LOOOOVE THIS VIDEO!

Music is just music, ya dig?! I love it! Found this after listening to some bhangra beats while packing. Made me appreciate it even more!

Carpe Annum!

It’s my last night in Baltimore, as a resident. I am moving closer to DC, and I really do not know what to do with the feelings inside me at the moment. I am very conscious of this feeling of uncertainty. I am embarking on a new part of my life. I will be 30 next year, which in itself, doesn’t mean a lot in terms of the fear of getting old. However, I do feel the need for more permanence in my life, as I stated in an earlier post.

Additionally, it will be my last semester in grad school. I am expected to be a real adult: pay loans, getting up at the same time everyday for work, blah, blah. I will do those things, but seriously, life is complex… Before I go off on a rant, I just wanted to pause in the midst of packing and listening to music, and realize that I am entering a new year, and a new chapter in my life. Carpe Annum, I say!! Carpe Annum!

Maya Angelou

I rode in the car with my friend, Alyce, a week ago to New York. On the way there we picked up her sister and her brother-in-law in Pennsylvania. A beautiful couple, made me at my most pessimistic of moments, believe in the possibility of real love, reciprocated love.

During the ride, Alyce told me about a poem she read at their wedding by Maya Angelou. Although I am not sure this is the right one, I found this beautiful poem:

Touched by an Angel

We, unaccustomed to courage
exiles from delight
live coiled in shells of loneliness
until love leaves its high holy temple
and comes into our sight
to liberate us into life.

Love arrives
and in its train come ecstasies
old memories of pleasure
ancient histories of pain.
Yet if we are bold,
love strikes away the chains of fear
from our souls.

We are weaned from our timidity
In the flush of love’s light
we dare be brave
And suddenly we see
that love costs all we are
and will ever be.
Yet it is only love
which sets us free.

-Maya Angelou

Moving Day…

…will be in two days. I have only packed three boxes of books, one of which I need to make into two boxes– it’s too heavy.

I HATE moving! I have done everything except pack: upload music, dance, talk to a friend online, write a blog entry, lol! Anyway, I have to do it, the mover is coming on Sunday and I have to clean my apartment. Moving is getting quite old for me. Permanency is necessary at this point.

Bhutto Assassinated

Woke up this morning to the most unwelcoming news: Benazir Bhutto was killed in Pakistan today. Twenty- Two people were also killed .

There are so many thoughts going on in my head right now. She was indeed an idealist, in her speeches she often spoke of a brighter future for the children of Pakistan. Her strength is to be admired.

Makes me : )

Strings Attached

Inspired by Susheela Raman’s “Voodoo Chile” at two in the morning:

Strings Attached

Strum me

Pluck me until it hurts

Create a forceful melody with your fingers

Find the right key that suits us
And play it all night
Flesh against wood
Sweat dripping
Separation between man and instrument
Will be unrecognizable

Art will be continued

Discover me in crescendos
Let me be at your mercy
Play me until it hurts

The rhythm will become the true master
The music will continue without tire
It will engulf us
It will consume us

Numb to all other senses
The need for the perfect composition
Will feed our drive

Delight will be found
In between
Each clef
Each bass
And each half-note

In each stroke
The rhythm will be rediscovered
And the song will continue on…
Copyright 2007 © RNLH

…And there was no one left to speak for me

“In Germany they first came for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me —
and by that time no one was left to speak up.”

-Pastor Martin Niemoller

I am watching Hotel Rwanda right now. I had to pause it for a minute and write. In this particular scene, the western soldiers came only to rescue the foreign nationals, mostly whites. Several things stuck out to me: (1)when a black British journalist tried to pass, he was immediately stopped, and had to show his passport before boarding the bus. (2) If the foreign nationals all banded together, and refused to go, what would have happened? I immediately thought of the quote above by Pastor Martin Niemoller, and I thought to myself, “Who am I not speaking for?” “What am I willing to die for?”

It is so easy just to be a spectator, and use words. It is even harder to be a participant, and create change. A Hindu belief, I believe, states that we are reincarnated in so many different forms, that becoming a human being is so rare, that we should cherish LIFE. So, to much is given, much is expected, as they say. There is so much to do:

The Congo

Sudan

India

Somalia

New Orleans

Urban America

Israel/Palestine

Rural America

You

Me …

Eruption

 

Eruption: resistance is futile
Control not welcomed
Truth lingers

In the light
Pain is masked by smiles and laughter

In the dark
The nakedness of desire erupts without excuse
The want will be apparent
The need is forever questioned

The gapping hole
Oh, the gapping hole
Insistent it is to always pull you in
With a song, a melody

A range of emotion emerges
Without consideration
For its captive
But a smile is never questioned in the light
Copyright © 2007 RNLH

Rilke and me

I am on page 1 of my 10 page paper ( due on Tuesday, a test on Monday–it’s 9pm on Sat). My mind is in constant motion, I am in no mood for thinking, on one thing at least. I am questioning the meaning of life, and I know the answer is complicated. I am not even sure I want to know the answer at this point. So, I sought Rilke ( I bookmarked his page on the computer for times like this) and I see why I connect with him. I guess I must say, I continuously see why I connect  with him. I think his favorite English word might have been “lament.”

