trading songs

Until my own voice returns, here are words from another that was my companion this week.  This book by Susan Brind Morrow called to me from one of Bradley's boxes at Winnings, and there was no refusing it.  Yet another book showing itself to have, or be a part of, perfect timing.  Sparse, spacious, austere, but abundant with color, image, birdsong, and in these excerpts, people's songs, from the author's desert travels.  From The Names of Things:  Life, Language, and Beginnings in the Egyptian Desert.

"Dr. Hatikabi...began to teach me old Sudanese songs that he knew.  The music sounded strange, when I first heard it, antique, more Indian than Arabic. 
As he sang, tribesmen came and sat around us.  I began to understand that year about trading poems and songs.  It involved giving, that intangible, freeing human thing:  giving something priceless, even to a stranger, for nothing.
A few months before, I had sung to a room of Egyptian engineers who were building an aluminum factory in Edfu.  They had given me dinner and had sung to me, tapping their glasses with their forks for rhythm.  Then they waited, expecting me to sing something back.  I sang the old Ruth Etting song from the thirties, "Mean to me. Why must you be mean to me?"  They all laughed wildly and applauded on "Awh Honey, it seems to me" (honey being the one word in the song they understood).
A decade later I was with my friend Nina West in the Tien Shan Mountains, between Kazakhstan and Xinjiang.  Everywhere we went we sang -- on buses, in the high rich green mountain fields, walking along a road.  And in response, everywhere we went people sang to us.  They traded beautiful Kazakh and Uighur songs for "You Go to My Head" (Nina's favorite) and "If Tomorrow Wasn't Such a Long Time" (mine).
One night in the snow at Heaven Lake, in a concrete shack where we fed together on a sheep's head, we started to sing Beethoven's "Hymn to Joy".  And to our surprise everyone else in the room sang with us -- Russian, Chinese, Kazakh, Mongol -- not the words, but the music, for everyone knew it."

[later, another trade]
"At the geological survey station in Marsa Alam, I have just come up from the beach, where the director, Mr. Rifaat, and I were sitting in the dark, against the hull of an overturned boat.  We were singing to each other, songs that brought tears to our eyes.
'Let us walk on the beach and sing moving songs', he had said after we finished our supper of tomatoes and cheese."

[yet later, with a nomadic family encamped near the ocean]
"Hassan Karr is singing softly, sweetly, as he fetches trays and bowls and fried fish..."Il dunya helwa, helwa", he sings.  The world is beautiful, beautiful."

San Ysidro

Thanks to Raquel for posting these wonderful photos from this year's procession honoring San Ysidro, and our farmers, and our acequias as they bring us the water to farm.  It was yet another odd and lovely time with la danza, as prayers, songs, and blessings were offered from the Aztec, Catholic, Native American and Buddhist traditions.  The flowers, the community and of course the dance itself brought their beauty to the day.  But one thing I like most about these occasions is that it's like living, for just a moment, in some parallel dimension where coexistence, and even willing collaboration, between all the spiritual paths is simply the norm.   http://cascabeldecobre.blogspot.com/2012/06/san-ysidro-procession-photos.html