(In My) Solitude

 Just gearing up for New Year's Eve with this old Duke Ellington/Billie Holiday tune, performed here with understated beauty by Katie Martucci and Josh Dunn.

And the Devil Knows What

 A snippet of a new polka (or "polska" as they say) by the Danish folk trio, "Dreamers' Circus," whom I love.  The entire song is posted below this preview.  Meanwhile, enjoy both this clip of the guys at work on the song, and the full and completed version below it.

Rainbow Connection

 I don't know how I stumbled upon this one.  A Kermit the Frog song originally written by Paul Williams and Kenny Ascher, played here by real people -- Katie Martucci and Josh Dunn -- at what looks like somebody's unassuming dining room table.  There you go -- real music by real people.  Lyrics below the video.

Why are there so many songs about rainbows?
And what's on the other side?
Rainbows are visions, but only illusions
And rainbows have nothing to hide
So we've been told and some choose to believe it
I know they're wrong, wait and see

Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection
The lovers, the dreamers, and me

Who said that every wish would be heard and answered
When wished on the morning star?
Somebody thought of that and someone believed it
Look what it's done so far
What's so amazing that keeps us stargazing?
And what do we think we might see?

Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection
The lovers, the dreamers, and me

All of us under its spell
We know that it's probably magic

Have you been half asleep?
And have you heard voices?
I've heard them calling my name
Is this the sweet sound that calls the young sailors?
The voice might be one in the same
I've heard it too many times to ignore it
It's something that I'm supposed to be

Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection
The lovers, the dreamers and me
La-da-da, dee-da-da, doo
Ba-da-da-da, da-dee-da, doo

What Changes When Nothing Changes

A moody, ambient piece by Kazuma Okabayashi.

 

Arabesque

Roxane Elfasci again, from her 2021 album, "Hommage a Debussy."

"God's A Different Sword"

 A song by the Folk Bitch Trio, performed for the Stephen Colbert show.  I love how vague this is.  Sometimes the more elusive truths of life are better expressed by skirting around them in just this fashion.  Lyrics below the video:

God’s A Different Sword Lyrics by Folk Bitch Trio

Am I lucky?
Or am I just sane?
Have I been walking round in circles
Always fumbling your name

Heard it quiet
At the bottom of my drawer
A heavy conversation
That I started to ignore

Here I go
Just one more

If I left it
Just a little while
Would these questions turn to answers
In a neat little pile

Could I be good
On my own accord?
Heaven knows I know need it
But God’s a different sword

Here I go
Just one more

I feel better
No, I feel awake
Well, I’ve been lying in a hook net
Just waiting for my break

Can’t deny it
My body keeps the score
But if you tell me that you need it
I can get up off my floor

Here I go
Just one more

Woke up early
Just a rule I’ve laid
Now my future’s written out
On my Sunday dinner plate

Could I be good
On my own accord?
Heaven knows I know need it
But God’s a different sword

Here I go
Just one more

Trust

 I'm not very inclined to trust and perhaps I am not alone in that characteristic.  Be it by our own original nature or through the betrayals of other human beings, fallible as they are, or merely through the incessant pounding and apparent opposition of life itself, we perhaps all experience some measure of loss of the ability to trust as time goes by.

I do have an instinctive trust in fate, as it were; that it will all work out in the end.  However, I don't mean that I believe my life will go as I wish, or even that my life will be in any way happy.  I mean I have a sure sense of faith in the inevitable culmination of my destiny, in a future that may be so far and distant as to be beyond my ability to conceive.  You may call that naive; I call it an instinctive faith in either divinity or simply life itself.  

I work with children.  In doing so, I attempt to provide them with a sense of safety, fun, assurance, and the nearly always unwelcome guidance in their interpersonal interactions with their peers.  I try to create an atmosphere where they feel secure and are willing to take chances and explore.  

I feel life, or God, or divinity, or destiny, fate, or what have you -- does that for me as well, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.  Despite the losses and heartaches of life, I persevere.  I'm stubborn that way.

Here's a little statement by a seeker named Don Stevens who voluntarily affiliated his life with the spiritual figure Meher Baba.  Don's talking in more depth about what I'm trying to convey and he's more articulate than I am, so I'll let his message speak for itself.

But I must say, what Don is really talking about, between the lines, is love.

SENSE OF
SELF-DETERMINATION ANNIHILATED

Don Stevens

 
Sooner or later, each human being must be willing to annihilate for a time his own sense of self-determination in a sense of absolute trust of another*. Only in this manner can there be the opportunity to comb out the snarls of countless accumulated actions in one's nature.

Even when a person is unhappiest, he still has a persistent sense of unconscious hope that his own deliberated actions will one day lead him to success and happiness. Usually it is only the person who has almost entirely ceased to hope who is willing to take the conscious step of annihilating his own ego in the person of another. For in annihilating his ego, he denies the very core of the "right" of free-will, of self-determination, and in that destruction there is bound to go his most stubborn, ego-centered hope for the future.

Once it is gone, he is really at sea. There is no landmark, no point of reliance or help, only that cause or person to whom he has perhaps by now given his allegiance. This is a frightening position and it is no wonder that most people would prefer to trust their own fallible but "visible" sense of self-determination, rather than surrender it to another's possible whims.

There are few people who have reached either such desperation in the successive traps of life, or enlightenment in the inner processes of the heart, to be willing to trust their fate implicitly to another being.

---

*Trust in or identification with another human being is not peculiar to the follower of the guru. It has its modern counterpart in the relation of patient to psychoanalyst, of friend to trusted advisor, of one who loves to the beloved. Such a relation apparently involves a very fundamental principle of nature in which the complexities of self can be attacked at their root only through the loss or lessening of "self" in the being of another.

 

LISTEN, HUMANITY, pp. 232-233, Meher Baba
Narrated and edited by D.E. Stevens
2004 © Avatar Meher Baba Perpetual Public Charitable Trust