Distant Cool Dark

[Video: “Composition Complete Track – Bossa 1,” by Volkmar Studtrucker. See the note
at the foot of this post for details.]

From whiskey river:

Impermanence is not just of philosophical interest. It’s very personal. Until we accept and deeply understand in our very being that things change from moment to moment, and never stop even for one instant, only then can we let go. And when we really let go inside, the relief is enormous. Ironically this gives release to a whole new dimension of love. People think that if someone is unattached, they are cold. But this isn’t true. Anyone who has met very great spiritual masters who are really unattached is immediately struck by their warmth to all beings, not just to the ones they happen to like or are related to. Non-attachment releases something very profound inside us, because it releases that level of fear. We all have so much fear: fear of losing, fear of change, an inability to just accept.

…It’s like a dance. And we have to give each being space to dance their dance. Everything is dancing; even the molecules inside the cells are dancing. But we make our lives so heavy. We have these incredibly heavy burdens we carry with us like rocks in a big rucksack. We think that carrying this big heavy rucksack is our security; we think it grounds us. We don’t realize the freedom, the lightness of just dropping it off, letting it go. That doesn’t mean giving up relationships; it doesn’t mean giving up one’s profession, or one’s family, or one’s home. It has nothing to do with that; it’s not an external change. It’s an internal change. It’s a change from holding on tightly to holding very lightly.

(Jetsumna Tenzin Palmo [source])

…and:

Of Time

Don’t even ask how rapidly the hummingbird
lives his life.
You can’t imagine. A thousand flowers a day,
a little sleep, then the same again, then
he vanishes.
I adore him.

Yet I adore also the drowse of mountains.

And in the human world, what is time?
In my mind there is Rumi, dancing.
There is Li Po drinking from the winter stream.
There is Hafiz strolling through Shiraz, his feet
loving the dust.

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

The coolness of Buddhism isn’t indifference but the distance one gains on emotions, the quiet place from which to regard the turbulence. From far away you see the pattern, the connections, and the thing as whole, see all the islands and the routes between them. Up close it all dissolves into texture and incoherence and immersion, like a face going out of focus just before a kiss.

(Rebecca Solnit [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Autumn Waiting

Cold wind.
The day is waiting for winter
Without a sound.
Everything is waiting—
Broken-down cars in the dead weeds.
The weeds themselves.
Trees.
Even sunlight
Is in no hurry and stays
For a long time
On each cornstalk.
Blackbirds sit in bunches.
From a distance
They are quiet as piles of dark grain
Spilled on the road.

(Tom Hennen [source])

…and:

For Jessica, My Daughter

Tonight I walked,
lost in my own meditation,
and was afraid,
not of the labyrinth
that I have made of love and self
but of the dark and faraway.
I walked, hearing the wind in the trees,
feeling the cold against my skin,
but what I dwelled on
were the stars blazing
in the immense arc of sky.

Jessica, it is so much easier
to think of our lives,
as we move under the brief luster of leaves,
loving what we have,
than to think of how it is
such small beings as we
travel in the dark
with no visible way
or end in sight.

Yet there were times I remember
under the same sky
when the body’s bones became light
and the wound of the skull
opened to receive
the cold rays of the cosmos,
and were, for an instant,
themselves the cosmos,
there were times when I could believe
we were the children of stars
and our words were made of the same
dust that flames in space,
times when I could feel in the lightness of breath
the weight of a whole day
come to rest.

But tonight
it is different.
Afraid of the dark
in which we drift or vanish altogether,
I imagine a light
that would not let us stray too far apart,
a secret moon or mirror,
a sheet of paper,
something you could carry
in the dark
when I am away.

(Mark Strand [source])

…and:

The Day After — Without Us

The morning is expected to be cool and foggy.
Rainclouds
will move in from the west.
Poor visibility.
Slick highways.

Gradually as the day progresses
high pressure fronts from the north
make local sunshine likely.
Due to winds, though, sometimes strong and gusty,
sun may give way to storms.

At night
clearing across the country,
with a slight chance of precipitation
only in the southeast.
Temperatures will drop sharply,
while barometric readings rise.

The next day
Promises to be sunny,
although those still living
should bring umbrellas.

(Wislawa Symborska [source])

_________________________

About the video: the “About” section of the YouTube video’s page says:

A binary star system in the constellation of Hydra has been emitting powerful X-rays. After travelling for 200 years, these X-rays were received by NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory.

Wanda Diaz Merced, a blind scientist working at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, used the computer program “xSonify” to convert the X- rays into a sequence of tones. Gerhard Sonnert, of the same institution, had the idea to turn these audible X-rays into music and offered it to the composer Volkmar Studtrucker.

You can read more about this X-rays-to-music project, as I did, starting with an article at the Smithsonian Magazine site. Be sire to listen not only to the finished composition snippets there, but to the raw original “transcription”; it’s quite beautiful in its own right.  (And I have to say, just knowing that someone is actually named Volkmar Studtrucker makes me, for one, very happy.)

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