This is a beautiful piece about how music really works. Read it, then go make some music!
Ana
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Posted on March 11, 2009 by fttgreenroom
Karl Paulnack, pianist and director of music division at Boston Conservatory, gave this fantastic welcome address to this year’s freshman class:

Karl Paulnack
“One of my parents’ deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not properly value me as a musician, that I wouldn’t be appreciated. I had very good grades in high school, I was good in science and math, and they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer, I might be more appreciated than I would be as a musician. I still remember my mother’s remark when I announced my decision to apply to music school-she said, “You’re WASTING your SAT scores.” On some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value of music was, what its purpose was. And they LOVED music, they listened to classical music all the time. They just weren’t really clear about its function. So let me talk about that a little bit, because we live in a society that puts music in the “arts and entertainment” section of the newspaper, and serious music, the kind your kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment, in fact it’s the opposite of entertainment. Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works.The first people to understand how music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you; the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this works.
One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940. Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940, sent across Germany in a cattle car and imprisoned in a concentration camp.
He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose. There were three other musicians in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist, and Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.
Given what we have since learned about life in the concentration camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture-why would anyone bother with music? And yet-from the camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn’t just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, “I am alive, and my life has meaning.”
On September 12, 2001, I was a resident of Manhattan. That morning I reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the world. I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice as was my daily routine; I did it by force of habit, without thinking about it. I lifted the cover on the keyboard, and opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my hands off the keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter? Isn’t this completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless. Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs a piano player right now? I was completely lost.
And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journey of getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, and in fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano again. And then I observed how we got through the day.
At least in my neighborhood, we didn’t shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We didn’t play cards to pass the time, we didn’t watch TV, we didn’t shop, we most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity that I saw in New York, that same day, was singing. People sang. People sang around fire houses, people sang “We Shall Overcome”. Lots of people sang America the Beautiful. The first organized public event that I remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief, our first communal response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular, that very night. From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part of “arts and entertainment” as the newspaper section would have us believe. It’s not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can’t with our minds.
Some of you may know Samuel Barber’s heartwrenchingly beautiful piece, “Adagio for Strings”. If you don’t know it by that name, then some of you may know it as the background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie Platoon, a film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn’t know you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what’s really going on inside us the way a good therapist does.
I bet that you have never been to a wedding where there was absolutely no music. There might have been only a little music, there might have been some really bad music, but I bet you there was some music. And something very predictable happens at weddings-people get all pent up with all kinds of emotions, and then there’s some musical moment where the action of the wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or something. And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn’t good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of the people who are going to cry at a wedding cry a couple of moments after the music starts. Why? The Greeks. Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we feel even when we can’t talk about it. Can you imagine watching Indiana Jones or Superman or Star Wars with the dialogue but no music? What is it about the music swelling up at just the right moment in ET so that all the softies in the audience start crying at exactly the same moment? I guarantee you if you showed the movie with the music stripped out, it wouldn’t happen that way. The Greeks: Music is the understanding of the relationship between invisible internal objects.
I’ll give you one more example, the story of the most important concert of my life. I must tell you I have played a little less than a thousand concerts in my life so far. I have played in places that I thought were important. I like playing in Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed playing in Paris; it made me very happy to please the critics in St. Petersburg. I have played for people I thought were important; music critics of major newspapers, foreign heads of state. The most important concert of my entire life took place in a nursing home in Fargo, North Dakota, about 4 years ago.
I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We began, as we often do, with Aaron Copland’s Sonata, which was written during World War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland’s, a young pilot who was shot down during the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about the pieces we are going to play rather than providing them with written program notes. But in this case, because we began the concert with this piece, we decided to talk about the piece later in the program and to just come out and play the music without explanation.
Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was clearly a soldier - even in his 70’s, it was clear from his buzz-cut hair, square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his life in the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone would be moved to tears by that particular movement of that particular piece, but it wasn’t the first time I’ve heard crying in a concert and we went on with the concert and finished the piece.
When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to talk about both the first and second pieces, and we described the circumstances in which the Copland was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed pilot. The man in the front of the audience became so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium. I honestly figured that we would not see him again, but he did come backstage afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.
What he told us was this: “During World War II, I was a pilot, and I was in an aerial combat situation where one of my team’s planes was hit. I watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes which had engaged us returned and machine gunned across the parachute chords so as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop away into the ocean, realizing that he was lost. I have not thought about this for many years, but during that first piece of music you played, this memory returned to me so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I didn’t understand why this was happening, why now, but then when you came out to explain that this piece of music was written to commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could handle. How does the music do that? How did it find those feelings and those memories in me?
Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between internal objects. This concert in Fargo was the most important work I have ever done. For me to play for this old soldier and help him connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect their memories of their lost friends, to help him remember and mourn his friend, this is my work. This is why music matters.
What follows is part of the talk I will give to this year’s freshman class when I welcome them a few days from now. The responsibility I will charge your sons and daughters with is this:
“If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you’d take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at two AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you’re going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft.
You’re not here to become an entertainer, and you don’t have to sell yourself. The truth is you don’t have anything to sell; being a musician isn’t about dispensing a product, like selling used Chevies. I’m not an entertainer; I’m a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You’re here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.
Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don’t expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that’s what we do.

