This song was written some years back during a time of trauma and loss. I experienced my dreams as vivid signposts at the time and happened to recall and record several of personal significance. In these verses, faint shadows from a handful of dreams are captured, rather like 'air-brushed' stories.
The simple, cyclical musical motif is a theme borrowed from african mbira music; wheeling and weaving around in endless ostinato form, it feels just right as gentle accompaniment to this recurring dreamy world. I had to introduce the nocturnal bell-ringer, for me the archetypal (hooded) harbinger of change.
As a footnote (excuse the pun, given the first dream recounted), my dreams have shifted and changed tenor as healing has come over the years. Feet are once again found, abundant grace flows in, and there's a simple freedom in just paying attention to the path wherever it is now.
The artwork is generously supplied by Dan Wylie, eco-poet, author and artist www.netsoka.co.za
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| Scenes from Dante's Inferno |
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| Compassberg |
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| Personally, walking in any wilderness is hugely helpful in crisis times, or anytime |
Originally conceived over hours, days on scraps of paper, all songs are eventually recorded and assembled using basic technology, piano and guitar.
Liz Campbell is the sole writer and composer of all the published material on this blogsite, unless otherwise stated.
This song written back in 2016 pulls together several significant threads for me; it came about after attending a mindfulness meditation weekend retreat facilitated by Rob Nairn. This was my launch into an ancient and diverse healing practice, essentially teaching a widening of seeing and hearing. And noticing that what is seen in the present moment is more than enough: enough to chew over for a whole lifetime!
I fell in love with the simplicity of an old Scottish folk song, 'parting glass', attributed to one Sir Alex Boswell as far back as 1650. This popular tune was later replaced by the well-known Auld Lang Syne. I have blatantly borrowed the finely crafted melody and replaced all the words with my own.
Except (being a 'thieving musician'), I have also borrowed from Hafiz, one of my favourite Sufi poets - well-tweaked, snipped and cut of course. His images defeat explanation and are best suggested in song. As he says in one of his poems (translated by Daniel Ladinsky):
"I wish I could speak like music"
Though the music has a predominantly melancholic undertow, it swings into a 'thumbs up' mode with some counter-intuitive humour: our very Loss is turned on its head as the Beloved (an image inspired by Sufi poetry) 'wins' and gives back even more abundantly, laughing... enough said, already too many words, let the song sing for itself!
And fittingly, my palms are indeed upturned as I invite any people (perhaps those who know me) who feel inclined to sponsor our LifeCycle song project to please contact me on liz.jessam@gmail.com
All songs are recorded and edited in my home-based studio using basic computer, cellphone, Ipad technology.
Sponsorship or not, the songs will continue to come.. so do subscribe and share!
This song from the LifeCycle collection recounts stories from several ordinary women I know in the workplace. They're not uncommon tales, especially as domestic violence and abuse are increasingly the order of these days.
All recording is done using cell-phones and Ipad, put together by myself and Tshego Makube.
Here's another song from the playlist LifeCycle, recorded and published during August, which in South Africa is termed Women's Month. Tshego Makube joins me as vocalist, singing to celebrate the lives of countless inspirational women who enrich our lives - our many sisters, mothers, daughters and grandmothers. This song pays tribute especially to the unsung women heroes who have risen above their stories and circumstances; it salutes those women who go unnoticed, thankless, or those who are trapped in abusive situations.
Fireflies are a treasured feature to be found seasonally up on the hilltop where I live. Seen in the light of day, they are insignificant and dowdy; it takes night's deep darkness to see their magical flickering light show!
It is simply a song by women, for women.
This song is from the LifeCycle playlist.
What
I need April 2015 LC
Please can I have:
A cup and a half of belly-laugh
And half a kilo of tears
------------------------------------------------------------
Cut the words and just watch and listen:
This beguiling wise man who keeps catching my attention did not use a lot of words, and it seems by all accounts that he spoke only after deep consideration. Hence he wrote nothing down, left no essential statement or message (that ‘mission statement’ of such paramount importance these days to institutions... only to become a burden to carry); his presence and being left enough to remember and it was over to his friends and followers to recall things he had said – a rough draft flow of gist, I imagine.
He did however indulge in telling stories, and these treasures are beautifully laid down, mostly preluding with the statement: ‘if you have ears, listen!’ or ‘if you have eyes, look!’. That alone is enough to keep one going an entire lifetime, learning to look and listen!
