Joni shining

SHINE

Oh let your little light shine
Let your little light shine
Shine on Wall Street and Vegas
Place your bets
Shine on the fishermen
With nothing in their nets
Shine on rising oceans and evaporating seas
Shine on our Frankenstein technologies
Shine on science
With its tunnel vision
Shine on fertile farmland
Buried under subdivisions

Let your little light shine
Let your little light shine
Shine on the dazzling darkness
That restores us in deep sleep
Shine on what we throw away
And what we keep

Shine on Reverend Pearson
Who threw away
The vain old God
kept Dickens and Rembrandt and Beethoven
And fresh plowed sod
Shine on good earth, good air, good water
And a safe place
For kids to play
Shine on bombs exploding
Half a mile away

Let your little light shine
Let your little light shine
Shine on world-wide traffic jams
Honking day and night
Shine on another asshole
Passing on the right!
Shine on the red light runners
Busy talking on their cell phones
Shine on the Catholic Church
And the prisons that it owns
Shine on all the Churches
They all love less and less
Shine on a hopeful girl
In a dreamy dress

Let your little light shine
Let your little light shine
Shine on good humor
Shine on good will
Shine on lousy leadership
Licensed to kill
Shine on dying soldiers
In patriotic pain
Shine on mass destruction
In some God's name!
Shine on the pioneers
Those seekers of mental health
Craving simplicity
They traveled inward
Past themselves...
May all their little lights shine

Mandala #42: For Deven (Affirmative!)

"... Those crazy crows always making a commotion ..." (from "This Place," by Joni Mitchell)

Back in 1967, as we became friends while attending University of California at Irvine, Deven introduced me to the music of Joni Mitchell.  "This Place," released in 2007, is a good accompaniment to the mandala for Deven.



Deven and her beloved Kevin (who also created mandalas) making music in the 1980s, and that's their dog, Star:

One Week In April Meditation

Woman With Heart

In 2007, I bought Joni Mitchell's CD called "Shine." That was a bleak year for me, and the CD brought me some light and some perspective on darkness. It was released in September, just after R had a brainstem stroke which left him in a coma for two weeks at the VA Hospital in Palo Alto, California. I would have heard about "Shine" after returning home from a yoga teacher training intensive in Eastern Washington that convinced me that I did not want to become a yoga teacher. I did not yet know that R had the stroke and didn't learn of his stroke until the last day of the year when his sister sent me a Christmas card. It is occurring to me that I may have stopped listening to "Shine" after R died the following April.



Listen to Joni:

Holy Earth

How can we heal you?

We cover you like a blight...

Strange birds of appetite...

If I had a heart I'd cry

Today I pulled "Shine" down from my small hard-to-reach up-near-the-ceiling shelf of CDs that I have kept but do not listen to very often. The CDs are more or less in chronological order, beginning with some early rock 'n' roll and ending with a 3-disk set called "Autoharp Legacy" (scroll down). Although that CD is from 2002, my recent interest in the autoharp places it there in my sense of history.

A few months ago, I put all my Bob Dylan CDs in a box which is now in the small storage closet in my hallway. They have been easily accessible to me for as long as I have had them, but I have not had any desire to listen to them, except occasionally in my car. As a long-time listener of Bob Dylan, I also have another box filled with his music on tape, and a shelf containing all his vinyl albums previous to the years when music began to be put on tape. Although I am still stopped in my footsteps and find myself close to tears when I hear Bob Dylan's voice as I did in the Bellingham Community Co-op grocery store a few days ago, and am moved to the core as I have been since I was 13 years old, something told me to put his CDs away and be open to hearing another voice. It's been very quiet here for some time anyway. Beginning in spring, when I can open my windows, I listen to the sound of birds. If I want to hear music, I sit down with my autoharp, dulcimers, and ukulele. It has been silent during the time that I have been making the first eleven mandalas, which was last September after most of the birds were gone.

A few days ago while checking for updates on Joni Mitchell's health, I discovered that on November 17, 2014, she released a 4-disk collection of CDs titled "Love Has Many Faces: A Quartet, A Ballet, Waiting To Be Danced." Because I am living on my dwindling savings, I went to our local public library's website to see if they had a copy. I've been listening to the library copy ever since. It's a work of art. Hers is the voice I want to listen to while I am drawing and when I weave on my inkle loom sometime in the future or when I just want to hear the voice of a complex creative woman with heart.

It appears that I may be employed for 20-28 hours a week as a medical transcriptionist and editor sometime soon, working from my home. This is the first June in years that I haven't suffered from situational depression, and I am hopeful that I will be able to keep working as a transcriptionist for the rest of my life. That job will provide me with a modest income that will allow me to continue buying food, paying my bills, buying paper and colored pencils for drawing, buying strings for my musical instruments, buying yarn for weaving and other necessities of life.

I don't take anything for granted anymore and am grateful to have found Joni Mitchell and her fierceness and gentleness and her music and her art work once again.