Stand By Me

This is a thank you SHOUT-OUT to everyone who has stood by me through thick and thin. My gratitude knows no bounds. Click on the title above, sit back and enjoy yourself for five minutes. A friend sent this along today, and I'm hoping you'll pass it on to your friends and family, encourage them to send it to their friends, and make everybody's day a little brighter.

Thank you all.

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.
~ Albert Schweitzer

You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink. ~ G. K. Chesterton

To educate yourself for the feeling of gratitude means to take nothing for granted, but to always seek out and value the kind that will stand behind the action. Nothing that is done for you is a matter of course. Everything originates in a will for the good, which is directed at you. Train yourself never to put off the word or action for the expression of gratitude. ~ Albert Schweitzer

"Blessed are those that can give without remembering and receive without forgetting."
~ Author Unknown

Rejoicing on Ash Wednesday

Once upon a time,
in the smokiest church
during mud season,
while hotel whistlers
and taxi horns
blew notes into the wind,
Signore Allegri looked
down from heaven
through roof, blue ceiling,
golden stars, and smoke.
He smiled as the sound
of the choir rose in greeting.

Because I do not hope
to turn and see quizzical faces,
in the choir, on Fifth Avenue,
or the commuter train
home from Grand Central,
because I cannot imagine a
more revolutionary, happy act
on the day of ash and dust,
because I look forward to such every year,
yet fear it was once, for all time,
as those best things often are,

Because I hope that time is always time:
enough time to finish the unfinished
yet remain open, playful,
loving, and compassionate -
I rejoice in all things, still,
and in all still things; and
I rejoice, having had two dots
and a curved line below them
placed upon my forehead,
in church on Ash Wednesday.

*Apologies to tse

25 Really Random Thoughts

1) One summer, I practiced flying by running from one telephone pole to the next, and then taking off and flying to the next pole. Then I switched to drugs, to see if that made it any easier.

2) When I was 12, I used to go to the Ross Nursing Home on Saturday mornings with TC, and we'd play and sing for the residents. I wonder whatever happened to her. Her momma took her outta public school because she got caught kissin' on a black boy. I thought they looked very cute together.

3) I was arrested at the Pentagon in the late 1970s for throwing blood and ashes (with Philip Berrigan and a group of students). I went to court and was found not guilty only because I thought to ask to see the evidence against me, which the arresting officer (Elliott) neglected to bring to court. I felt guilty about not going to jail for a long time.

4) I've just signed a contract to sell my house, so it's time to look for an apartment, some moving boxes, and a couple of strong men.

5) In the last three years, I've lost my grandmother Ana Maria, my dear friend and patron Anne, my job of 15 years, my partner of 17 years, and my house. Anybody want a dog? Or, will someone please turn off the spigot? It's amazing to me that I haven't really lost the first two. They pop up all the time.

6) I'm a Sagittarius with Aquarius rising. The rest of it looks like a whole lotta fire and no earth.

7) I totally love my mother. She's my favorite person on the planet. God reminds me of her: she loves me unconditionally and wants me to be happy.

8) I keep a running list of prayer requests, both in my head, in a journal, and on little scraps of paper. It all finds its way to my altar, which has an olive wood cross from Jerusalem, a Kuan Yin statue, a pine cone, a rock, a few shells, two votives and an offering bowl.

9) I played my first bar gig when I was 15, playing trumpet in a black top 40 band. Since then, I've played trumpet, hand percussion and backup vocals in disco bands, horn bands, and latin bands.

10) I sang in the chorus for the Mahler Second Symphony the last three times it was conducted by Leonard Bernstein.

11) My friends are incredible, I love them very much, and should probably tell them more often just how grateful I am for their generosity, and their ability to make me laugh at the world and at myself. I also appreciate that they don't freak out when I cry (I'm a big cryer). And, finally, I appreciate it when they let me blow off steam and continue to love me.

12) I love teaching people chants that help them manage their internal weather, and waken to their depth.

13) Love and compassion are the most important things in the world to me, and I hope to get better with practice.

14) One of my favorite lines from a hymn is : For the love of God is broader than the measure of the mind, and the heart of the eternal is most wonderfully kind.

15) I do sitting meditation regularly, and have just started going to a zendo to sit in community.

16) I began chanting and sitting around 1990 as a way to ground myself and deepen my spiritual life. It's working. I'm much more grounded these days.

17) I've made 6 CDs, written one book, and have an occasional blog that hardly anyone has read.

18) I once did LSD as a teen and watched myself trying to go to sleep, from the ceiling of my bedroom.

19) I shared a room with my sister as a kid, and I can still hear the sound of her breathing as she slept.

20) I love people, but am an introvert, and need time alone with a cushion, a book, a body of water, or a rock in a yellow wood.

21) I'm the most optimistic person I know. I have faith that "All shall be well."

22) I worry about money, but checks always show up in my mailbox. I also work like hell.