I sense that he refers not only listening to words, but beyond that, also listening and looking with our bodies, and inside our own bodies and what they tell us in any situation. That is ‘deep listening’from inside out. When people tell you to really listen, what do they mean? How does the word – really- change the quality of any action? Could it be that we listen or look through our body, flesh, blood, bones, all parts of ourselves?
In the aftermath of some great trauma involving loss, my experience of profound dreams always multiplied: for me, helpful agents in healing. One such dream I’ll relate as it introduced me to this aspect of my secret love affair:
A
dear, gentle, tall, slow-moving and greatly respected uncle of mine said to me:
‘There are 13 different ways to hear, you know’. Then an old woman, the
archetypal hag, wise and forthright, commented in her aged, matter-of-fact,
no-nonsense voice: ‘But no matter, if you don’t want to hear I can just give
you a stroke’.
This exchange was just the end tip of a larger dream story.
Both characters had something to say: the gentle slow uncle pointing out that there are many ways to hear, not just with our ears. Our gut talks to us. My knees talk when I pound them on a treadmill. Our breath catches. Our neck spasms just at that moment. We are walking conversations within our selves if we give it some attention!
The crone in the dream was quite right. Not long after this dream I quit my stressful full-time job. Had I not stepped off that treadmill I would have been increasingly beset by physical ailments that were already setting in. Our bodies look after us by finding ways to make us stop. We develop tremors, or facial twitches, chronic neck pains, twisted spasms in our gut or lower back, and these eventually stop us in our tracks to claim our attention.
Watching and listening are dangerous practices as they tell us things that can’t be ignored.
There is a way of inclining ourselves to listen and look with our entire body. Our body works hard to give us information and guidance but is easily over-ridden by our busy bustling ego with its stories and constructs, plans and cover ups, fixes and finger pointings. Subtle or pretty blatant signs from within ourselves can give us all we need for the moment: a range of body-based signals firing off in the energy transfers constantly happening within our cells – nothing short of miraculous!
When something is watched, it behaves differently. Try it. Watch children play, and once they know you’re watching they change their behaviour slightly. Apparently even atomic particles change their behaviour when observed (quantum physics).
No great magic, nor doctrine, nor cure, nor mission statement. Just an urging to wake up in all situations, to WATCH and LISTEN.
Liz Campbell is the sole writer and composer of all the published material on this blogsite, unless otherwise stated.
And
adoration leaves no room for pride
It
is as though the whole creation cried:
Alleluia alleluia we
sing!
How often making music we have found
A new dimension in the world of sound
As music moves us to a more profound
Alleluia alleluia we sing!
So
have we all in countless heartfelt song
In
faith and love, through centuries of wrong,
Sung
praises to the truth in ev’ry tongue
Alleluia alleluia we
sing!
Let ev’ry instrument be tuned for
praise
Let all rejoice who have a voice to
raise
May God give us grace to sing always
Alleluia alleluia we sing!
So
may our voices rise to God in song
To
whom, in whom, through whom we all belong
Who
was and is the music all along
Alleluia alleluia alleluia we sing!
It came to me in my dreams – a message: life is a game, a dance! |
No need to take it too seriously – it’s a game: it could go either this way or
that. Follow the basic rules, creatively. Think laterally, have FUN!
Margaret Fuller, a forerunner of modern feminism, wrote back in 1845:
"this world is no mere spectacle or fleeting shadow, but a great, solemn game to be played with good heed, for its stakes are of eternal value".
I love games. I love the way they hold us together for a time span. It has a beginning and an end, and the best games are full of intrigue, unpredictable twists and surprises. It’s best not to cheat but to be on high alert for the next best move, crafty or obvious.
Games illustrate consequence – this move results in the likelihood of that happening.
I awaken from a dream with this in my head:
“come play with me!
“come dance with me!”
A loving summons to live this way from this playful, ever-evolving, spinning energy.
Left
for dust
(on Tess leaving home)
Dust
eddies and swirls
as he comes and you leave.
My
receding world
wears a fine winter dust-jacket,
playing tricks with the angles of slanting
sunlight.
Why
bother to wipe it away now that you’ve gone?
It’ll
only settle again with this restless solstice wind.
The
harsh berg breezes
sweep through my home and
release
the dancing ghosts.
Either
that or sift a gentle grey mantle
on my emptying nest.
Remember this : Anniversaries April 2015
Once
I
lurched crazily, drunkenly
from one anniversary to the next
birthday
deranged
eyes stretched with
the madness of grief.
Each
occasion offered a million reasons
to evoke cataclysmic pain
re-lived, belly-up,
a blow all over again in the solar plexus;
I'll curl up like a child.
Now
I sail into them with surprise –
What- here again?
