Art, Music and Levity

Tags

art, levity, music, spiritchat, spirituality

The ability of art and music to transport us into realms of lightness and levity in our heart is well known to many, if not all of us. The use of art and music in religious and spiritual practices is also well established over the millenia. Our deep, enriching experiences with these two mediums may even define many pivotal moments of our personal lives.

It is the personal nature of what we consider to be art – the scope of its breadth and depth – that attracts us to it. The same breadth and depth of attraction also applies to music. The line between “art” and “non-art”, between “music” and “noise”, is very thin, and very subjective. It is perhaps this freedom of subjectivity that has attracted many a famous “objective” person of the sciences to also excel in these mediums – Leonardo da Vinci and Michael Faraday come to mind.

As I reflected on what is it that represent art and music to me, bring me levity, some thoughts from my sitting and walking, came to heart. I share them here with you…

• Life’s music is like the ebb and flow of the rain – and the percussion it creates is the sound of the infinite
• Light rain on leaves – the same leaves that seemingly grew overnight, right before my eyes
• Symphony of birds in the pre-dawn hours, coming to a crescendo, just before sunrise
• Church bells in the distance, in harmony with the morning rain, the bird sounds
• Sound of sunrise – which silences the birds – perhaps they are dumbstruck by its beauty…
• Arrival of geese in the nearby lake, immediately after sunrise – they come in pairs, every few minutes 
• After sunrise, a single bird starts the symphony anew – and one by one – the forest comes alive again
• The whoosh of the wind through the trees flanking me on both sides, as I silently walk the path
• The hopping of a robin – what sound does it make?
• The sound and beauty of a leaf falling into the temporary lagoons created by rain…
• The shaking off of last night’s rain by the leaves, as the drops cascade down several layers of branches 
• The singing of my mothers and grandmothers in their native tongue (Punjabi) in their prayer rooms…

I notice that most of the above examples of art and music are from nature… which is perhaps appropriate because so many artists and musicians through the ages have been inspired by nature. What inspires you to create and appreciate art and music? Does art inspire you more than music – or is it the other way around? In your spiritual practice(s), do you find yourself incorporating more of art or more of music? What role do art and music play in your personal healing? If you were allowed to take the art/music of two favorite artists/musicians to a deserted island, which would you choose? Just thinking about these questions gives me a sense of lightness, of levity – how about you?!

I invite you to share with us, here in the comments, and in the weekly #SpiritChat conversation on twitter – Sunday, May 15th 2016 at 9amET(USA)/1pmUTC. We continue our broad theme of “Lightness and Levity” for the month of May, with Art and Music. Join us 🙂

Kumud @AjmaniK

“Heart” Artwork by my daughter – A.J.A.

Mothers, Levity and Laughter

Tags

laughter, levity, motherhood, mothers, mothersday

For many adults, the connection of mothers and motherhood to levity and laughter is not easy to find. In the complexity and gravity of the mother-child relationships, the lighter side often gets obscured, if not lost. But, if we dig a bit deeper into our awareness, the flower-seeds of our mother’s laughter is indeed to be discovered. We may have to go back to our mother’s childhood, as is revealed in the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore:

“Where have I come from, where did you pick me up?“ the baby asked its mother.

She answered half crying, half laughing, and clasping the baby to her breast —

You were hidden in my heart as its desire, my darling.

You were in the dolls of my childhood’s games;

In all my hopes and my loves, in my life, in the life of my mother you have lived.

In the lap of the deathless Spirit who rules our home you have been nursed for ages.

When in girlhood my heart was opening its petals, you hovered as a fragrance about it.

Your tender softness bloomed in my youthful limbs, like a glow in the sky before the sunrise.

Heaven’s first darling, twin-born with the morning light, you have floated down the stream of the world’s life, and at last you have stranded on my heart.

As I gaze on your face, mystery overwhelms me; you who belong to all have become mine.

– Rabindranath Tagore in The Crescent Moon

So, what if we were to go back to the moment when our mother was born. To imagine her as a young toddler, learning to walk, full of life and laughter and play. To think of her as a teenager trying to find her place in the world, with all the hopes and dreams that come with being ‘oh so young’ and naive. What if we were to think of her as she experienced her first ‘falling in and love’ and her ‘first heart-break’? Were her fears and hopes and prayers that much different than what we have for those that we ourselves hold dear to our heart? Surely, she laughed and cried and walked barefoot in the grass and smiled the same way at the first onset of spring’s flowers as we do today.

