Hah! Okay! Here I am! Whew… it’s taken a long time to land. I actually started a blog post a couple of weeks ago and I left it too long without hitting “Save” and it all disappeared! So I am going to keep this one short. My intention for the next few weeks is to write short blog posts at least a couple of times a week- hopefully even more frequently and get somehwat caught up on tracking my amazing year- and hopefully include lots of sound illumination in here as well. The world is crazy, busy and very full!
I am not a newshound, by any stretch of the imagination, but I have to say that I have felt a need to at least keep an eye on the headlines so I have a sense of what’s going on, at the same time trying to stay detached and not get too work up about it all. I’m not going to get political here, beyond saying that I needed a break from all of the news and craziness a couple of days ago. I was putting things away in my kitchen so I put music on YouTube instead of… the other scary stuff! My TV is hooked up to a good sound system so sometimes it’s a great way to listen to music.
The first thing I came across was an extended version of Max Richter’s On The Nature of Daylight, the incredibly beautiful soundtrack to Arrival. I was so happy to be able to listen to it for a full 20 minutes. I think I could really listen to it for hours on end.
That was followed by a piece by Ólafur Arnalds, Only The Winds, which has an accompanying video/short film that is completely hypnotic- poetry in sound and motion.
And finally, I listened to a beautiful composition by Arvo Pärt called Silentium, which begins and ends with the sound of falling snow, one of the most precious sounds of near stillness. A sound when you step outside and hear it, when you step into it, that brings the inner being naturally into a deep quiet place. You want to listen to it.
What I want to share about all of this is that each piece of music, one following the other brought me so much calm and so much peace, as well as happiness and gratitude and simple remembrance of the beauty contained in each moment, something that is so easy to miss in a world filled with noise and which seems at times more chaotic than ever.
Take a break. Take a listen. Drop in to your Self for a little while.