23) I have been a dishwasher, a chocolatier, a barista, a religious bookseller, a sexton, a house painter, a gas station attendant, and a babysitter (I've got Miranda and Guinivere Saturday at Noon - they're 9 months old).

24) I love digging in the dirt and will miss my garden most of all when I move next month.

25) My life's goals are to be the sweetest, most loving girl I can be, and to write music that helps people to be their most open, compassionate selves.

Chai Recipe

I make my own chai at home, and serve it to anyone who wanders by. So many people have asked for the recipe it seems like a good idea to share it. Enjoy!

10 slices fresh ginger root
1 whole nutmeg
12 whole cloves
5-7 cinnamon sticks (3-4 inches long)
12 black peppercorns (more or less to taste)
12 cardamom pods
1 star anise
4-6 teaspoon black tea (with or w/o caffeine, 6 or so bags are okay, too)

Optional: Add1 teaspoon vanilla extract as chai cools for honey vanilla chai.

Crush nutmeg cloves and cinnamon sticks in a mortar and pestle until about a 1/5th of their size. Place everything except tea into a saucepan with 3 quarts of water. Bring to a boil, then simmer on medium/low heat until liquid is reduced to one or 1½ quarts. Enjoy the delicious smell wafting through your home as the chai is cooking. Turn off flame and add tea. Steep 5-10 minutes. Strain and pour into jar with a tight-fitting lid (I use a ½ gallon canning jar), so you can shake before you pour a cup. Chai may cloud up; this is normal.
To prepare, add milk or soy milk, and local honey.
Let your taste buds decide throughout the process. I use less ginger and an extra star anise some days; other days I use more pepper, cloves and cinnamon.
10 minutes to prepare.
An hour or so to cook.

Enjoy.

Not-so-Senior Moments

Every now and then a friend bemoans the fact that she is aging in ways she isn’t particularly comfortable with. It hasn’t helped to mention that the alternative to aging is not aging, and that it, too, has its drawbacks. I now feel forced to pay attention to aging because it’s been the friends I look up to as wise and smart, with great senses of humor, good skin, and the sweetest dispositions who seem the most frustrated by its vagaries. The worried talk about aging begins with the manifold bewailing of some part of their anatomy, usually something I find distinguishes them and adds to their charm, and which, I helpfully point out, they’ve hated from adolescence anyway, so the time get over it might be now. But the big thing my friends all seem to worry about are what everyone calls “senior moments.”

These senior moments seem almost exclusively to represent the fear that their previously enormous brainpower is dimming. I’m beginning to worry because I’ve just turned 51, and to hear my friends talk, you’d think senior moments were contagious. I want to know who first coined the term “senior moment” sometime around the end of the millennium. I looked on urbanlegends.com, but found only links to serious articles. That’s no fun! My first recollection of someone talking about a senior moment was when my grandmother was worried about having them. She was 75 at the time. She told me she’d begun taking Ginkgo Biloba to improve her memory. I asked, “How will you know if you forget to take it?” She laughed and threatened to slap me.

I submit that almost all of my friends still possess incredibly huge brains and even larger hearts, and that this excellent combination is causing them to fall victim to circumstances and poor communication due to the placing of their trust in institutions and software that don’t deserve it, in an attempt to manage certain aspects of their lives.

For instance, I’m not even sure I’m old enough to be worried about senior moments, but AARP has been sending me bi-weekly letters since two weeks prior to my 49th birthday. Since you can’t become a member of AARP until you are 50, they must have been worried that I would forget my 50th birthday. Do many people forget their 50th birthday? Judging by the amount of bulk mail I received from AARP, you might think so. After a year of bi-weekly emails, I sent them my $12.50 for a year’s membership (after I returned from taking all the junk mail to the recycling dump) because (a) I was finally eligible to be a member; (b) I thought the bi-weekly letters would surely cease; and (c) I hoped I might get a nice discount on a hotel or some fun toy in my dotage.

For the next year, I was regaled with bi-weekly letters plus emails, telling me how I was missing out on all the great perks and discounts of being a member. I also received special “member only” offers, for life insurance, car insurance, and credit cards. Okay, it takes some institutions awhile to get the message, so I figured the bi-weekly letter people would eventually get in touch with the “She finally joined AARP after 26 letters and has paid her dues!” people and that would be the end of it. But no. Soon thereafter I began receiving pairs of permanent member ID cards, bi-monthly, first in cardboard, and the last two pairs in plastic. Why two, I wonder, every time a new pair arrives in the mail. Do they send the extra out in the likely event I’ll have a senior moment and mislay eleven? Is it even possible to have institutional senior moments? I’m sure the Supreme Court would think corporate senior moments have standing. But I digress (or do I?).

This morning when I answered the telephone a voice on the other end said, “Thank you for your patience. A representative will be with you shortly.” Someone thought this was a good idea? Now we don’t even have to be the caller to be put on hold. I can hear it now: “Hey, let’s just call them and make believe they’ve called us! We'll put them on hold as if they’d initiated the call, and then we can make them wait until we’re ready to talk to them. The worst that could happen is they'll think they're having a senior moment.” I wonder if bailout money goes to such as this. The question “Who’s having the senior moment here?” may have arisen in my rapidly aging mind.

