A Sensitivity to Things

Quarter acre sections; a sky tower that doesn’t really go all the way to the sky; spotlessly clean suburbs; rolling, semi-green, semi-bald hills covered in sheep and mountain bikers; speedos for fashion rather than the beach; xylophones; a calypso beat, and druids in a city where almost nothing is older than 150 years—just some of the eccentricity galore in this irrepressibly happy, undeniably strange music video from Auckland, New Zealand band Bressa Creeting Cake—the only group with a truly awful pun for a name to win a national music award.

Or to describe Palm Singing in the words of the band:

“A very happy holiday song full of gaiety, summer, and love for one’s fellows.”

Strange backyard rituals around a bonfire aside, who on earth could possibly bad-mouth that?

My friend “Krazy Karl” was once a member of this band—before he made a stand for sanity. I need no longer wonder where the “Krazy” came from…

In New Zealand, the concept of “six degrees of separation” may not have been invented, but it always applies, and my crazy musician friend and Bressa Creeting Cake are just one example:

• I work with the guitarist from semi-famous rock band Garageland;
• I went to school with semi-notorious rock band Shihad;
• Jemaine of HBO comedy show Flight of the Conchords was in my film classes at university;
• A workmate was trying to sell a concept for a board game named based on this very concept—that you can connect one person to another through six degrees of separation or less.

Here in the land of four million people and forty million sheep, everybody really does know everybody…

A video and news story from ABC on the passing of Sri Chinmoy on Thursday, 11th October, 2007.

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Oct 12, 2007

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Spiritual guru Sri Chinmoy, a peace activist who inspired his followers to feats of extreme physical endurance, has died at the age of 76 at his home in New York, a statement from his organization said on Friday.

Chinmoy, who suffered a heart attack, died on Thursday.

Chinmoy was born in India and in 1964 immigrated to New York, working in the Indian Consulate. He later started a meditation center that eventually spread around the world.

A statement issued on behalf of Chinmoy’s followers said he had been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize that was awarded to former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on Friday. He was a strong supporter of the United Nations and his charities sent food and medicine around the world.

Chinmoy’s followers were said to take on a regimen of vegetarianism, humanitarian service and extreme physical challenges as a way to inner peace. He set an example by running ultra-marathons before switching to weightlifting. Acolytes said he was capable of lifting airplanes and had written more than 1,600 books of prose and poetry in his quest for world peace.

Read more: ABC News: Peace activist Sri Chinmoy dead at 76.

Music has always been very important to me. The moments in my life when I have lacked inspiration have also been lacking in music; to each and every part of my life worth remembering, there is a soundtrack playing.

I almost always wake in the mornings with a song playing in my head; the better I have slept, the clearer, more deeply the song plays, the longer it stays with me during the day.

It is easy to see only the bad in the world, or ourselves, to take the uninspiring present, our small corner of it, and paint everything black, imagine that even though we can’t always hear it there is a soundtrack playing—even to life’s least rehearsed, badly performed scenes.

Anybody who thinks that the world isn’t improving, that all is doom and gloom might gain in the listening to the lyrics of popular music for a while. Yes, it is mostly insipid romance, exaggerated bravado, aggression or even worse, and it mostly has always been, but out on the fringes, far beyond the television or radio blaring, barely heard but, in time, progenitor and creative influence for everything, are soulful whispers…

I am your truth, I am your destiny
I am desire and despair
I am your glow inside your beating heart
I am the love that leads you there
I am your soul, I am your soul

Can you imagine lyrics like these being sung fifty years ago? To an audience of millions?

Of course the distance between the lyric and the final, sung product, the song writer’s intention and mass, unthinking consumption is still vast, but a distance growing closer I would guess.

Likewise meditation. People who meditate aren’t seen or heard—those who break the silence grab our attention far before those who seek it’s whispers in secluded corners—the squeaky wheel gets the grease as the adage runs—yet those who meditate exist in increasing numbers, and their gentle, correcting, affirming influence can be found in the most surprising places.

And if you only knew
Just how much the sun needs you
To help him light the sky
You would be surprised
Cerf, Mitiska & Jaren—Light The Skies

I like these lyrics in so many ways—not just for their Emily Dickinson like intuition of a two-way bridge between nature, man and something deeper, their magical imbuing of the ordinary and everyday with something extraordinary and beyond, but for the idea that somehow the happiness of the entire world, the light even of sun and stars is brighter when each of us are happy.

And what else is the human soul but eternal happiness?

I am the darkness where you disappear
I am the light that leads you safe
I am the shepherd of your laughter and your tears
I am your pleasure and your pain
I am your soul, I am your soul
I am the faith that leaves your spirit strong
I am the sunlight in the rain
I am the universe inside your mind
I am your pleasure and your pain
I am your soul, I am your soul
I am your soul, I am your soul

I am the courage that inspires you
I am the knowledge that you gained
I am the people you will choose to be
I am your pleasure and your pain
I am your soul, I am your soul.
Markus Schulz vs. Chakra—I am