A Handful of Beauty

Nice name, isnt it? I wish we could always see beauty around us, but that seems very hard now & then. I guess my friend G. and I have been on parallel quests of a similar nature - trying to find things that can calm us down every now & then, that can help us stop, listen to ourselves and the endless expanse above and beyond us...something that can help us make peace with things happening around us, things that we cannot control...G. mentioned a poem by Robert Frost called "Acceptance":

When the spent sun throws up its rays on cloud
And goes down burning into the gulf below,
No voice in nature is heard to cry aloud
At what has happened. Birds, at least, must know
It is the change to darkness in the sky.
Murmuring something quiet in her breast,
One bird begins to close a faded eye;
Or overtaken too far from his nest,
Hurrying low above the grove, some waif
Swoops just in time to his remembered tree.
At most he thinks or twitters softly, "Safe"!
Now let the night be dark for all of me.
Let the night be too dark for me to see
Into the future. Let what will be, be.

Isnt it quite profound? Beautiful lines indeed.

I came across this album called A Handful of Beauty, one of the first albums of Shakti. In the 1970’s critics thought John McLaughlin had committed commercial suicide by abandoning electric instruments and Western sensibilities in favor of an all-acoustic group with Indian musicians. In fact, record sales for this group, Shakti, were quite disappointing. Sometimes though, a musician has to follow his inner feeling. In this case, McLaughlin was led to create a very fertile groundbreaking group in the form of Shakti. John was heavily influenced by Indian art & music and a great follower of Sri Chinmoy. In fact, it was Sri Chinmoy who suggested the name Mahavishnu Orchestra - one of the fusion groups John started, and arguably thought as the finest fusion rock group.

A Handful of Beauty has some memerising compositions. L. Shankar with his unique 5 string - violin and John McLaughlin are brilliant as usual and it also has one of the most amazing percussion duets I have heard - between Zakir Hussain and Vikku (T.H. Vinayakram). Simply superb. I wish I could see this in a live concert.

I simply have to write about Lotus Feet from the album Remember Shakti, a revival of the original Shakti group which happened in the 1990s and included the brilliant U. Shrinivas on the mandolin. Lotus Feet is this supremely sublime composition by U.Shrinivas, John McLaughlin & Zakir. It is actually a much slower one as compared to the other Shakti compositions, and requires much more attentive listening to appreciate it. I have listened to it hundreds of times, and it still has an amazing calming effect on my senses.

Life

Isnt life fragile, miraculous, beautiful, ironic...all at the same time? We all go through ups and downs, but once in a while, somethings happen that make me wonder - why? Why do we all go through these moments, experiences that dont seem to make sense? Why do the most noble people suffer? Why are kids born in abject poverty? What have they done to deserve that? I was reading an article in one of my old issues of National Geographic - there was a picture of a small kid, Panneer, in one of the silk farms of Kancheepuram. The kid was hardly 10 years old, he works more than 14 hours a day, winding threads for silk sarees. His fingers bleed. His body is being poisoned by dye. There was a picture of another kid, about the same age, half submerged under a car, working as a mechanic in a garage - he works all day, every day, doesnt get paid, nor gets any rest. I had no idea there are 27 million slaves in the world, like this, all over us, around us. Some 15-20 million are debt slaves in India, Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh - slaves all their lives working off debts. Sometimes largely invisible, sometimes a part of the fabric of our every day lives. The article went on & on, I skipped sections - it was too painful to even read.

For the last few days, I have been thinking about my friend G. One of her friends, in what was a really cruel twist of fate, lost their baby just 3 weeks before she was born. Just a few months earlier, another of her friends had to make a decision to pull their 7 month old baby off the heart lung machine after a open heart surgery after doctors gave up hope. I try to pray everyday they somehow find solace, strength to pick up their lives.

I dont know what to make of life. Maybe that is the way it has to be - and we just accept it in all its colours. I went through some parts of Siddhartha (by Herman Hesse), and I felt a bit quietened.

Siddhartha learned from the river how to listen, to listen with a still heart, with a waiting, open soul, without passion, without desire, without judgement, without opinions.
"Have you learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time? That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere, and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past, nor the shadow of the future? When I learned that, I reviewed my life and it was also a river, and Siddartha the boy, Siddhartha the mature man and Siddhartha the old man, were only separated by shadows, not through reality. Siddhartha's previous lives were also not in the past, and his death and his return to Brahma are not in the future. Nothing was, nothing will be, everything has reality and presence."

Was then not all sorrow in time, all self-torment and fear in time? Were not all difficulties and evil in the world conquered as soon as one conquered time, as soon as one dispelled time?

He felt that this love, this blind love for his son, was a very human passion, that it was Samsara, a troubled spring of deep water. At the same time, he felt that it was not worthless, that it was necessary, that it came from his own nature. This emotion, this pain, these follies also had to be experienced. He no longer felt alienated from normal people. Their vanities, desires, and trivialities no longer seemed absurd to him; they had become understandable, lovable and even worthy of respect. There was the blind love of a mother for her child, the blind foolish pride of a fond father for his only son, the admiration of a man for a woman. All these simple, foolish, yet tremondously strong, vital, passionate urges and desires no longer seemed trivial to Siddhartha. For their sake he saw people live and do great things, travel, conduct wars, suffer and endure immensely, and he loved them for it. He saw life, vitality, the indestructible and Brahman in all their desires and needs. These people were worthy of love and admiration in their blind loyality, in their blind strength and tenacity. With the exception of one small thing, one tiny little thing, they lacked nothing that the sage and thinker had, and that was the consciousness of the unity of all life. And many a time Siddhartha even wondered this knowledge, this thought, was of such great value. The men of the world were equal to the thinkers in every other respect and were often superior to them, just as animals in their tenacious undeviating actions in cases of necessity may often seem superior to human beings.

Within Siddhartha there slowly grew and ripened the knowledge of what wisdom really was and the goal of his long seeking. It was nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life.