Let’s face it, though; most of us have been having senior moments since we were children. Mothers all across the globe say, “Honey, where are your shoes?” (if their children are lucky enough to have shoes). Children reply, “I don’t know.” Or, “Did you remember to do your math homework?” “I forgot.” These are perfectly typical replies when given by anyone below 12 or so. But after we turn 50, we fear we might be losing your mind if we can’t remember where that pair of shoes is, what we came into the room for, or where we put the mail we were just about to take to the post office.

These things are normal, folks. Always have been, always will be. One of my friends is sure she’s having senior moments because she sometimes forgets the names of people she knows. I say, “Maybe.” I figure I’ve known three Christina’s in my life, and when I saw the fourth one today at a rehearsal, I asked her name, because even though Christina was the name that popped into my head, I didn’t trust myself because I’d just sent an email to one of my other Christina’s. So, perhaps self-doubt and low self-esteem play a role in this aspect of our memory, along with stress and sleep deprivation.

I find software-induced memory loss, to be one of the worst annoyances. I ask my computer to remember to do something, and then it prompts me to do something else that I’ve never really thought about, or don’t really care about, and which doesn’t seem important or earth-shattering at the time. I usually just click okay. This okay is like the okay your give your kids when you’re in the middle of something really important (like fourth and goal, or the crucial part of any story) and they ask if they can borrow the car to drive their friend home. You say, “Yeah, sure.” Then, about a minute later, the tape in your brain begins to replay and you realize your kid is only 12, and he didn’t really ask you if he could borrow the car, did he? Then you hear the car start, you break into a cold sweat, and run like hell! This same thing happens with automatic computer updates. The computer prompts me; the geek squad has told me to “Just click okay.” This week it was someone’s Firefox browser asking if it was okay to update itself. When these questions come up they go into the category of a kid asking you “May I please go to the bathroom?” We don’t normally ask “why, when, where, how, what,” and the kid/computer doesn’t offer. However, when your browser updates itself, it resets a lot of stuff that you rely on to be there (things you’ve put there SO THAT YOU DON'T HAVE TO REMEMBER THEM).

Mostly what a browser update does (but doesn’t tell you it’s about to do) is erase all the passwords that have been automatically filled in for you since the first time you ever used a password. Then you try to log on to a website that you go to every day, and they act as if they’ve never heard of you. Then they make you copy crooked words in boxes that should be labeled “How do we know it’s really you?” This happens to everyone, because the people who make browsers don’t want to bother us with all the details of our lives, but they don’t trust us any more than we trust them. So they ask us “secret questions.” I picture my account being sorted into a corporate storage box with all the other people whose first pet was named Princess. We used to have the hope of decent customer service; now we have this.

The other thing we all do is lose our little black book of passwords and secret codes. We all have one or two passwords that we’ve used forever, with or without an extra number or an upper case letter or two. The last time I lost my little black book of login IDs and passwords, I built an email file filled with generously donated corporate login ID’s and passwords that I have no connection with and couldn’t possibly remember if my life depended on it. My favorite of the corporate given ones and the only one I've committed to memory, but which is no longer current, is "tygoxazo." That one had a strange appeal. Perhaps I'll recycle it sometime. Feel free to make use of it if it casts its spell on you.
I've thought of using famous authors’ names, like Rabindranath or Jhumpa. Who would guess such a password? To look at me, you would never guess that I can even read! Which brings up the question of how we choose our passwords in the first place. In the beginning of the password craze, I used things like secret, password, and, when I was feeling particularly snarky, biteme. Those worked for years, until some clever server analyst decided they weren't secure enough. I suspect there were just too many of us out in the world using "secret" and "password," and the corporate server gods grew cranky at this flagrant belittling of their "safety etiquette."
Then, my fun taken away, I had to resort to something less fun that I could still remember. Ah, there's the rub. I have a great memory, but it has its own organizing system, and there's no defragmentation setting (unless that's what sleeping does, and I suspect it might). I now have little scribbles close to where I'll need them, should I need them (not often, but always when I am short on time and patience); which is a very long way of saying that I'm not sure we're having senior moments at all.

HARC: Blessed by Light

Dear gentle friends,
This post is an act of shameless self-promotion, so hit delete NOW if you care not one whit about it, and don't say I didn't warn you. If, however, you are the curious sort, and of a mind to support a couple of sacred musicians, read on:

Many of you are aware of my music, and of my singing partnership with Ruth Cunningham, a member of The Anonymous 4 vocal quartet. Our second CD project, HARC: Blessed by Light is now available. Blessed by Light contains beauty and fun, is great for tooling down the highway, for yoga, or just for hanging out. There are chants, tunes, rounds, and mantras for your heart, for group singing, to usher you into heaven and enjoy the party upon your arrival, and to help you be your best self on the way to work or right before you sleep. There are tunes that used to sound different somehow, tunes with other tunes buried inside them, and a bit of folk music thrown in for good measure. There are a few tunes from the new hymnal, Music by Heart. I think you'll like the variety, close harmonies, and instrumentation.

