This is Joy Harjo's ongoing journal of dreams, stories, poems,music, photographs, and assorted reports from her inner and outer travels about Indian country and the rest of the world .
10/9/12
Following the Song Line
Reading an essay by Oliver Sacks, "Altered States". In the opening paragraph he states:"To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape...we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need....to get beyond ourselves...in states of mind that allow us to travel to other worlds, to rise above our immediate surroundings."
Here is the place of poetry, dance and music: the arts. I am studying how to be intoxicated with each moment, how to listen beyond the ordinary realms, how to follow the song line of a story beyond colonized mind constructs that demand we act within rules and laws that ensure our enslavement (see fundamentalist sects of Christianity, or a consumer culture run by multinationals for example) to fear.
In this study I realize that I do not know much at all. I do recognize love, the immense power of connection and compassion. It becomes most obvious in the natural world, at sunrise and sunset. It is then I see the connection between ancestors who love us, who we are now, and the children and grandchildren who follow.
As I get beyond myself I realize that I am closer. All roads leads to and from the heart.
Yesterday when I peered down at my heart to ask a question, it looked up at me with an immense shine. My loose footing steadied.
We will make it.
We will all make it.
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3 comments:
Beautiful
Thank you
Bless you, Joy.
very true...love makes the sun shine and the moon rise... beautiful
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