Straight from the Winged Horse's Mouth

H ost: So, tell us how you became a political spirit guide? Did you always know what you wanted to do? Or was there, like, a tipping point, or moment of clarity, like destiny, that got you on that path?

Spirit: Well...I was always interested in politics since I was very young. When I was alive. One day, I'm watching TV, and the news comes on. They said that You-Know-Who won the election, and my candidate lost. Well, that made me so mad! I had a heart attack right then and there, in front of my TV.

The next thing I know, I'm, like, floating! And I see my body lying on the couch. I thought, "Oh...great! Look what he did to me! Now what am I going to do? And who's going to take care of my dog?!!"

So I'm just floating there, really pissed, wondering what to do. The next thing I know, out of the blue, some lady who says she's a psychic medium -- she's got a YouTube channel where she answers people's political questions — is using her Silva Mind powers to contact me. She asks me stuff like, Do I think the President will get impeached? What do I think will happen during the mid-term elections?

Host: Wow! That's amazing. God sure does work in mysterious ways, doesn't he?

Spirit: Yeah! Yeah. I believe that. Yeah.

Host: So how do you go about answering her questions? Do you have some kind of process or...what do you do?

Spirit: Well, I found that I'm part of a group. We're all very interested in politics. We're all kind of on the same wavelength that way. I guess that's what brought us together. So —

Host: Oh, interesting. Can you tell us a little more about your group?

Spirit: Well, we have one Republican, two independents, and a couple of liberals. Oh, one guy is a socialist, um, Social Democrat, Democrat Socialist — something like that. Whatever that means. So, uh, yeah. I go talk to my buds, we argue some, place a few bets, lay odds. You know. And then I, uh, get back to her.

Host: And, you're listening to Straight from the Winged Horse's Mouth. This week's episode is "How I Became a Professional Political Spirit Guide." I'm your host, Chrys Saor. Tune in next week for our next episode, "What I Learned from Being a Dictator over 5 Lifetimes and 5 Thousand Years." There will be a prize to the first caller who correctly guesses the 5 incarnations of our mystery guest. We'll be giving out clues before the show. Don't go away — we'll be right back after the commercial break to find out more about political spirit guides.

Ding Dong, Merrily on High

This tune is my arrangement of "Ding Dong! Merrily on High", an English Christmas carol dating from 1924.

The lyrics were by English composer George Ratcliffe Woodward, who published the carol in 1924 in his book The Cambridge Carol-Book: Being Fifty-two Songs for Christmas, Easter, And Other Seasons, but the music is believed to be from a 16th century French secular dance tune, "Branle de l’Official". "Branle de l’Official" first appeared in Orchésographie, a dance book written by Jehan Tabourot (1519–1593), the French cleric, composer and writer.

My aims for this exercise included making it sound a bit more interesting than a couple of easy piano versions I had seen. I started with the basic melody and enhanced it by blending approaches to accompaniment I had seen in a couple of other arrangements of this carol, and by adding my own small embellishments to the beginning and end. For this version, I changed the playback of the music composition software to use string instruments. It came out nicer than I hoped, and just in time for use during the holiday season.

Ding Dong, Merrily on High:

Resurgence

I developed "Resurgence" by experimenting with ascending scales on a piano, and then notated in MuseScore with string instrument voices selected for playback. It is actually a fairly simple set of patterns, well within my ability to play on piano, but effective. It lifts from a somber beginning to a determinedly hopeful resolution, probably a reflection of my mood while under state-wide lock-down order.

I tell people that "Resurgence" is my "working from home during the age of coronavirus" music. I call it that because I composed it while working on my clients' presentations about pandemic-related changes in the meetings and events industry.

Resurgence:

Friday Practice Ditty

This is a short tune I recorded using the Hookpad song editor at hooktheory.com. It felt surprisingly natural to make the tune, considering that I knew nothing about making music before reading the Hooktheory book. It was first composed in Hookpad with its synthesized piano voices, and then it was imported into Apple's GarageBand software where other instruments were substituted, adding drama.

Friday Practice Ditty from Space:

The playable music theory tab for the tune, with the original piano voices, is through this link: Music Theory Tab - Friday Night Ditty

A couple more tunes:

Driven

Things Are Hopping

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The Place from Which All Movements Come

Tree Man #1. Charcoal sketch and photo image, digitally combined and colored. Click for bigger view.