If you'd like a CD, they're available in Eco-Wallets here: www.cdbaby.com/cd/harc2, and will soon be available here: http://www.churchpublishing.org/. If you'd rather download the CD or any parts thereof, you can do it here: www.digstation.com/harc. It will soon be available on itunes and a bunch of other online venues too!
Here's the tune list:

Arise, Shine – Tune by Ruth Cunningham, text from Isaiah 60:1, arr. Ana Hernández

Om Tare Tuttare Ture Swaha - by Ana Hernández
The mantra of Green Tara. Tara is the energy that unites wisdom and compassion and protects us from the eight great fears: fire (anger), drowning (attachment), lions (pride), elephants (ignorance) imprisonment (greed), snakes (jealousy) demons (doubt) and thieves (false views). Tar in Sanskrit means to cross over, as in using a bridge.
Listen to it here: www.myspace.com/anahermusic!

In Paradisum – Traditional Gregorian Chant

Sri Krishna Saranam Ma Ma - Traditional, arr. Ana Hernández
A liberation mantra to take you across the ocean of samsara (the phenomenal world); it frees us from the cycle of rebirth. Rough translation: Krishna is my shelter.

This Little Light - Traditional, arr. Ana Hernández

Tar A Thighearna - by Ruth Cunningham, arr. Cunningham, Hernández
Tar a thighearna, tar a hee. Translation: Come, Oh thou Lord. Come, Oh thou being.

Om Namah Shivaya - by Ana Hernández
Rough translation: I honor the Divine within. This mantra leads to spiritual maturity.

Come Light of Lights - by Ruth Cunningham, arr. Ana Hernández
Listen to it here: www.myspace.com/anahermusic!

Christ Be with Me - Ruth Cunningham

Brother James’ Air – Traditional, adapted and arr. Ana Hernández
Psalm 84 paraphrased by Carl P. Daw, Jr. Used by permission.

Be The Peace - Tune by Ana Hernández, text by M. K. Gandhi
Be the peace you wish to see in the world.
Listen to it here: www.myspace.com/anahermusic!

Musicians:
Ruth Cunningham – vocals, flute, harp
Ana Hernández – vocals, guitar, tongue drum, ankle bells, djembe, klong yaw, shruti box
Eugene Friesen – cello
Helena Marie, CHS – flute on Om Tare Tuttare Ture Swaha
Mark Dann – electric guitar, electric bass

Please send this email to anyone you think might be interested, because we love to make things for you and can use the support! Thank you so very much for your friendship, time, consideration and support. I really hope you like the new CD!

http://www.ruthcunningham.com/ - Ruth's website with appearances, lots of cool links and clips

http://www.anahermusic.com/ - for links to all Ana's music, appearances, and her book The Sacred Art of Chant: Preparing to Practice

Prayer and the Facts of Life

“Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words usually seem worth reading but rarely move me to action. So why I felt as though suddenly struck by lightning upon reading these words the other night is beyond me. Truth be told, I wasn’t even reading Emerson at the time I stumbled across them. I was reading an essay about him by Mary Oliver in her book Long Life: Essays and other Writings. She went on to say “and suddenly that elite mystical practice seems clearer than ever before, and possible to each of us.”

Why does prayer often seem like some elite mystical practice? And how can we reclaim the straightforwardness of Emerson’s definition for the benefit of absolutely everyone? It’s not as if I possess the highest point of view; surely that can’t be said. I have on occasion been known to contemplate the facts of life (and all manner of life) in their broadest manifestations, and my vision has been stretched, kneaded, shaped, baked and sometimes burnt by what I see. But I keep looking. I’ve always been frustrated by my inability to explain to people why I find praying, and especially praying for other people (intercessory prayer), to be crucial for our formation as human beings. Far too many words have been written about prayer that make it seem as though words themselves are necessary to the endeavor, but the sentence “Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view” seems to sit at the edge of the cliff of words. Emerson encourages us to leap (or at least fall) into the lap of God without even a dictionary.

I think that one of the reasons this sentence struck me is its compactness— its beauty, the way it just lies there all taut and pretty, yet daring us to open an entire universe. Perhaps it is the depth of its simplicity. Maybe it’s the way it encourages us to deal with the facts from a high perch. I often deal with them from a lower vantage point, not quite sure what’s going on or what to do about it. I almost never have the whole picture or story, only my small piece of it, often accompanied by the feeling that I might be missing some fact or other that might change my mind, which is ultimately the only part of me worth changing.

The way the sentence affirms contemplation feels good to me, because I prefer prayer with as few words as possible, and it's always nice to be affirmed. However, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, the facts of life have a tendency to make themselves known, ebbing and flowing according to all need and desire. Why those facts pop up as soon as I sit on my cushion I cannot tell you, but at some point I just decided that too must be a fact of life. Frequently the facts are fuzzy, accompanied by a feeling or a sense about something or someone, and I don’t know what it will ultimately be about, or what will happen in the long run. I’ve come to expect it, because I can’t possibly know everything, and life’s too short to miss. I used to let everything get to me, internalizing all manner of debris that wasn’t mine. Then one day I read a Chinese proverb:

You cannot prevent
the birds of sorrow
from flying over your head
but you can prevent them
from building nests in your hair.

