Welcome to December, 2005 -- and, as the people say in Arabic, Yarab! (Oh God!)
Has it seemed to you in recent weeks, even months, that you and most of the people you know are in a state that can best be described as near-desperation? That goals you've been pursuing through decades of devoted lightwork not only seem no closer to fruition than they were before, but now even seem to have moved so far from your reach that your frequency would often be somewhere in the lower band between rage and resignation if you were not working so hard just to stay in touch with your higher self that there seems to be little time or energy left for anything else? Are you working so hard on sustaining the will to live that you don't even want to go out the door, much less let anyone else see you so close to despair?
We may as well get used to this, and find our ways of moving within it most gracefully, because the fact is that we have now entered a time of karmic friction and burnoff that is unprecedented in our experience. The time from now through the end of 2007 will compel us all -- at least all of us who intend to come out on the other side in something resembling one piece -- to tap our deeper resources of creativity and fortitude, and hold the frequencies of love and joy while so many around us are tempted to wonder if the happy times we knew before were not mere mirages, and if we will ever taste again the lightness and joy we used to know.
There is no getting around it. While it is the UFC's policy not to abet the spread of dread with fear-based prophecy, it is also our aim here to deal in the truth as compassionately as possible, even if the forecast is dark and cold, with no respite of sunny clarity visible yet on the near horizon. We have, after all, entered as of this writing (on Nov. 28) what Mayan calendar scholar Carl Johan Calleman calls the Fourth Night, a 360-day tun in which the collective consciousness of humanity can be expected to move away from greater spiritual awareness. It is not that our consciousness itself is somehow decaying, but rather that we are likely to endure over the next year a time of severe economic change and dislocation that threatens to drop us into our most elemental fear after the fear of death: the dread of stark, utterly demoralizing poverty that wolfs down our self-esteem, especially among those who have loved ones to support, and robs us of the courage to go on.
It is pointless to lay blame for the problems of countries and the planet, as tempting as this always is. It is even harmful to complain, as this not only stokes the pulse of fear and the posture, if it can be called that, of victimhood; it also makes these deadly habits magnetic, so that they attract more things to complain about, until the vicious cycle of hardship and rant brings about an angry death, or even worse, turns one into a talk radio jock.
So there will not be even one wasted nanobyte here on whose fault anything is, or why the Chinese have known all along that bitter is one of the five essential flavors. Our emphasis here is on how we will help ourselves, and one another, get through this. Many different remedies are efficacious, provided that they do their work within the pharmacopoeia of love. This, by the way, is the truest index of whom to believe as the chorus of dire, distressed voices rises and clamors for resonance with us. If the speaker is bent on telling us what we have to fear and spices the warnings with a fetid pepper of separation, judgment and doom, it is best not to order his book or buy into his pitch. If, on the other hand, the main theme is how we will unite with each other in teamwork and forgiveness, then we have just met a candidate for attention. The acid test: how many pages or minutes must one read or hear before the word Love first appears?
If you've been reading the UFC in recent months, you already know which medication this writer prefers, and why Music Medicine is our focus this month. The international concert and other events coming in Cairo only 12 days from now have been the motor of my efforts for the last year and a half. It is the only thing I focus on now, and all I want to or can write about.
The project is called Music Medicine because all of its elements -- the International Concert, Children’s Peace Playshop, Sound Healing Workshop, Children’s Art for Peace Contest and reciprocal Peace with Aloha exhibit between Cairo and Hawaii all share the same ideas:
Music heals. So do beautiful colors and forms. We are all creative. It is time for artists, and all creative people, to bring peace and planetary healing by creating works of beauty together.
Music Medicine will be the first time in Egypt’s history that artists from the Middle East, Europe and the United States will play together for peace and planetary healing. At a time when the United States is at war in Iraq, the great Iraqi oud player Naseer Shamma will play a duet with the award-winning American guitarist Scott Huckabay. In a region where art for peace is not a part of the cultural tradition – with the notable exception of Israel – artists, students and other people of good will are about to reach across borders and beliefs and find ways to Be Creative about Peace.
Beyond the general themes of the concert and other events, one of our main aims in Music Medicine is to gather artists who are as notable for social, environmental and spiritual activism as they are for the beauty they create, and thereby to contribute another of today's worthy experiments at defining the Aquarian Artist, the whole thrust of whose effort is to lift the spirits and empower the actions of their communities, even the wider community of all the Earth and her people, by balancing the goals of beauty and practical impact, stardom and service, success and love.
It won't be an effortless transition. Laurence Olivier once stirred controversy when he famously, or notoriously, remarked that "All artists are selfish. It's their job." Like his great rival John Gielgud, he observed more than once that an artist who aims to succeed must be ruthless. Like their spiritual great-grandfather Richard Wagner, they both left a flotsam of emotional wreckage behind them. They would have agreed with Abraham Lincoln that "Your success is more important than any one thing" -- only they would have left out the "one." The competition, needless to say, is relentless. As the old joke says, "How many actors does it take to change a light bulb? It takes five: one to screw in the bulb, and four others to fight for the spotlight."