This vision-story came to me as I meditated on the yearly renewal brought by the spring time, and on the human awareness of the cycles, terrestrial and cosmic, of time and space.

“I  saw their walker of worlds watching over them. He could feel the spirit move in each person, and the life of the people murmured to him like the wind in trees and the rustles of small creatures in grass.

“As he trod a trail upward, I noticed with surprise that he actively engaged, while he stepped, an unusual internal process. It was no merely intellectual exercise — it was palpable to him, like breath or pulse.

“It came to me then that there are places that cannot be reached by the unprepared, no matter how easy might seem bodily passage, for they exist mainly unseen though guised with earthly aspect.  He climbed to just such a place, a high bluff where one could see far and feel most receptive to perception and realization.

“And, though others might see him going here or going there, to him it was as if the world itself, with all of its living things and shifting relationships, flowed around an enduring place where part of him was always present.

“As I contemplated these impressions, more followed.

You can trace the movements back to the place whence they come, to the changing of internal states that flow outward into action.  There, small adjustments may have large effects on the patterns of becoming. You can feel its workings in your mind and body, and its nature in the space between your hands.

“I thought then of artful practices having a strong aspect of interior awareness, of connections strengthened in the brain.

“With due caution — perhaps we could allow ourselves to mythopoetically imagine that — somewhere — there is something like an inside-out, upside-down sort of place.  There, a great tree grows at the heart of things, roots fed by fine emanations from stars, branches ever-spreading in ceaseless motion to form the world we know.  Perhaps at times our walker finds it more effective to internally pivot, wend his way inward on a branch, touch where the branches meet at the trunk, then trace a different branch back out to the world.  In this way he travels from place to place, or condition to condition, such that even a straight track may curve from outer to inner, and back again.

“In the exterior aspect of physical experience, the Earth travels its year-long journey around the Sun, during which a person might spend much effort to adapt his circumstances or to travel distances.  In the interior imaginal realm of our psyches, inhabited by resonant symbols, one may watch the Sun, Moon and stars trail arcs of fire around the Earth as it spins — and at the center of all the turning grows the tree that roots itself in sky as much as in earth.

“There, the perspective grants keener sight of things needful to know, and by which our walker may quicken or smooth his way.  Moreover, to those who know the way, it is the deepening place whence comes breath and movement, the birthplace of all paths, and where it can be seen that the way anyone ever really gets anywhere is to transform one place into another, over and over, and that this is how the world was — and still is — made.”

The High Place. Oil paint drawing on paper, digitally enhanced.

Yin and Yang Hands.

Tree Child #2. Ballpoint pen and marker drawing on notebook paper, digitally colored.

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The Fallen Hours

Below is another poetic response to someone's comment on time's passage.

Dreaming trees,
root ever deeper
into forgotten seasons
veiled by curtains
of rain and sun.

Whisper, leaves.

O, fallen hours—
muted by time—
stand again, chorus
your thousand
thousand voices:

I am alive again.
I am Here—I am Now.
I am the seed that fell.
And I arise again.

The Falling. Oil paint drawing on paper, digitally enhanced.

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Memory

I do not claim to be a poet, but this is a poem that I wrote as answer to a poet's question to me about seeing in aged faces connections to family past and future. It seemed more appropriate than to compose a, likely to be muddled, prose response. The characters in the poem are composite figures based on actual persons that I know. The phrase "gesturing the sign" is a reference to American Sign Language.

You need no paper,
no photo, no recording
to prove the truth of yesterday.
The map of your face remembers
the time of my birth;
and when I first laughed at your smile;
and how I leaped
to your arms
before I could speak;
and your mirth when I touched
the morning stubble on your cheek,
then turned away,
gesturing the sign, dirty,
my small fingers waving
under my chin.

The mirror of your eyes
remind me to myself.
Without speech, they recall
how you held me up before
the living room mirror,
to let me see
us as we were.
You named to me
the people who loved me.
We looked at each other
reflecting morning light,
and you murmured to us:
Remember.

