lotusinthemud

Heart Sutra (cho ver.)(2020 mix.) × Ikkyu-ji Temple,Kyoto,Japan - Japanese Zen Music

 

 

Joni Mitchell on meeting Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Tibetan, rather than Zen

 

Joni Mitchell on meeting Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche ... / ... Thanks for the link John Burris

"He was the bad boy of Zen. I wrote a song about a visit I made to him called 'Refuge of the Road.'

I consider him one of my great teachers, even though I saw him only three times. Once I had a fifteen-minute audience with him in which we argued. He told me to quit analyzing. I told him I couldn't — I'm an artist, you know. Then he induced into me a temporary state where the concept of 'I' was absent, which lasted for three days.

[Later], at the very end of Trungpa's life I went to visit him. I wanted to thank him. He was not well. He was green and his eyes had no spirit in them at all, which sort of stunned me, because the previous times I'd seen him he was quite merry and puckish — you know, saying 'shit' a lot. I leaned over and looked into his eyes, and I said, 'How is it in there? What do you see in there?' And this voice came, like, out of a void, and it said, 'Nothing.' So, I went over and whispered in his ear, 'I just came to tell you that when I left you that time, I had three whole days without self-consciousness, and I wanted to thank you for the experience.' And he looked up at me, and all the light came back into his face and he goes, 'Really?' And then he sank back into this black void again." - Joni Mitchell
--- --- ---

Refuge Of The Road

I met a friend of spirit
He drank and womanized
And I sat before his sanity
I was holding back from crying
He saw my complications
And he mirrored me back simplified
And we laughed how our perfection
Would always be denied
"Heart and humor and humility"
He said "Will lighten up your heavy load"
I left him for the refuge of the roads

I fell in with some drifters
Cast upon a beachtown
Winn Dixie cold cuts and highway hand me downs
And I wound up fixing dinner
For them and Boston Jim
I well up with affection
Thinking back down the roads to then
The nets were overflowing
In the Gulf of Mexico
They were overflowing in the refuge of the roads

There was spring along the ditches
There were good times in the cities
Oh, radiant happiness
It was all so light and easy
Till I started analyzing
And I brought on my old ways
A thunderhead of judgment was
Gathering in my gaze
And it made most people nervous
They just didn't want to know
What I was seeing in the refuge of the roads

I pulled off into a forest
Crickets clicking in the ferns
Like a wheel of fortune
I heard my fate turn, turn turn
And I went running down a white sand road
I was running like a white-assed deer
Running to lose the blues
To the innocence in here
These are the clouds of Michelangelo
Muscular with gods and sungold
Shine on your witness in the refuge of the roads

In a highway service station
Over the month of June
Was a photograph of the earth
Taken coming back from the moon
And you couldn't see a city
On that marbled bowling ball
Or a forest or a highway
Or me here least of all
You couldn't see these cold water restrooms
Or this baggage overload
Westbound and rolling taking refuge in the roads

© 1976; Crazy Crow Music.

beautiful birds and nembutsu chanting - from jayata

 

buddha amitabha song

 

new year music

"songs for tibet" cd offer

The International Campaign for Tibet is supporting a new musical compilation entitled 'Songs for Tibet - The Art of Peace'. Now available through iTunes and retail channels worldwide, including Amazon.

As a show of solidarity with the Dalai Lama and Tibet, 20 artists have come together to release this historic double album to coincide with the Beijing Olympics.

Sting, Dave Matthews, Alanis Morissette, John Mayer, Suzanne Vega, Rush, Imogen Heap, Garbage, Damien Rice, Moby, Underworld, Duncan Sheik and many more have been brought together to create this album of 20 songs. The project is the artists' expression of peace and support for Tibet and the Dalai Lama.

k.d. lang comes out spiritually

::kd lang Comes Out Spiritually

The March issue of Shambhala Sun Magazine features Melvin McLeod's interview with kd lang about her Nyingma Buddhist practice with teacher, Lama Chodak Gyatso Nubpa , and her new album, Watershed: 

"The idea of watershed has a great deal of pertinence to becoming a Buddhist and following the path.  It seems to me that the flow of dharma - or the flow of one's own innate buddhanature - is like water.  There are obstacles, but eventually the water will find its way around them. 

"A change of direction happens when you take refuge and become a practitioner.  For me, it's been about reassessing, reviewing and reprioritizing everything in my life.  It's been about revitalizing my morality and my relationship to cause and effect, meaning what I do as a person - with my body, speech and mind - and how it affects all other beings.  Each song is about my relationship to something, and it's also about the cause and effect of each of those relationships."
::link

musicians unlock mystery melody in scottish chapel

The 15th Century Rosslyn Chapel, about seven miles south of the Scottish capital Edinburgh.....which featured in the best-selling novel "The Da Vinci Code" has revealed another mystery hidden in secret code for almost 600 years.

A father and son who became fascinated by symbols carved into the chapel's arches say they have deciphered a musical score encrypted in them

::read more

I heard this music on Radio 4 - The Today Programme, which was on as I woke yesterday morning - it was very attractive and stayed in my head all day.....but I've lost it now.

::link to audio and videos

stop global warming college tour kicks off

The Stop Global Warming College Tour kicks off today April 9th at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas, Texas. Over the next two weeks, singer-song writer Sheryl Crow and I (Laurie David) will visit ten universities across the Southeastern United States in a bio-diesel bus, urging students to join the movement to stop global warming.

gore gets a hand from congress for climate concert

....The former Democratic presidential candidate had wanted to highlight the need to address global warming by staging one of seven worldwide "Live Earth" concerts on the National Mall in the U.S. capital on July 7.

But two events already are scheduled for that day on the Mall so Gore reached out to a close friend in Congress, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, to use the front lawn of the Capitol ::read more