I put the saying on my refrigerator immediately. Sometime later, I began to notice that every time something heartbreaking, unfair, distasteful, corrupt, or evil would rear its head, there was also, still, a breathtaking beauty surrounding us. I made a pact with God that we would deal with whatever or whoever walks through the door. It was like opening the door to opportunity, and I’ve never looked back.

Which leads me to the real reason I’m in love with Emerson’s sentence: it opens the door of prayer to absolutely everyone. It’s not fussy, you don’t need to learn any particular rituals, be on your knees, in the half lotus position, or bring two forms of ID. There’s only us and our ability to open to the highest point of view; often something barely perceptible and of crucial importance, requiring us to be still and allow life the freedom to wander by, letting it fill us with the energy to bring the best we have to offer to bear on the facts of our lives.

One Way to Support a Sacred Musician

Hello, sweet people,

I've just released two songs online, All Through the Night, and Endless Song (How Can I Keep From Singing). You can hear them in their entirety and/or purchase the mp3's for your listening pleasure by clicking on the title of this post (above), or by visiting my website: www.anahermusic.com/order. If you'd like to buy them after you listen, just scroll down to the HARC/Snocap box on either page and you'll see them listed for 99 cents each.

One fine way for you to support a musician today might be to send the link above to anyone you think might like, love or need these tunes (please!). Surely you know someone with a new baby in need of a lullaby, or possibly someone who's been heckled during a public address, and could use to hear How can I keep from singing?

Beside the fact that you may know actual people in this world who might appreciate these tunes, paying for time in the recording studio puts a big strain on a girl's wallet, and every two bucks helps (oh yes it does!).

I'm hard at work with Ruth Cunningham on our second HARC CD, which should be available in September. The aforementioned tunes won't be on it, but the new CD is beautiful and fun, great for tooling down the highway, and even for sitting, with or without friends. There are tunes for your heart, tunes for your church, and tunes just for fun. There are tunes that used to sound different somehow, and tunes with other tunes buried inside them. Wait and hear.

Until then, I thank you all from the bottom of my heart for your support: past, present and future. Stay as cool as you are, and enjoy the rest of the summer. Ah.

The Great Calm: Humming Your Way to a Peaceful Silence

It may seem paradoxical that one of the most direct routes to silence and a peaceful state of mind is by making sound, but humming is the fastest way I know to achieve a deep meditative state. At the beginning of my prayer time, I sit on my cushion looking for silence and a little peace. Humming helps me to quiet my mind, so I can enter the realm of contemplation. Listening for the silence beyond the sound has helped me to be a little more mindful, and to keep my heart open in difficult situations. More important, the silence created by humming has allowed me to dive deeper than I thought I was capable of, and helps manage my emotions in a healthy, congruent way, through some painful storms.

Some people can practice sitting meditation for hours on end. Some of us have a hard time sitting still for five minutes, much less sitting for an extended period, and some find it difficult to clear enough interior space to be able to listen deeply when we do manage to sit. The first five minutes of sitting are always the hardest for me, and some days trying to calm down feels almost impossible.

In the Bible, there’s a story in Mark’s Gospel about a miracle in which Jesus stills a great storm. The disciples are out in a boat when a great windstorm arises,

“and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped.” They wake the sleeping Jesus, and say “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing? He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” Then the wind ceased, and there was a great calm. He said to them, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” And they were filled with great awe and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”

In his book The Dharma of Jesus, George Soares-Prabhu reminds us that "The great calm is not simply a return to a pre-storm quiet, but the attainment of a new depth of stillness, immeasurably greater than that obtaining during the anxious bustle that preceded the storm… We are suddenly made aware of the fact that the stilling of the storm… is a rescue operation in which the men are saved from the forces of destruction that continually threaten the world we live in. We experience vividly the precariousness of human existence lived out in a world teetering on the edge of chaos. The fragile boat of man’s existence can at any moment be overwhelmed by the sea.”

The fragile boat of my existence can be overwhelmed by any number of things. What I have been able to find through my humming practice is the depth of stillness of which Soares-Prabhu speaks. Humming 10-20 minutes every day has helped me to manifest a more open and reflective state. I can sometimes hear that still, small voice, and the amount of time I can sit quietly (without squirming) has increased. I feel more grounded, relaxed, and better able to cope.

Humming supports our spiritual and emotional health by helping us to be more in tune with what’s actually going on in us, here and now. To get started, just put your lips together and begin. Push your lips out lightly while humming softly, until you feel the vibrations nasally. That’s all there is to it. Try humming softly in the shower; on public transportation (no one will even hear you); while walking, or doing dishes. Hum loudly, softly, high and low, slide around; don’t be afraid to make sound. It’s important to play with your voice and see what it feels like. What you put into it is what you’ll get out of it, so don’t just hum from the neck up. Gently ride your breath. Have fun with it.

