Meditation, poetry (& song)
Meditation and Poetry
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Traditions of deliberate attention to consciousness, and of making poems, are as old as humankind. Meditation looks inward, poetry holds forth. One is private, the other is out in the world. One enters the moment, the other shares it. But in practice it is never entirely clear which is doing which. In any case, we do know that in spite of the contemporary public perception of meditation and poetry as special, exotic, and difficult, they are both as old and as common as grass. The one goes back to essential moments of stillness and deep inwardness, and the other to the fundamental impulse of expression and presentation. |  |
– Gary Snyder, “Just One Breath”
And songs of course! The Tibetan, Milarepa, was famous for his ‘songs of enlightenment’ – spontaneously launched into after long periods of practice (must have been the relief after his years of building towers to precise instructions only to be told by his teacher that he’d got it wrong)
The song below began to emerge for me during a 20 day meditation retreat; I spent days hovering between the seduction of creative thought applied to the next verse – punctuated by moments of recollection that I was intending to be meditating. As a result – maybe – this completed version, first played at an ACT conference in Holland in 2009, took 25 years to reach this stage!
Hope you enjoy – let me know?
Filed under: Uncategorized on February 16th, 2014