Sunday's Song, and Anna's Dream

An adaptation of Maya Angelou's poem, Still I Rise, sung by Ben Harper





I dreamed marvellously. I dreamed there was an enormous web of beautiful fabric stretched out. It was incredibly beautiful, covered all over with embroidered pictures. The pictures were illustrations of the myths of mankind but they were not just pictures, they were the myths themselves, so that the soft glittering web was alive.  There were many subtle and fantastic colours, but the overall feeling this expanse of fabric gave was of redness, a sort of variegated glowing red. In my dream I handled and felt this material and wept with joy....
And now I was standing out in space somewhere, keeping my position in space with an occasional down-treading movement of my feet in the air....
I was too sick and dizzy to look down and see the world turning. Then I look and it is like a vision - time has gone and the whole history of man, the long story of mankind, is present in what I see now, and it is like a great soaring hymn of joy and triumph in which pain is a small lively counterpoint. And I look and see that the red areas are being invaded by the bright different colours of the other parts of the world. The colours are melting and flowing into each other, indescribably beautiful so that the world becomes whole, all one beautiful glittering colour, but a colour I have never seen in life. This is a moment of almost unbearable happiness, the happiness seems to swell up, so that everything suddenly bursts, explodes - I was suddenly standing in peace, in silence.


---Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

Saturday's Song: Below my Feet

Reading of this year's washing of the feet brings this song to mind.
"Keep my eyes to serve, my hands to learn..."

Friday's Song

speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world

This little boy recites the poem Litany, by Billy Collins, in a whole new way.

He is not only the sound of rain on the roof; he also happens to be the shooting star.