There is no getting around it. A healthy self-esteem is the very lubricant of talent. The rub, as you know if you've lived or worked with one ambitious artist, and much more if you've ever woven together the visions and talents of many, is that once the artist gets a little ink or more than a little applause, or reaches the green room next to the Big Break, there is no telling how he or she will suddenly get an elephantiasis of the ego, and turn from Willy the Whale into Moby Dick, smashing the Pequod and everything else that dares to pursue. It has always been this way, and perhaps always will be. The price of beauty is pain, for the artist as well as the society that loves and hates him, at least until the artist begins to work as a healer who shifts the focus away from the agony of the wound and toward the goal of shared wholeness and joy.
This has been the driving motive behind building Music Medicine not just from a brilliant array of artists, but these artists. We'll look for a moment here beyond their usual profiles to what could be called the spiritual interest stories that have shaped each one:
Naseer Shamma of Iraq is one of the world's great masters of the oud, and becomes better known each year through his brilliant recordings and tour performances that now take him to dozens of countries. Behind the glittering star profile is a darker history. Naseer was jailed for a time for activities deemed disrespectful to the regime of Saddam Hussein. He thus belongs to that company of artists creating beauty in times of tyranny -- the parallel ice ballet between Shostakovich and Stalin comes to mind -- who were so irritating that they could not be left unpunished, yet so beloved and crucial to national morale that they could not be harmed too much. What did Naseer do that was so provocative? Work out the chords on this: he was so moved by the suffering of the thousands of men who lost their hands, even their whole arms, to wars with Iran and the United States, and thus could not play the oud again or begin to learn it, that he invented a method for playing the instrument with one hand. Among Middle Eastern artists, he is one outstanding symbol of the reverence that Muslims have always attached to one of the sacred names of Allah: Karim (Generosity).
The healing journey of American guitarist Scott Huckabay -- who'll play a duet with Naseer in Music Medicine -- has been especially arduous. Afflicted with severe asthma as a boy, he grew up isolated from contact with other children, and found in his Chiron-like solitude the first stirrings of an extraordinary creativity that expressed itself first in drawing and painting, then in a prodigious facility with the guitar. He evolved into an accomplished and increasingly popular musician, active especially on the American west coast where he now lives, then suffered in a motorcycle accident injuries so catastrophic that doctors advised him to give up all hope of ever moving at all again, much less of standing on stage to play the long, joyous sets he loves most. Scott then embarked on a process of sonic healing with the assistance of wild dolphins whose "miracle cures" are unexplainable in the context of white coat medicine, though obvious to those who know from their own experience that the world's mightiest physicians live in the sea, and can apparently beep any dis-ease off the reef and away if one has the vibrational bait to divert them from their routine of continuous spinning and sex. Scott's recovery has been total, as is his commitment to play his gratitude in an ever headier stream of healing sounds.
The sounds were much less lyrical in the Balkans during the 1990's when Svemir Vranko of the rock-fusion group Senzar, an accomplished guitarist and player of didjeridoo, Tibetan bells and other sacred sounds, had his work cut out for him as both an expert in conflict resolution and a master of raising emotional frequencies through music. And other Music Medicine artists have similar tales set on the shifting border between art and compassionate communal action. Hawaii artist Katherine Fisher, whose exquisite silk paintings will dress the stage for the concert, is co-creator with Michael Saiz of the Hawaii Health Guide, and has been especially active in programs to remove land mines from rural areas, and to prevent the future use of land mines. Songwriter Kevin Hughes, creator of especially lyrical and poetic music, is equally passionate about preserving the health of the Hawaii environment, and like Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai, knows that there will be no peace within or among nations until human beings live in peace with the Earth. Hosam Shaker could spend the rest of his life touring Europe and Asia, as he has before to great acclaim, if he and his colleagues in the Rahalla group were not just as devoted to searching every village in Upper Egypt for folk musicians to record and children to teach for no fee more than the satisfaction of knowing that the ancient music will live for yet another generation.
And so on. There's more, but you get the idea. We will make music, dance and painting together 12 days from now with the aim of anchoring the frequencies of courage and love. With some faith and help, we may replicate the Music Medicine design in other countries in the region, until we surround the war arenas with so much beauty that we won't just make the planes and tanks disappear. They'll reappear in Darfur, only made now not of steel, but of bread for children to eat, and filled not with petroleum, but with milk for babies to drink.
Far-fetched? Perhaps, for now -- until we awaken the artist of love in each one of us, and work together miracles that are beyond our dreaming.
Keep Holding That Frequency.