A
place to meet a long lost friend;
A
chance to breathe and re-connect:
A welcome harbour for re-stocking.
As
life goes on, more landmarks score the route.
They
pepper the map of my life -
punctuation marks:
Remember this!
It’s part choice to experiment living this way. Maybe 90% or more of the human population live like this: no regular income, no insurance, no pension, no ‘security’: living hand-to-mouth. But I am grateful and fortunate to have a home base; from its shelter I've weathered comings and goings, mindful of many who lose so much more from wars and upheavals – refugees - and those born into pitiless poverty, claiming only pavement space.
I've often heard said: “we all want security”. What is this essential security and where do I find it amidst crisis and loss, beyond the usual social security checklist? The blazing question!
This phrase, 'self-supporting', asks to be turned around. I do not support myself: over time I see how my self supports me. My own body is given to me – my gift, my treasure, my only real security that carries on two feet who I am, until the day I die.
Self-supporting is different from self-sufficient; true self-sufficiency is almost impossible for us species, a drastic and lonely way of life. Interdependent communities and webs of support are part of being human; one can be self-supporting but still in an exchange of community.
There is a famous intimidating quote which has such potential to be divisive and exclusive. But when I turn it around, check its context, chew on the original Aramaic and look at it upside down, it points towards an inner powerhouse. “I am the way the truth the life, no one comes to the father but by me” I understand as follows: my body will always tell the truth - it never lies and the truth always has a way of coming out; my body gives me an inner guide that shows the way; and my body is the only life I know, while I'm alive. Through our bodies we see, sense and connect with the loving energy tirelessly at work within our beings. I understand I AM as reference to the body, the inside-inside us, and is all I have as the primary way to truly connect with this nameless source of life (father, mother, parent, source). Apparently it's all I need. Any more is just an add-on, helpful or not.
It's almost a bit embarrassing and too simple; here is no great
doctrine to proclaim, nor rituals, nor dogma; it does away with religion. We
all have a body – like all other matter on this beautiful earth – and this is
our first port of call to connect with our great loving source inside and around
us. No body is excluded.
This
body becomes my support through my life. If I give it ear, it guides; if I watch it, it tells me what I need to know; it's my home base to return to and to live from, always. It is my
constant companion and friend, there at birth and there when I
die. It has a wisdom that underpins and supports the incredible whirring connections
and train of thoughts and ideas in my busy brain.
The trauma of loss toppled the ‘top-heavy’ construction of my life. As my world fell apart I found that my SELF is able to support me, more than I ever knew. The secret love affair continues, so secret it feels illusive and fleeting; just a suggestion of direction.
The
practice is to descend into the body and discover the treasure it is, always just enough for the present.
There are many angles to view a single thing, as many and diverse as the 7 billion+ different faces, each its own lens, on this planet. Here's my singular perspective, written years back as I waded through the messy, uncharted terrain of suffering. They're snapshots of poetry (amateur) and song (ditto), often borrowed (or stolen) from other sources and cobbled together for myself.
I am no purist and will borrow, steal or patch together from diverse sources. Where possible, due credit will be attributed to these influences. (Composers have been known to be called thieves; it can be impossible to determine the origin of original..)
Here my reflections are collected and assembled, ad hoc, before they get swallowed by a dying computer or eaten by fishmoths on their paper scraps. Maybe they will sing to someone else who has undergone their own great loss, or maybe not.
And so, on with the tale of this secret love affair....
It all started when my world fell apart for the second time.
Two things became clear to me quite quickly:
Firstly, I had joined a community of sufferers and was not alone or unique in experiencing devastating loss.
Secondly, I was alone and unique in dealing with my story of devastating loss.
No short cut would circumvent the painful path that I knew was to come. No-one else could experience those depths with me or for me and no messianic knight-in-armour was going to show up to save me. The fact that suffering comes to all people at some point in their lives doesn't make it any easier. I recall saying, sometime just after my 2 young children died tragically, I wanted to go to sleep and skip the following 5 years. No such luck.
[Contextual foreword: this was written when I was in the throws of resigning from full-time employment from an elite educational institution, suffering from teacher burn-out, post-divorce turmoil and empty nest crisis. The prevailing buzzword at the time was "transformation", necessitating endless workshops and speeches on the subject. My gut instinct - bending to my own inner mounting stress and pressure - was to bow out and drop the job; for me, an ultimate act of deconstruction]
Much emphasis is put on construction these days; it is the hallmark of our current society, and certainly every institution, corporation and any-ality places premium on its “mission statement” or “vision”.