As the issues of your life drift by, notice how you feel, what’s comfortable and what isn’t, and revisit those places every couple of days to see what’s different. Pay attention to the changes in your breathing, the way it deepens, the space between your breaths, the energy within and around you. If you’re anything like me, and even if you’re not, my guess is that after a while, you’ll find you are very, very quiet, and you’ll have reached the place where it’s possible to just sit. The vibrations from your humming practice will keep working in you even after you cease making the sound, and you’ll be right where you need to be.

Open My Heart

If you click on the title of this post, you'll find yourself watching me on YouTube, in St. Paul's Chapel in NYC, doing what I like best: helping people to sing about the most important things. The video is from the Music That Makes Community Conference a few weeks ago, and shows about forty people in a chant called Open My Heart. It's the kind of chant that helps you to open your heart. I only know this because the tune was given to me in the middle of a very contentious meeting of the Episcopal Church, where I taught it to about a thousand people who were trying to decide whether or not to consecrate Gene Robinson a bishop. I felt the energy of that room completely shift to a better place in less than two minutes, and I'm not the only one. The video is 4 minutes long, and comes to us courtesy of the All Saints Company. Thanks Daniel.
Enjoy the weekend.

Seeing Beauty

Short blooming seasons for the finest and most fragrant flowers surely make my list of things to take up with God every spring. Luckily, this shortcoming creates a need for more beauty, and there are still many humans creatively filling it (some of us can't help ourselves). One of the coolest of these is my friend Toinette Lippe. She sees deeply into the nature of beauty and manages to communicate it with grace. For the times when the lilacs and sweet woodruff are over and gone (and all the other times, too), you can do no better than to have a stack of her Chinese brush paintings somewhere under the pile on your desk. Something happens to me when I sit down to write a note on one of her cards that reminds me to take care with whatever I write on the inside. People always thank me for these cards, but I thank Toinette.

There is much delicate strength in her work with flowers, fruit, vegetables, and birds, and we are invited in to really see. Some of the original paintings are available, also (at very reasonable prices). You are probably already acquainted with Toinette through her work in publishing. It's a safe bet she's edited some of the books on our shelves (Do any of these sound familiar: The Zen of Seeing, How Can I Help?, 100 Graces, A Year to Live, and Ten Poems to Change Your Life?. In 1989 she founded Bell Tower, and as editorial director, published so many good books I can't list them all. She is also the author of two fine books: Nothing Left Over: A Plain and Simple Life; and Caught in the Act: Reflections on Being, Knowing, and Doing.


Enjoy the lotus bud on the left, and then take the short trip to her website and you'll see what I mean. Click on the title at the top of this post and you're there. You'll be thrilled, and you'll be supporting one of the most creative people around. This is one trip that will fill you up.

No Turning Back: My Summer with Daddy King, by Gurdon Brewster

This week, I’ve been reading a book I found in the Episcopal Bookstore in Seattle (on my February trek out to Olympia to teach a workshop at St. John’s). I was surprised to see it there, and I hardly cracked it open until the day before yesterday, when I found it was stuck to my hand and wouldn’t let go (you'll see, and I won't even mention the recipes). I was surprised to see Gurdon's name on the book, because he was a mentor of mine when I lived in Ithaca, NY (1978-80). It seems he still is a mentor of mine. Gurdon was a chaplain at Cornell (for 35 years) and is an excellent sculptor. But this writer thing is something I didn’t know about him. I'll bet I can fill all the telephone books in the whole wide world with the things I don't know about people.

Daddy King was Martin Luther King, Sr., and was co-pastor (with his son Martin Luther King, Jr.) of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. Gurdon spent a summer with Daddy and Mrs. King in 1961 and lived in their house. There are pages and pages I could quote, but here’s something that reminded me that the most important things in life are peach ice cream, the transformation of people’s hearts, and the protection of the gifts we are given:

“Daddy King came home about 9:30 one hot night, and when he heard the freezer grinding, a big smile broke out on his face. Mrs. King and I lifted the container carefully out of the ice water and brought it over to the sink to wipe it off… He stood nearby with a large bowl, at which point Mrs. King backed away and watched with delight as he plunged his spoon into the ice cream, loading his bowl with a generous heap mixed well with the peaches. “When I eat cream, I eat cream,” he said, as he moved toward his favorite chair.
Just as we turned on the TV, Coretta called on the telephone to ask Mrs. King where she might take the children to have their tonsils removed. Suddenly, Dr. King appeared on the screen. “He’s on the news,” Mrs. King told Coretta in a perfectly natural voice, as if she were describing an everyday occurrence in the home. She hung up the phone and returned to her seat to watch.
Dr. King had been speaking in Jackson. “Freedom is coming.” He said.
“Yes it is,” replied Daddy King, talking to his son as if he were in the chair right next to him. “Boy, they hate that,” he said in a strong voice. “They’d like to get at him, but they can’t because he’s right. They can’t say anything because he is right,” he said looking back at me. “He gets white people mad because he wins people. He can’t help winning. He has won people over since he was a boy.”
“Segregation is dead.” Dr. King went on. “The only question is how expensive will they make the funeral.”

Well, we’ve made the funeral pretty damn expensive so far, and Barack Obama is raising and spending money so fast it’s getting more expensive by the second. I pray every day that his story has a different ending, because it looks like he, too, is right, and can’t help winning people over.

