One of the ways I prepare for a restorative workshop is to spend some time looking for new music to play quietly in the background to enhance the fullness of the experience. In the past couple of days, I have enjoyed listening to quite a quantity of new and new to me music appropriate for my upcoming Finding the Warmth Inside: Relax Into Optimal Alignment with Anusara Restoratives on February 25th at Willow Street Yoga Center (click on the link for details and to register). Among the music I downloaded, which I am thoroughly enjoying (though it might be too upbeat for the restorative workshop playlist), is C.C. White’s “This is Soul Kirtan.”
As I was listening at my desk and swaying to the beat, I thought about the non-dual tantric philosophical principle that exhorts us to find the good in everything, to recognize that in all there is still a “divine” spark that is expressed in the creative effulgence of the universe itself. The music is joyous, delightful, offered with love, delivered with a high degree of professionalism–both the musical performance and the recording and presentation. I tried to fathom just how many centuries of human migration, suffering, oppression, bigotry, and then fighting for tolerance, education, equal rights, spirit, and freedom had to occur for this music to be able to exist at all and to be published and embraced, it being an extravagant blend of Indian spiritual/religious practice, American soul and blues (and all its history), and classical Western musical technique.
I didn’t buy a coffee mug, but I did take the picture. If only remembering was as easy as buying a souvenir. Memory, though, it much more ephemeral. I’ll remember this day. Sometimes I will deliberately recall it. Sometimes, images will come unbidden as something triggers a memory, just as the solicitation by a friend last week to support an orphanage in Peru brought back the thought of 9/11. I had been in Peru at the retreat center that supports the orphanage when the planes hit the World Trade Center. I hope for news tomorrow of the imminent closing of Guantanamo to start reshaping our relationship to 9/11.
