Rituals and Spring
9 February
Continuing my obsessive need to chart the return of the sun, here on a bright and clear Sunday morning is the current state of play.
There's a smudge of light on the horizon at 6am, the street lights go off at 7.15am and the sun is up over the roof of Whipp's Cross hospital at 7.50am pouring light into my front room. By 8.15am, the light is surging into my downstairs room also.
Ross was here from Thursday night and it was good to have so much time with him before I took him home on Saturday lunchtime to meet up with his friend Amy. They hope to go hunting for sculpture materials and reference points in Brick Lane market on Sunday morning.
Meanwhile, I did five loads of washing which included all the bed linen and the towels as well as doing the weekly shopping. Oh, I am such a little house proud soul at times.
The evening brought a fabulous music event on the South Bank which I attended with Gill. When I first saw the event announced last summer, I knew that it was her sort of eclectic happening.
It began with music from the African Equatorial rain forest. Seven women singing, dancing, performing. Three men providing percussive accompaniment. They were sensational, earthy, sexy, completely undisciplined in Western performance terms, highly elaborate in their music making, completely out of context in a Western temple of art.
Copland's Appalachian Spring provided an orchestral break. It's a piece I love and which brought tears to the eyes with its yearning love.
Then came a performance of Machaut's Messe de Nostre Dame which was first heard around 1450. It was performed by the Hilliard Ensemble with Kudsi Erguner playing a Turkish flute called a ney and it provided and exquisite blend of two traditions of meditation. I really felt that Islam and Christianity came from two wellsprings. I felt that when there was singing, there was flute and when there was flute there was singing. It was also astonishing to see that where the women had begun from the earth and worked through to the head, the men started from the head and worked through to the ground and that, though both were ineffably different, they were still the same.
When it came to it, I did not need Stravinsky's Rite of Spring as well. I knew it in my head already and knew that I would be amazed that the rhythmic structures of that masterpiece were less intricate than the seemingly naïve music of the African women.
The whole thing was so wonderful that I was moved to talk about it at Quaker meeting the following day. I was uncertain as to how my ministry about synthesis and one-ness went down. Quakers don't make a lot of fuss. But I have heard since that people were moved by what I said.
And on Monday, at yoga, it snowed. Tuesday morning,
Cyril's garden toiletries were the quickest
so far this year. 