise yard, losing itself in the vast prison yards. And then, unexpectedly, the voice of Vuyisile Mini came roaring down the hushed passages. Evidently standing on a stool, with his face reaching up to a barred vent in his cell, his unmistakable bass voice was enunciating his final message in Xhosa to the world he was leaving. In a voice charged with emotion but stubbornly defiant he spoke of the struggle waged by the African National Congress and of his absolute conviction of the victory to come. And then it was Khayinga's turn, followed by Mkaba, as they too defied all prison rules to shout out their valedictions. Soon after, I heard the door of their cell being opened. Murmuring voices reached my straining ears, and then the three martyrs broke into a final poignant melody which seemed to fill the whole prison with sound and then gradually faded away into the distant depths of the condemned section."
Divide and rule strategy of the apartheid state had been so effective that a chasm of distrust and suspicion separated the coloured and African communities. Drawing in part on African-American Black Power slogans and ideology, activists within the Black Consciousness movement believed that their primary task was to conscientize black people, which meant giving them a sense of pride or belief in their own strength and worthiness. Among other things, this involved asserting the value, dignity, and beauty of indigenous and working-class black cultures. Many coloured people knew that similar histories of slavery, oppression, cultural assimilation, and permanent minority status within white supremacist nations linked them to the African-American experience. Once one understands the full import of "Mannenberg," it’s staggering. Issues of the individual development of artists, the relationship of the artist to the community, the function of commerce in the production and distribution of art, the question of aesthetic development either divorced from or wedded to broader political struggles, and a host of other issues are all highlighted by this one song.
Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony tells the story of black South African freedom music and the central role it played against apartheid, the music that sustained and galvanized black South Africans. A story of human courage, resolve and triumph.
Songs of resistance are also songs of beauty. That's one of the secrets of oppressed people's songs ... Oppressed people have all kinds of signs, underground moves, hidings, codes. There was nothing in South Africa that did not have to do with song. A child's birth, a death ... our songs were emboldening, galvanizing, about courage, affirming our right to be, and to protest. Hugh Masekela
During the apartheid years of defiance politics, Mannenberg became an anthem of the struggle: that special sound that helped build that wider family during a time of deep repression, when speech was not enough. That sound which is something we can feel but not explain, which gave voice to the speechlessness of those times. Trevor Manuel (a leading figure in the UDF), speaking at the funeral of Basil Coetzee, who was at the forefront of support for the anti-apartheid organisations, always prepared to provide music for rallies.
The United Democratic Front (UDF), established in 1983, was a broad alliance of grassroots anti-apartheid organisations, structured at national, regional, and local levels... The UDF explicitly called not just for struggle, but for a culture of resistance, and from its foundation used graphics and music as key aspects of its activities. A number of musicians were invited to perform at rallies and gatherings organised by the UDF, and Mannenberg was one of the songs often played at those gatherings.
The bonds of arrogance are slow released as self, exhausted, writhes in impotence. The ceaseless efforts of the I have ceased; The world about withdraws to immanence. Perception comes, with heart and mind elate. Night perishes before the sudden dawn. And lo! the world awakens uncreate in blazing splendour of the Light unborn. Christmas Humphreys
All psychic processes are material, but the converse is also true. Psychic stuff corresponds directly to physical substance, always—the two realms are linked by their frequencies of manifestation—and both coevolve through the thermodynamics of psychic shocks that convert their density and nature. The ways in which we live our lives provide those shocks, either downward toward unconscious habits and loss of memory or upward toward awakening and freedom. We exist as physical energy states that can evolve to subtilize, to remember themselves (who and what they really are), like movements for becoming more conscious; that is, for breaking with unconscious and involuntary habits and automatic behaviors that are rooted in the denser aspects of our manifestation.
