Just as the smell of freshly cut hay or just turned garden soil seems to
contain all other smells, so also the high sparkling sound of rushing
water seems to hold all other sounds.
The sound of the wooden flute, the violin and oboe is there. And the
trumpet and the human voice. Or the deep sound of skin drums, and
strings of tiny metal bells. All are held, it seems to me, in this mysteri-
ous rushing sound of flowing mountain water.
Perhaps that is why we sleep so peacefully in the sonic embrace of an
alpine stream. No other sound has such deep roots in our own natural
history’s story. Indeed, how could this be otherwise? For where there is
clear flowing water, there there is security of the very most basic kind.
The sound is whispering, as it were, a soothing reminder to someplace
deep in our common unconscious, that, like love itself, where there is
water, life flourishes.
POETRY HEALS . . .
We shape the world and the world shapes us.
Poetry heals. The experienced sound. The moved rhythm.
The deeply felt meaning.
You need but three things to find out for yourself if this is true.
(1) A poem you resonate with strongly;
(2) The instrument of your own voice;
(3) A timespace filled with enough energy to get you on
your way, learning your poem forwards and backwards,
doing it over and over again, inside and outside, alone
and for friends, until you know it, as the expression goes:—
by heart.
AGAINST ENTERTAINMENT!
We shape the world and the world shapes us.
The problem with Entertainment is that it quickly replaces our
own unique experience of the world, our own unique voice,
with something merely 2nd hand. After a while, that is what
we ourselves become—2nd hand, but empty containers
filled with somebody else’s self-serving idea of Culture.
Real Culture, like real Religion, should liberate us from the
merely 2nd hand.
-