Make sure No Turning Back is in your local library: No Turning Back: My Summer with Daddy King, by Gurdon Brewster (2007, Orbis Books).

Listen to an Interview with Gurdon on American Public Media. Here's the link:
http://thestory.org/archive/the_story_432_Summer_With_The_King_Family.mp3/view

A Prequel - "Where's the girl?!"

Greetings all,
This is a note about the not-so-recent past. Think of it as a prequel that doesn't require you to sit in a dark theater, or eat popcorn. Feel free to do those things, though, if you think it'll help. Feel free to skip this post and come back another time for something more to your liking... Hey, it could happen! Future posts will deal with life as I experience it (whoa!), and the beauty that is all around us, which lately means music, chanting workshops, recording sessions, 176 high school boys, how to bless one another and ourselves, hundreds of tiny baby apricots, and the peonies, which are now advertising for ants, to begin work immediately, to help meet the late May deadline.

But first, a word about where I've been hiding since early 2006, which past life regression was prompted by one email and two comments by former patrons just this week. It's been two years since I've heard from any of them. In January of 2006, I was dismissed from my former employment as chief bartender, spiritual director, and asst. manager of the Episcopal Book/Resource Center in the city of New York. For about 15 years, I toiled, wondered, laughed, cried, held my tongue with many people, and helped at least a few to find their way in to a deeper relationship with themselves, God and everyone else. I sought and bought the best books available on important topics related to the care and spiritual feeding of God's children on this fragile earth our island home. Then, I'd match up the books with the right people and vice versa. I loved the work, the people, and dealt with whomever God sent through the door. It's a deal I made with God a long time ago. It's made for an interesting life so far.

In 2004, there was a building renovation planned, and we were told that we'd have to move the store to the basement for a while, but that my job was safe. My partner had a brain aneurysm right before Thanksgiving 2005 and had been home from the hospital for less than a month when I was asked to come upstairs and told that my job was no longer my job. This seems to be the way of the world for many, especially lately, but one might expect an institution like a church to hold its people to a higher standard. I seem to recall something about not bearing false witness in my studies, but it doesn't seem to apply to people in the fulfillment of their institutional roles. It took a while to get over the pain of losing that particular job, and for months afterward, I heard there was a big fuss over the decision, which helped my morale, until the health insurance ran out four months later...

There are some patrons I still hear from, and some I miss running into: clergy and DRE's who bought books for their flock for book groups and Bible studies on a regular basis; folks who lived in the congregational development section because they wanted to improve their communities; the ones who lived in the spirituality section because they wanted to give people as much practical knowledge as they could about God and neighbor; the people who lived in the pastoral care section because they needed to take care of the fragile in their midst and/or the fragile in themselves; and all the the other broken, arrogant, certain, mean, sweet, clueless, overwhelmed, tired, happy just to be there, and entirely holy humans (some of you radiate beauty). Heschel said: Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy." Amen.

I also truly/madly/deeply miss all of the precious jewels who helped to further my compassion practice, some by lying to my face, and to store patrons about my job status and future plans for the store. Then there was the bishop who asked "If you were a woman, what color Bible would you like?" I was so taken aback that I looked him straight in the eye and said "First of all, I am a woman, and second of all, not all women like the same color! It wasn't my finest hour, but we became friends. He saw me a couple of weeks ago at St. Paul's Chapel in NYC, came over and gave me a big hug. He looks a lot more relaxed since he retired. There was a woman for whom I opened the door after hours so she could prove the old adage "No good deed goes unpunished."
I am a calmer person, and much more patient; you were my teachers, and I thank you all.

One of the people who forced me to realize the depth of service often required (and mostly overlooked) was the loud, half blind and partially deaf old man who came in every other month or so for at least five years to look at Bibles; he monopolized my time, energy and patience, and the patience of everyone in the store because he was SO LOUD. He always took an hour, and never bought a thing, until the last time I saw him, when his shoes were so holey it was a wonder they stayed on his feet. He asked for me by yelling "Where's the girl?! She can help me! My colleague, Constancio De Jesus (and he is) told me "That one will get you your wings." I'd have settled for a new pair of shoes for the guy. He wanted a Bible to leave to his daughter when he died. I sold him one. I still think about him, looking down, yelling "Hey, I want a Bible!"

There was an endless stream of people for whom I know my presence in that store made a difference, and about whom I wonder and still pray for: the woman who came in on her first day back to work after having had a miscarriage, looking for a book on how to deal with it. We cried through the entire transaction. There were people who came in to find books, either for themselves or their loved ones, to deal with the death or impending death of a parent, child, sibling, or friend. There were some who just thought it was a good bookstore. There were people who came in to calm down after they'd been treated badly by their bosses; that's when I felt like a bartender, serving up good books and therapeutic music.

Nowadays I spend a great deal of time listening for that still, small voice to tell me what's needed for the task at hand. This month, I'm doing it in the recording studio. Who knows how anything will turn out? Our God is a very quirky God. I'll let you know what I know as soon as I can articulate it (which is not nearly as soon as I know it, usually). Thanks for reading, and enjoy your week.