music and survival

~ Alice Herz-Sommer

At age 110, Alice Herz-Sommer the world’s oldest pianist and oldest holocaust survivor, retains an unshakeable faith in the beauty of life and humanity, not unlike an awestruck child. She maintains that even the bad is beautiful, for it is part of life. To this day, Alice lives alone in her North London home, and practices the piano each day for two hours in the morning and two in the afternoon. People from everywhere come to listen outside of her building. She is the ‘lady in number six’. To claim that music is and has always been her salvation would be an understatement, in Alice’s own words:

“I felt that this is the only thing which helps me to have hope… a sort of religion, actually.

Music is God."

"I knew that even in this very difficult situation, there are beautiful moments... even the bad is beautiful."

 [ also known as Alice Sommer (26 November 1903 – 23 February 2014), was a Prague-born Jewish pianist, music teacher, and supercentenarian who survived Theresienstadt concentration camp. She lived for 40 years in Israel, before migrating to London in 1986, where she resided until her death, and at the age of 110 was the world's oldest known Holocaust survivor until Yisrael Kristal was recognized as such. Kristal was also a Holocaust survivor, and was born two months before Herz-Sommer ]

~ from Wikipedia

glide

The soul, then, being thus inwardly recollected in

God or before God, now and then becomes so

sweetly attentive to the goodness of her well-beloved,

that her attention seems not to her to be attention, so

purely and delicately is it exercised; as it happens

to certain rivers, which glide so calmly and smoothly that

beholders and such as float upon them, seem neither to 

see not feel any motion, because the waters are not

seen to ripple or flow at all.

~ Saint Francis de Sales

from An Introduction to the Devout Life 

silence and meditation

One day some people came to a solitary monk  . 

They asked him:

"What is the meaning of silence and meditation? "

The monk was just the scooping of water 

from a deep well. 

He said to his visitors: 

"Look into the well. What do you see?" 

The people looked into the deep well and responded: 

"We see nothing!"

The monk put down his bucket. 

After a short while, he urged the people once more: 

"Look into the well! 

What do you see now? " 

The people looked down again: 

"Now we see ourselves!" 

"You could not see anything," replied the monk, 

"Because the water was restless as your life. 

But now it's quiet. 

This is what the silence gives us : one sees himself "

Then the monk told the people to wait a while. 

Finally, he asked them: 

"And now look again into the well. 

What do you see? " 

The man looked down.

"Now we see the stones on the bottom of the well." 

The monk said: 

"This is the experience of silence and meditation. 

If you wait long enough, you can see the reason of all things. "

~ author unknown

inner wildness

Our bodies are wild. The involuntary quick turn of the head at a shout, 
the vertigo at looking off a precipice, the heart-in-the-throat 
in a moment of danger, the catch of the breath, the quiet moments 
relaxing, staring, reflecting – all universal responses of this mammal body… 

The body does not require the intercession of some conscious intellect 
to make it breathe, to keep the heart beating. It is to a great extent self-regulating,
 it is a life of its own. The world is our consciousness, and it surrounds us.
 There are more things in the mind, in the imagination, 
than ‘you’ can keep track of – thoughts, memories, images,
 angers, delights, rise unbidden. The depths of the mind, the unconscious, 
are our inner wilderness areas, and that is where a bobcat is right now. 

I do not mean personal bobcats in personal psyches, but the bobcat that roams
 from dream to dream. The conscious agenda-planning ego occupies
 a very tiny territory, a little cubicle somewhere near the gate, keeping track
 of some of what goes in and out, and the rest takes care of itself. 
The body is, so to speak, in the mind. They are both wild.

~ Gary Snyder

from The Practice of the Wild

kindness

 



I used to be libertarian. I used to be atheist. I used to want America to be more atheist libertarian.
All my voting, preaching, discussing and complaining reflected those desires. I'm still libertarian and atheist, and now I'm vegan to boot, but none of that matters any more. I no longer care.
All I want out of America now is kindness. That's all. The past few years have filled too many of our friends and neighbors with hate, and it breaks my heart. Some people started acting hateful, crazy and nasty so that they could win, and then people who disagreed with them acted the same way. They disagree in content but agree wholeheartedly in tone. 

So many of us now agree with the message of hate, and play "ideology" as team sports. The message doesn't matter when the medium is hate. My friends who work on TV, people I love personally, are using a tone and a meanness in their jobs that they never used before. Is hate where the money is? I don't know if fighting fire with fire actually works, but I do know that fighting hate with hate never works. 

It makes me cry. I've read about family members not invited to Thanksgiving because of political disagreements! The Clash sang "anger can be power" and I believed it. Maybe I still believe it, but maybe I don't want power any more. Can't we replace the word "evil" with the word "wrong?" Everyone is wrong sometimes and nobody is evil ever. The America I want is kind to people who are wrong. 

I'm like a dog, I don't hear words anymore, I just hear tone. Anyone whose tone is kind will get my complete support. Libertarian, Democrat, Republican, Socialist, Green . . . anything else you got. I've always been left out of team sports. I don't want to win enough. I'm not part of a team, I'm part of humanity. I want kindness. There's no other team for me. Let's love each other, and then discuss how to run our country together. 

~ Penn Jillette, of Penn & Teller

 with thanks to fivebranchtree

love amid owl cries

It is not
the altar that matters,
not that,
nor the shape
that is found there.
The ghostly ideas
come and go, one after another.
But the place endures.
The fact that there is a door.




~ Jane Hirshfield