When I first heard the voice of this "bulbul" ("songbird" in Persian) Mahsa Vahdat,I didn't know whether to weep or to cry out in joy. It was as if I had come home to a mountain top, to a desert plain, or to a forest...
For many years I've been studying the significance of intimate love circles, inside as well as outside the conventional and socially accepted forms. I have found that when love reaches a particular summit of its strength and courage it can become a unit of force...
I was first introduced to the poetry of Mirabai (a 16th century illuminated woman) ten years ago when I set one of her love poems to music ("To Have This" on my Pouring Light CD is available on ITunes). Mirabai won her authenticity by non-conventional and...
I've often wondered about the function of the muse—as " Inspirer"— in all relationships, little known or famous. My sense is that at the very moment when love dawns between two persons, the Inspirer appears. Many experience the passion of intimacy as a beginning stage of...
There are questions that emerge in my soulful conversations with others. What is a soulmate? Is there such a thing? How do I know whether I have met my beloved in human form? Will I in this lifetime? In the great beyond? In the next...
"Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, one familiar with the language of ancient western and eastern mystical texts. In his groundbreaking work, The Legends of Genesis, Hermann Gunkel noted that the function of myth is to reveal perennial and universal truths that...
Jazz mixed with persian spiritual poetry? American clarinet & Indian tabla? Pure instrument sensitivity combined with electronics and youtube savvy? Tekkie mind and ancient heart? Yep. This is Shankar Tucker. Another thoroughly schooled and capable re-entry—a very old artist in a young body. Shankar's collaboration with...
There is a mystery that is unfolding to me as I move along the road of the internet to discover works of art that enrich the soul on its journey back to the "other side." Music, paintings, poems, writings of earth and heaven, lives of...
The love relationship between the West and the sitar began with George Harrison's sincere desire to learn the rudiments of this complex stringed instrument under Ravi Shankar. He recorded its sound in "Norwegian Wood" and other songs. Later—at Woodstock— Ravi Shankar mesmerized already stoned-out audiences...
It has been inaccurately said that Odilon Redon (1840 –1916) was merely "a French symbolist painter, printmaker, draughtsman and pastellist." Yet Redon was more fittingly called by deeper appreciators of his work, "the prince of dreams." He described his own art in this way: "My drawings inspire, and...