But then, something changed when the spirit of That girl started feeling the effects of the added responsibilities of life – and That spirit full of life and laughter, of defying gravity, of wearing flowers in her hair and singing like nobody was listening, of dancing in the first monsoon rain like nobody was watching – got buried somewhere deep under the weight of that single word. Mother. For not every girl is adequately equipped to treat that word with levity and unbridled joy.

And how do I know that all of this levity and laughter was within Her all along? I know it from the sparkle in her tone when she would ask me about her granddaughter during our weekly phone calls. I know it from the friends that she used to ‘card-shark’ during her weekly games of gin-rummy (yes, they told me all about it – your secret is out, Mom :)). I know it from her delight in eating fresh strawberries and chikki on our day trips into the local mountain resorts of Mahableshwar and Khandala. I know it from the stories they – my birth mother and her sister who raised me – shared about their childhood days in Lahore and Chandni Chowk…

The gravity and responsibility that surrounds ‘motherhood’ often forms many an opaque layer that hides the levity and laughter of the girls and boys (their surely are many fathers in ‘mother’ roles). Maybe it is up to us to poke some holes in these layers and shine a different, lighter light through them. If we still have the opportunity, we can invite our mothers to tell us some of their ‘young girl’ stories… and tell them some of ours.

For, in every new story told, like every new spring rain, lies the potential for new seeds of love and laughter to grow.

Thank you Mom, for telling me some of your stories. I can pass on your childhood pranks to your granddaughter 🙂

Namaste,

Kumud

P.S. Join us Sunday, May 8th 2016 at 9amET(USA)/1pmUTC for our weekly twitter chat in #SpiritChat – bring some light-hearted stories about your mother. If you are a ‘mother’, bring some light-hearted stories about your motherhood. Thank you, and enjoy the flowers 🙂

A beautiful, related post, full of light and levity – by @LisaLKahn – My Mother’s Sanctuary

On Light and Levity

Tags

levity, light, lightness, perspective, spirtuality

Two books – “Questions for the Dalai Lama” (library digital edition) and “The Mastery of Love” (library analog edition) merged into a powerful stream this week. “Light and Levity” emerged from reading them concurrently and alternately, interspersed with a few notes from walking among the profusion of Life springing up in some new areas of the local forest…

And then one day we will wake up and decide that we are done with punishing them for their long past mistake(s). We have been carrying this burden of being judge and jury for as long as we can remember. They may no longer even be the person that we think or imagine they were. For all intents and purposes, the person who heaped all that hurt and pain and suffering and grief upon us, all of which was justifiable and (still may be) very real for us – may be long ‘dead’ and gone. Yet, we remain. Transfixed by the past.

We may not admit it, but, to a large extent, we all choose the burdens that we wish to carry – and we have been carrying some of these burdens for so long that they have become part of our identity. We cannot imagine our forward motion or movement without this burden. The burden lowers our center of gravity and may even give us (temporary) added stability, like the sandbags that we throw in the back of our trucks to give us traction on icy pavements. But, is winter not yet over for us? Did we forget that it is spring time, the ice has melted, and that it’s okay to shed those sandbags which do not serve any more purpose?

Yes. Gravity has a purpose, but so does levity. When gravity threatens to whelm us, wash our joys away in an emotional current like the swiftly moving river swollen temporarily with overnight rain carrying away everything in her path – levity and light can be a safe haven for us.

We can choose a different perspective. We can choose to lighten our burden and reframe our vision. Instead of looking down upon ourselves in gravity, or looking behind at the hurts and pains of our past, we can reframe our view. We can bridge the wisdom of levity with the compassion of the future.

A change in perspective is often our friend. It can remind us to be kind to our own selves, to treat our own selves with a bit less gravity and a bit more levity. Consider: if we forget how to occasionally laugh at our own selves and smile at our own infirmities and frailties, how will we find the courage to chose to lighten our dead-weight burdens?

Light and levity beckon to us. They are like the steps leading up to ‘Indian Hill’ that come into view as we round the blind corner on the trail, on a day when we had only planned to ‘walk the flats’ to rest our aching feet from a week of walking the forest…

What is a seeker to do when invited? To climb or not to climb? Is That even a question?! Do I even need to describe the new light and levity gained from walking the forest at the top of That hill?

Kumud

P.S. Join us in #SpiritChat Sunday May 1st at 9amET (USA) / 1pm UTC for our weekly twitter gathering ~ Topic: Light and Levity ~ Hosted by @AjmaniK ~ Light, Levity, Lightness and Perspective will be our themes for May…