What is this music for?

You can listen to this here:

It seems to me that us humans are an amazing little species that has lost its way. That’s forgotten its place, forgotten our place in the family of things. Somehow we are pouring millions of hours of sewage into our rivers and burning things that fill the air with toxic chemicals, spilling our blood and the blood of many living things. All for the illusion of control and safety. So these songs that we’re writing and singing are for me kind of a cultural medicine. For me, personally.

These songs help me remember the river is sacred. That the moon who has composed cycles with her body, which runs the tide and menstrual cycles and the trees are sacred. The plants, that turn light into food that we and all other beings might live. With all of this, these songs are in a play. They’re in a relationship. They are helping me remember that I am part of this divine play. All of this is one infinite being, as Rupert Spira says. looking and speaking and dancing with me.

So they’re a bridge, I suppose, these songs. They’re a bridge to remember my place in the family of things, like the poem wild geese by Mary Oliver. And my place in the family of things is not in the centre of the natural world that can just take whatever I please without consequence. My place is as a member of a great family of beings – of plants and tree and chicken and river and moon and lake, of star and sun and all of this dreamt by the Supreme beloved, the divine friend, dreamt, breathed into being, and here when I’m remembering that that this voice is his voice, her voice, their voice; that this body belongs to Him. That this heart belongs to the goddess, and is hers.

This is sanity for me. This is a sanity that is harder to shake than the sanity of nationhood or race or religion. It’s a universal sanity. It’s a sanity that would be true on this planet and on any planet, in any place, in heaven or in hell. So that’s what these songs are. I hope they’re like that for you. Maybe they’re not. Maybe there’s something else for you. I’d love to hear if they’re something else for you. They are the medicine of remembering and if we are to move forward as a species, we must learn, I feel – well, I must learn, anyway – to let go of my littleness. My identification and my grasping with the small power of being in control of my life and knowing what’s right. And this is devotion, this is Bhakti: where everything that I am and everything that I’m experiencing is open to unconditional presence, to the aliveness of being. The songs help me get to that position where I can let love in, and receive love into fear and grief and terror, and let it move where it will.

But this is not just an individualist experience. My experience of this receiving is that when that I receive divine love, as much as I have the courage to receive, it extends. It extends outwards, quite naturally in spontaneous, surprising, humourous, playful ways to my family and friends and to strangers and the natural world. ‘The natural world’- that’s such an interesting bit of language. The world of Non-human persons, let’s say.

So I don’t know who will hear or read this. I don’t know what its’ purpose is, but it feels good to say it out loud. And I guess it’s kind of a prayer. It’s a prayer out loud to God. To Baba. that he would protect me that the divine presence would protect this little mind from confusion or attachment or grasping. And especially when I’m leading Kirtan (which feels like an outrageous, outrageous thing to do. To lead. To lead other human beings into the Holy of Holies, and to do it as the imperfect being that I am, rash and prideful, and impulsive. And, of course, like the rest of this glorious and majestic, mysterious.) That especially when I’m leading, that I Remember. That I remember my place in the family of things. That it be a prayer, that it be a nourishing, that it be medicinal, that it be joyous, that it helps people remember that they are not alone. That they are not a meagre being. That the great is with them, as Shri Shri Anandamurti sings in his poetry. Mote it be be so, Arwen, Amen.

Shanti.

Deva