There is a delight in following a stream of thought, seeing where it meets the next body of thought and how they dance together. The following composition is with my daughter, Xochi John (cello), Larry Stephens (percussion) and me on violin. The field recording is simple and done as a single take. The poetry of Rumi is translated by Coleman Barks. [Click his name to see his website.] Below is the new recording as I seek to find consonance in these colors and combinations. At the bottom of the post you will find the first sound sketch, if you are interested. Feedback is aways welcome. Sharing is enthusiastically embraced.
Where Everything is Music
This is a repost of Heart-Healing-Oxygen and it still feels relevant today.
One of the joys of writing and researching for a blog is the ability to follow a muse or take a tangent only to be delighted on how applicable it is to my current work. While participating in an equinox gathering at Serpent Mound in the non-glaciated part of southern Ohio, I met an individual studying herbal medicine. She highly recommended the work of Stephen Harrod Buhner. Initially, I didn’t see how this related, but never the less, I looked up his work. Before I knew it, I had ordered from the author, “The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature” and “The Transformational Power of Fasting: The Way to Spiritual, Physical, and Emotional Rejuvenation.”
These two books have a wonderful perspective on perception, healing and the interrelationship- interconnectedness of humans and the world. On page 111 of “The Transformational Power of Fasting” Buhner quotes Clarissa Pinkola Estes, “The body is best understood as a being in its own right, one who loves us, depends on us, one to who we sometimes mother, and who sometimes is mother to us.” Buhner continues, “We begin to trust what the body can do, and so we step back and let the body do what it has always been capable of doing. We allow it to go where it uniquely knows to go. We drop the reins on its neck and allow it to take us home. …It is the first and best friend that the Universe has given to us, and it is through the body, not in spite of the body, that we find the luminous and the ineffable that our souls need to be whole.”
What Buhner expounds upon in great detail, employing extensive research, challenges the very core of the modern quasi religious belief system of how we are related to the earth, the plants and each other. Concerning the direct perception of nature, he writes, “Scientists have, by removing all meaning, intelligence, and soul from matter, caused the abandonment of this capacity of the human. We have been colonized by a particular kind of thinking.” When the paradigm of science that sees species, organs, environment as discrete, identifiable, controllable and dis-related systems, the true interconnectedness is missed.
Just because we can’t sense or measure all of the frequencies or vibrations around us does not mean that they are not present. “For Universe is not a place but an event, not a collection of solids but an interaction of frequencies. Not a noun but a verb.” As we feel our connection, the solid becomes plastic, the unchangeable has the potential for returning to its state of balance. Vibrations entrain as they interact, and balance is the underlying principle of health.
When healing is viewed from a heart perspective, there is a significant change in the approach towards disease. “Our heart intelligence is still working at a six-year-old level while our mind intelligence is absurdly further ahead.” Our linear education has given us this predilection for missing the connections. I keep hearing how things are ‘out of the box’ — education, science, business, medicine. The truth is, there is no box.
Once, while sitting in my inner city back yard late at night, looking at the stars, there was a drunken argument from the next house. All of the other words were muffled except, “You aren’t god, you never were god and you never will be god.” I laughed as I wondered when he would realize that they were both god. However, when it comes to linear thinking both in and out of the box, there is no box, there never was a box and there never will be a box.
We have forgotten our heart. “For the human heart is vastly more than a muscular pump-it is one of the most powerful electromagnetic generators and receivers known, It is, in fact, a highly evolved organ of perception and communication.” Healing takes on a radically old perspective, a point of view that reflects back to our roots of humanity. Most of our time as a species on this planet has been one of connections, recognition of our kinship with plants, stones, mountains, indeed, all aspects of our material plane. Because spirit is not measured, does not mean it is not there. Because we have forgotten our thinking heart, does not mean it does not think.
“So What” — (The question that always got me into trouble in school.) — How does this relate to Oxygen and the tones from its spectra. Do these tones and colors help the body to heal? At this point, I am not sure, though, I am following a feeling that as we find vibrations that are in tune with the elements, we will be able to better resonate with them.
With the colors of the oxygen spectral fingerprint, the reds are the lower tones and as the tones get higher, they move towards the blues and violets. I am enjoying playing with these tones and I am continually fascinated by their inherent consonance. Here a sound sketch of Oxygen.
Pictures by Linda Deslauriers
