… and here’s Dandelion Leaf (Herbal Music)

As I mentioned in the previous post, In my book, Paloma and Wings: an Herbal Comic, Paloma experiences the music of the herbs! The music below is the melody that came to her when she was with Dandelion. I play it on my harp. This too is a short video!

Hildegard von Bingen: Mystical Chants of Earth and Her Elements

Meet 12th century German abbess, composer, physician, author, visionary, and saint,  by way of her mystical chant.

Concert: Sunday, October 6, 3pm.

Location: Church of the Holy Spirit, 15420 Vashon Highway SW, Vashon WA. Across from VCC.

Immerse your spirit in this one-of-kind meditative musical experience in which Hildegard’s heavenly chant expresses the spiritual illumination of the elements and heaven within earth. This concert brings together a talented group of singers and harpists from the island, as well as internationally-known harpist and special guest Christina Tourin, founder and director of the International Harp Therapy Program to perform the music of Hildegard.

Voices: Erin Durrett, Fiore Grey, Barb Adams, & Amy Cole

Harpists: Christina Tourin, Deb Knodel, & Jane Valencia

Suggested donation: $15. No one turned away for lack of funds.

Find out about the Hildegard Music and Plant Medicine workshop.

Earth Song: Emerging Spring

Western Skunk Cabbage - photo
Western Skunk Cabbage – photo by Jane Valencia

Spring is awakening … in the tiny reddish buds on the Silver Birch, the bright faces of Daffodil and Dandelion, in the return of the Rufous Hummingbird with the first pink blossoms of Salmonberry, in the mysterious and murky spathes of the Skunk Cabbage in the wetlands.

Spring suffuses the air — lengthening  the days, and invoking the renewal of exuberant and anguished egg-laying by our hens. It infuses our vital force, and we too may feel a budding and greening, the surge of sap rising — pulled upward  by way, as with the trees, of the crown of ourselves. — drawing forth the minerals and waters from our saturated winter-fed subconscious, and nourishing our fancies and wishes, plans and motions with the sweet and potent brew of life.

Here in the Pacific Northwest the persistent rains, and soaked fields, forest, and pathways remind me that we humans are of the waters and the earth. Fluids move through us, a constant interchange of absorption and release of various aspects of earth and air. We are sparked and fueled by the fire of life, and awash with the streams, rivers, tides, and tranquil ponds that communicate within us our ocean nature. We possess greening, leafing selves, pulled upward even as we root downward and and outward in our daily quest for essential nourishment to sustain our spirit and selves.

Bright stars of thought and imagination, the deep inner mystery of our own genetic coding, and the unending, surrounding, and inner flowering breath of the Divine urge us to reach in ways that enliven the deepest threads of our being. The successive layers of our own wood nature — our progression and story through the years — sculpt our resilience and strengthen our resolve as we respond to the changes, stresses, and wonders that is life on our blue-green world and with one another.

If you are alive, you are always listening and responding. Your trillion cells listen and respond, as does your very soul. The earth song that shapes and shifts the world around and within us is a music that every aspect of us knows, and an improvisation and composition within which each of us has a voice.

Who are you when nature and you know no boundaries, when one flows into the other and you recognize yourself in the garden, and the forest within your heart? When the Divine is soil and the soil is music? What is the earth song you express into being just by being yourself rooting and growing, leafing and flowering nourished by the very soul of your nature?

I invite you to share your musings below.

Welcome to Spring!