I read an article recently, which said that we often connect to sad poems more than happy ones. Rilke’s poems, though not sad per se, are often in a constant state of yearning, for that happy place. In this moment, I seek only contentment. So while I wait, I will remember:

The Tenth Elegy

That some day, emerging at last from the terrifying vision
I may burst into jubilant praise to assenting angels!
That of the clear-struck keys of the heart not one may fail
to sound because of a loose, doubtful or broken string!
That my streaming countenance may make me more resplendent
That my humble weeping change into blossoms.
Oh, how will you then, nights of suffering, be remembered
with love. Why did I not kneel more fervently, disconsolate
sisters, more bendingly kneel to receive you, more loosely
surrender myself to your loosened hair? We, squanderers of
gazing beyond them to judge the end of their duration.
They are only our winter's foliage, our sombre evergreen,
one of the seasons of our interior year, -not only season,
but place, settlement, camp, soil and dwelling. 

How woeful, strange, are the alleys of the City of Pain,
where in the false silence created from too much noise,
a thing cast out from the mold of emptiness
swaggers that gilded hubbub, the bursting memorial.
Oh, how completely an angel would stamp out their market
of solace, bounded by the church, bought ready for use:
as clean, disappointing and closed as a post office on Sunday.
Farther out, though, there are always the rippling edges
of the fair. Seasaws of freedom! High-divers and jugglers of zeal!
And the shooting-gallery's targets of bedizened happiness:
targets tumbling in tinny contortions whenever some better
marksman happens to hit one. From cheers to chance he goes
staggering on, as booths that can please the most curious tastes
are drumming and bawling. For adults ony there is something
special to see: how money multiplies. Anatomy made amusing!
Money's organs on view! Nothing concealed! Instructive,
and guaranteed to increase fertility!... 

                                                            Oh, and then outside,
behind the farthest billboard, pasted with posters for 'Deathless,'
that bitter beer tasting quite sweet to drinkers,
if they chew fresh diversions with it..
Behind the billboard, just in back of it, life is real.
Children play, and lovers hold each other, -aside,
earnestly, in the trampled grass, and dogs respond to nature.
The youth continues onward; perhaps he is in love with
a young Lament....he follows her into the meadows.
She says: the way is long. We live out there....
                                                        Where? And the youth
follows. He is touched by her gentle bearing. The shoulders,
the neck, -perhaps she is of noble ancestry?
Yet he leaves her, turns around, looks back and waves...
What could come of it? She is a Lament. 

Only those who died young, in their first state of
timeless serenity, while they are being weaned,
follow her lovingly. She waits for girls
and befriends them. Gently she shows them
what she is wearing. Pearls of grief
and the fine-spun veils of patience.-
With youths she walks in silence. 

But there, where they live, in the valley,
an elderly Lament responds to the youth as he asks:-
We were once, she says, a great race, we Laments.
Our fathers worked the mines up there in the mountains;
sometimes among men you will find a piece of polished
primeval pain, or a petrified slag from an ancient volcano.
Yes, that came from there. Once we were rich.- 

And she leads him gently through the vast landscape
of Lamentation, shows him the columns of temples,
the ruins of strongholds from which long ago
the princes of Lament wisely governed the country.
Shows him the tall trees of tears,
the fields of flowering sadness,
(the living know them only as softest foliage);
show him the beasts of mourning, grazing-
and sometimes a startled bird, flying straight through
their field of vision, far away traces the image of its
solitary cry.-
At evening she leads him to the graves of elders
of the race of Lamentation, the sybils and prophets.
With night approaching, they move more softly,
and soon there looms ahead, bathed in moonlight,
the sepulcher, that all-guarding ancient stone,
Twin-brother to that on the Nile, the lofty Sphinx-:
the silent chamber's countenance.
They marvel at the regal head that has, forever silent,
laid the features of manking upon the scales of the stars.
His sight, still blinded by his early death,
cannot grasp it. But the Sphinx's gaze
frightens an owl from the rim of the double-crown.
The bird, with slow down-strokes, brushes
along the cheek, that with the roundest curve,
and faintly inscribes on the new death-born hearing,
as though on the double page of an opened book,
the indescribable outline. 

And higher up, the stars. New ones. Stars
of the land of pain. Slowly she names them:
"There, look: the Rider ,the Staff,and that
crowded constellation they call the the Garland of Fruit.
Then farther up toward the Pole:
Cradle, Way, the Burning Book, Doll, Window.
And in the Southern sky, pure as lines
on the palm of a blessed hand, the clear sparkling M,
standing for Mothers....." 

Yet the dead  youth must go on alone.
In silence the elder Lament brings him
as far as the gorge where it shimmers in the moonlight:
The Foutainhead of Joy. With reverance she names it,
saying: "In the world of mankind it is a life-bearing stream." 

They reach the foothills of the mountain,
and there she embraces him, weeping. 

Alone, he climbs the mountains of primeval pain.
Not even his footsteps ring from this soundless fate. 

But were these timeless dead to awaken an image for us,
see, they might be pointing to th catkins, hanging
from the leafless hazels, or else they might mean
the rain that falls upon the dark earth in early Spring. 

And we, who always think
of happiness as rising feel the emotion
that almost overwhelms us
whenever a happy thing falls. 

Translated by Albert Ernest Flemming 

geovisit();