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He comes on stage, folds his hands in greeting, sits down. The light shining on him is too bright, too harsh. It won’t allow his magic to take root, grow, flow. They have to be dimmed. There, that’s right. Just enough so we can discern his form in still motion, and the expressions that arise and ebb on his mercurial face.
Silence hovers over the crowd like a krishna-hued monsoon cloud, heavy with anticipation. It’s rumbling with thunder now, unable to contain its own fullness. As his voice, and his hands, move from the earth to the sky, the cloud bursts into warm flashes of rain, drenching us with the furious beauty, the momentous suddenness, of his music.
Somewhere deep within, a snake uncoils and frees itself, rising all the way to the crown chakra.
Somewhere in the universe, a sun implodes.
Somewhere in the ocean, a pearl forms.
Somewhere in our collective consciousness, love begins. Once again.
A solitary tear
clings to the edge
of my left eye
for the longest while…
until I coax it
onto my finger
and hold it up to light…
Have you ever
seen sorrow
luminous and bright
and pain transformed
to unbearable delight?
Yesterday I heard the song of the humpback whale. It really was musical! In the sense that we human beings understand. It had a particular rhythm and harmony, and there was definitely some conveying of feelings in those series and phrases in whale voice.
Listening to the sounds made by these awesome creatures drew me deep underwater, surrounded by miles and miles of ocean. A primeval dawn, a raw interconnectedness. The beginning of evolution when a flaming earth forces all life undersea. A time rich in potential, when everything is newborn or unborn.
The whales sing to each other, conveying who knows what? Scientists as usual try and reduce everything to survival needs. Oh, it is a mating song, they say. Then, when faced with female whales’ indifference to it, it is identified as some sort of exchange of information between male whales.
Why, I ask. Why cannot it be a way of creating, enabling, inducing, sharing beauty? Why do human beings think beauty and art and intelligence are their sole preserves, and that every other creature, whether it is whales singing or dolphins playing or birds lining their nests with flowers, must do so out of some compulsion to survive, win in the rat race as it were? It is indeed the tyranny of humanity, the apex of anthropomorphism.
In all of this, when humanity’s progress has all but destroyed the earth and its delicate life-networks, I throw in my lot with the whales. Something tells me they’ll be singing into the oceanic dusk long after all of us have vanished in a mushroom cloud. Or a heat haze. Something or the other. We are good at that. Creative, even. Hey, give me the whales’ creativity any day.