The lover in his love replete gives all, of faculty and boundless will, to noble deeds the heart yearns to fulfil, and nurtures them in golden light until he lays them at her feet. But I, un-whole, a riven part, have nought wherewith to build this royal array, have nothing left in jewelled words to say, have nothing humbly at your feet to lay. You are my heart. Christmas Humphreys
You taught me precious secrets of the truth witholding nothing. You came out in front and I was hiding. But now I'm so much better and if my words don't come together listen to the melody cause my love is in there hiding. A Song For You
When events such as the Japanese earthquake and Tsunami happen, I find they always challenge me. I continually ask, what, if anything does my faith offer in light of such disasters. Is my desire for quick spiritual fixes or easy answers to difficult questions a temptation?
The shadow is a term coined by Carl Jung to describe the dark side of each of us, a part we often keep firmly below our conscious awareness. The less we are aware of the shadow, the more it can influence our behaviour, individually and collectively - and not for the better. Debbie Ford. In her book "Why Good People Do Bad Things: How to Stop Being Your Own Worst Enemy", outlines seven states of being that are driven by our “shadow”: Greed, guardedness, arrogance, intolerance, self-absorption, stubbornness, and deceit. Every wounding incident holds the potential to be a catalyst that will mend the separation between our lower self and our higher self. But if we don't make amends for the things we feel bad about, if we don't start treating ourselves with the love, care, and attention we so desperately need, the sad reality is that we probably will in fact continue to be our own worst enemies.
What sustains your hope? What give you the courage to mine your shadow for it’s wisdom? Accept that you are loved and valued in God’s eyes - only this knowing will bring true contentment. Anne Simmonds
Sima Bina- Aziz Beshin Kenarom
Amir Koushkani - Spiritual Journey
Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. Ralph Waldo Emerson.
It is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent. There is an artistic movement brewing. Among its hallmarks are the incorporation of seemingly unprocessed material; randomness, openness to accident and serendipity; ... self-reflexivity ... a blurring (to the point of invisibility) of any distinction between fiction and nonfiction. It is a form of collage, which edits, alters and reapportions cultural commodities according to need or desire. Reality is a landscape that includes unreal features; being true to reality involves a certain amount of wavering between real and unreal. Likewise originality, if there can ever be any such thing, will inevitably entail a quantity of borrowing, conscious and otherwise. David Shields -Reality Hunger: A Manifesto
Perhaps I am a coward wanting to appear more dignified by creating this audience of mine, but this is for a good cause: The Public, or merely to cure my own boredom through my years of being trapped. Yvonne Reinhart
Roma history video based on Roger Moreau`s book, Walking In The Path of The Gypsies
What I cannot remember resides outside of details. I can remember the incessant yap of a neighbourhood dog, and innumerable other things that pose no real, tangible significance. Of true memory there is nothing, not a whisper of a dialogue in that other place, and when I close my eyes there is no image in my mind that can penetrate the uniformity that constructs this place. What I can remember is that there is another world, apart from this one, and that is the root of my madness. I often think that if I could deny myself the knowledge of that place, or banish its sensation from my mind, perhaps I could remain here in happiness. If not in happiness, then perhaps contentment. I know now that those fragments and senses will for eternity remain, for my torment is the reason for this place, and its allowance of these fragments is a parcel in that torment. Borges's Library and the man who came from nowhere, Daniel Poirier
I am a stranger in this world, and there is a severe solitude and painful lonesomeness in my exile. I am alone, but in my aloneness I contemplate an unknown and enchanting country, and this meditation fills my dreams with spectres of a great and distant land which my eyes have never seen. The Lonely Poet, by Kahlil Gibran
How can I keep searching when dark clouds hide the day. I only know there's nothing here for me. Nothing in this wide world, left for me to see. Still I'll keep on waiting until you return. You can't be happy while your heart's on the roam. You can't be happy until you bring it home. Home to the green fields and me once again. Brothers Four
How To Be Alone - A video by fiilmaker, Andrea Dorfman, and poet/singer/songwriter, Tanya Davis.
The Tuning of the World (The Soundscape)- Murray Schafer
