Jack Gilbert: 'Failing and Flying'

A poem on love in The Writer's Almanac this morning, coming from an extraordinary place of wisdom:

Failing and Flying

by Jack Gilbert

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

"Failing and Flying" by Jack Gilbert, from Refusing Heaven. © Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.
Reprinted by The Writer's Almanac with permission.

                                                        

Vibrational, healing sounds: Energy Medicine

direct link: Maya Meditation 2012: The 13 Sacred Tones

Vibrational, healing sounds: Energy Medicine

I downloaded this album to my iPod some months ago but each time I listened I fell into a revery and slept, to return an hour and a half later when it had finished. Today I listened all the way through to the 8th track, 'Pulsar3aDim,Espacio,' where I drifted into a deeper state of consciousness, beyond memory, returning in the middle of the final sublime track.

For me, each track corresponds to a "chakra," wheels of energy, subtle body vortices in the esoteric anatomy. Each interlude is beautifully composed, a perfect understanding of this system. Every time I listen the depth and richness of Quetzalbwattio's work increases.

Each chakra, and the array of sounds from various musical instruments played are accurate as far as I understand their tonal aspects. This music moves the energy in each wheel of light, Muladhara, Swadhisthaha, Manipura, Anahata, Vishuddha, Ajna, and Sahasrara as the Kundalini rises, until radiating out into the aura, considered in some systems a chakra, and then, for this listener, in the last piece, into the massive and intimate universe itself.

For a long time I played only 'Pulsar1aDimension.Vida,' which I guess would correspond to the Heart Centre, Anahata. It's fantastic. Though tonight, listening closely to 'MatizAutoexistente,' my 'third eye' was 'opened' by the phenomenal energetic serpent of blue crackling energy undulating through my brain and cracking the pineal gland wide open so that I could 'see in the dark.' So to speak! :grins:

While I don't know the Mayan system to which the title refers, I find the Sanskrit 'chakras' (found in Hindu, Tibetan Buddhist and Chinese descriptions of the energy body) work here too. Listen on headphones. This is a beautiful, healing album of vibrational energies.

Beautiful work, Quetzalbwattio.
_
I wrote this review last night, though I am now listening upright at my computer in the morning and not meditating and dipping in and out of revery, and I understand that it's not necessarily an 'orderly' progression, this Kundalini rising in Maya Meditations, but rather like we are, a complex interweaving of energies, and it is in the totality of the matrix that the vibrational healing occurs.

                                                        

Quetzalbwattio: 'Sammasati FullMoonSpirit II:) Trip to ChrïstmaSoül'

direct link: Quetzalbwattio: Sammasati FullMoonSpirit II:) Trip to ChrïstmaSoül

I love this album. It inspires a meditative mood that soothes and stills the inner maelstrom. While playing Sammasati FullMoonSpirit II:) Trip to ChrïstmaSoül this afternoon, my apartment flooded. A thick mantle of water spilling over the hardwood that took a dozen towels and a mop and bucket to clean up. Quetzalbwattio's ambient meditative music played throughout and so the flood and the clean-up felt in a rhythm, the flow part of the flood of being.

I would play this in a yoga class, while painting, or staring out the window, and during floods, yes :smiles:

So many instruments creating a slow torrent of creation, a spiraling star-birth dance, particles of light overflowing the darkness, a fluidity of rhythm: sitar, drums, didjeridoo, gongs, bells, singing bowls, flutes, trance, meditation, kriya, chanting, the Ganges River, it's subtle, gentle, very beautiful.

                                                        

My next painting's sketch progresses slowly...

From Next Painting

untitled, 24" x 30", 61cm x 76.2cm, acrylic bone black base, chalk sketch in-progress

No, I shalln't leave it as a ménage à trois, surely not. Each to each. Should I have waited until there were two to post?