Someday, I will embrace
all that I have seen
and trace, like the sun,
with fingers of light
the curving face of time—
see how all places that we knew
have been but shared memories
all along.
I will look for you in memory,
where you too can find me.
We will laugh over
what we remember
and what we forgot,
and then:
Make new memories—
to grow up in again,
to live in again
for ever.

The Opened Heart. Oil paint drawing on paper.

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Shapes

Yin and Yang Nodal Transits

Alternation of Odd and Even

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The Being That Silently Burns

Convergence

This story is from a mystical dream which, I later learned, occurred during an actual astronomical event and is strikingly suggestive of it.

Before dawn, the two boys slipped away from the other children. The young ones need protection, the taller boy thought. They made their way to a long disused room, where he drew statuettes from their hiding place and arranged them on a rectangle of old linen. He fingered one of them for a moment, a figurine of reddish colors. 

He turned and saw a small opening that had not been visible a moment before. Through this they climbed, emerging into a long corridor formed by shimmering bands of white and red emanating from a distant source. The taller boy peered into the convergence that flared large with blinding light against the darkness, that poured endless streams of hot white and red. He thought he saw an elongated human-like form emerge in the brilliance.

Afterwards, he could not explain all that happened. He remembered hastily forming his request before the audience ended, with the smaller boy helping to recall the old words for what they wanted. Then the being that silently burned replied in words without sound:

It would have been better asked sooner.
The flow ebbs again—but something
can still be shaped.
With that, it blazed suddenly many times hotter, and they fell back from its power and away from that place.

Major solar flare recorded Dec. 5, 2006.

Tsunami-like blast wave rips across the Sun
A blast wave swept across the face of the Sun on Wednesday, rippling outward from the site of a large solar flare. Blast waves that spread all the way across the Sun like this one did are rare, especially when the Sun is in the quiet phase of its 11-year cycle, as it is right now.

Russian Scientists Expect Powerful Solar Flares
Russia's geophysical forecast center said Wednesday it expects powerful solar flares, vast explosions in the sun's atmosphere around sunspots, to occur in the near future. Solar flares can expel billion-ton clouds of electrified gas or plasma into space at a speed of 1 million miles per hour. Eruptions from the sun can damage satellites and disrupt electrical and communications systems on Earth.
"An X9 solar flare was registered last Tuesday. Over 30 years of regular X-ray observations of the sun, only about 25 powerful flares have been registered, and they had never previously been observed in the solar minimum [the lowest point of the sun's 11-year activity cycle]. This is surprising, because normally such flares occur at the peak of the sun's activity," the center said.

Propagation Forecast Bulletin #51 de K7RA
The past couple of days have seen robust solar activity, with flares and strong solar wind. On Wednesday and Thursday, December 6 and 7, the planetary A index rose to 28, then 25. On December 5 a large X9 class solar flare emerged from the sun's eastern side, but it wasn't earth directed. This was from a large sunspot 930, which drove the sunspot number to 59 on the same day as the solar flare, the same level as five days earlier. Wednesday, December 6 saw a smaller X6 flare, and currently early Friday morning we are seeing a strong solar wind, with the interplanetary magnetic field pointing south, making us vulnerable. There is a chance of more flares, which might be bad news for the ARRL 10 Meter Contest this weekend.
Flare activity caused a 10.7 cm solar flux reading at Penticton, British Columbia to jump off the scale. The noon reading showed a solar flux of 573.4, and had to be adjusted downward to 103 for the day.

E33Sunglasses for a Solar Observatory
In December 2006, an enormous solar flare erupted on the Sun's surface. The blast hurled a billion-ton cloud of gas (a coronal mass ejection, or CME) toward Earth and sparked days of intense geomagnetic activity with Northern Lights appearing across much of the United States.

Spirits of Fire and Light. Oil paint drawing on paper.

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Secret Country

In this short poem, a contemplative psyche looks backwards and forwards, and perhaps finds no end in sight to either direction.

Through wisdom's heart, a passage leads
to secret country under ancient skies,
where wildflowers bloom as midnight stars,
and the wind whispers truth through centuries.

Through dreaming eyes, the vision pours
like gem-combed sun, the rainbow tress.
Yet trackless lands pass seeing's bounds,
and this waking heart holds wilderness.

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