(My wise late aunt likened institutions and –alities to psychopathic individuals, characterised by the exact same tendencies. Though we are horrified at the idea of psychopathic individuals, we are inured to these traits which are now the benchmark in the very places where many of us find employment)
Even the new “transformation” buzz is but another form of constructing, this time a more acceptable politically-correct image. But another projection to add to the countless others devised to promote the business/ school product.
Surely true transformation starts with deconstruction: not a comfortable process, and necessarily involving loss of some sort? It's so much easier to cling to things as they are, piling and bolstering them up to make them look even better.......empire building?
History shows how every empire eventually took a dramatic tumble, ending in spectacular ruins that still hold our fascination. [see https://connectsongdance.blogspot.com/2019/10/old-king-glory.html a song for children about how to weather the collapse of systems - how to dance round and round the rubble!]
A light look at deconstruction
There is a new word out –load shedding. This is not welcome in my country because it means the lights go out as the electricity supply is cut off. Our human systems are in collapse and cannot be sustained as they are, and we’ll only help ourselves by practicing load shedding in all aspects of our lives. We desperately need to learn to do more with less. Our gross consumer habits are our very undoing, so we could practice now getting used to less STUFF.
Load shedding is maybe exactly what we need to usher in the transformation we've all been on about.
But let me bring it back to my small-scale experience: in leaving my secure, prestigious institutional post, and no longer bearing the respectable title of a married woman, the sudden absence of labels, identity and habits that once defined me felt very akin to mass deconstruction. Without these boxes, I’m left with only ME.
Letting go is a clue: as our own bodies feel floored, grounded, bottom fallen out, we are taken down to the ground. Losing a job or splitting with a spouse can be deeply humiliating for some - a great sense of failure. At the same time, it's the ultimate load-shedding!
We are mainly urged to hold our heads high as we brave crisis, but what relief to let go and go down; it won't be forever, and we come up the lighter for it. Though our egos and minds may abhor the idea of load shedding, loving the false security that ticks-and-boxes afford us, our bodies respond with gratitude and relief when allow ourselves to drop baggage (and shopping bags!). This practice could also stave off stress-induced conditions such a strokes, aneurysms, insomnia, stiff necks and nervous tics.
Watching healed animals demonstrates this perfectly: look at Rumi's open stance of complete trust: the art of letting go! (no sign of the traumatized rescue dog with tough street background)
Ode to a full time salary .... by LC
....which
requires us to sit in a box
behaving
while we tick it off
neatly,
with obedient loyalty
and serious obsequience.
No
space for jack-in-the-box
pop- up- fun
nor
a breather.
Creativity
can’t be gift-wrapped.
So
I’ll forgo the full-time “benefits”,
toss these boxes, stack
a precarious leaning tower
or
stamp them flat;
paint them, re-arrange them
or just abandon them.
Liz Campbell is the sole writer and composer of all the published material on this blogsite, unless otherwise stated.
..... this colourful
laughterful lifetime -
a crazy patchwork of jagged living -
reduced to summarized columns of figures:
exchanges of this- and that-
amount.
How can life or love,
be calibrated?
The burning
ADAM LEAVING March 2015 LC
This morning a sob lumps up
just
under my chin,
threatening to
throw up
at
a moment’s notice.
Even the day weeps,
a
steady drizzle of mist
echoing
with distant cow calls~
a mournful chant.
Last coffees are poured in your mug,
hastily drunk in passing
as you assemble your life
into neat piles.
Final exchanges are made
over cricket
scores.
You travel light, my son.
From your small rucksack so much life
springs.
You have learnt an essential life
lesson:
It’s
not how much you HAVE
It’s
how much you ARE.
I give you my tears, m’dear, this
weeping mother!
Why do I even bother to apply my eyes
anymore?
Come close June 2015
(excerpts taken from poem by Sappho)
In
all honesty, I want to die.
Leaving
for good after a long cry,
She
said: “we have both suffered terribly,
But,
Sappho, it is hard to say goodbye.”
I
said: “go with my blessing if you go,
Always
remembering what we did. To me
You
have meant everything, as you well know.”
May
gales and anguish sweep elsewhere
The
killer of my character.
But
I am hardly a back-biter bent
On
vengeance; no, my heart is lenient.
Cold
grew the spirits of the ladies;
They
drew their wings close to their bodies.
Stand and face me, dear; release that fineness in your irises.
May
you bed down , head to breast, upon
The
flesh of a plush companion.
You will have memories because of what we did back then
When
we were new at this;
Yes,
we did many things then – all beautiful……..
