“Once upon a time, there was a child whose light shined so bright…”
“You have been telling your story in personal terms… now tell it in mythological terms. Take the story past the wounding to the place of transformation. When finished share it, a show put to music and dance [and sing] the living myth.”
—JEAN HOUSTON
“She goes on a journey into the woods to find herself. The deep forest of the unconscious…She has many adventures trials and tests and gets lost along the way and off the path. She returns home after years…home within her true self…”
One record early on, I remember having an impact on me was Harper’s Bazaar “Anything Goes.” Records like this brought something tangible to the experience of listening where the moment is lingered upon and stayed with, as in how one follows the thread of a story that unfolds. This allows for a deeper experience of listening when the moment moves into a timeless realm.
“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”
—THOMAS MERTON
The transformative aspect of all art as well as music is its ability to offer a possibility or potential for the listener and or viewer to experience a sort of catharsis through the experience of the work itself. Suzanna and the Magical Orchestra and their album Melody Mountain, and the composer Arvo Part’s ”Spiegel im Spiegel” spoke to my soul during a particularly challenging time in my life where I was recovering from an injury and during the making of some of the songs from my album.
“Silence is like fertile soil, which as it were, awaits our creative act, our seed.”
—ARVO PART
The one thing that stands out with these recordings is the silence that is in the music. There was a time during my recovery from my injury where too much stimulus would send my system into overdrive. The space between the music in these artists’ recordings allowed for a deeper relaxation of my senses and, while meditation has helped me over the years, during this time I was not able to meditate in the way I had been taught.
This was when I also began to spend time with the poetry of Shelly, Tagore, Rilke, and Gibran. I had beautiful moments of synchronicity where I would have certain words come to me and then later be drawn to read a particular passage from a poem only to find the same words spoken in the poem, shedding light onto a deeper and varied meaning and association. This was the case for me in a song called “Child of Light” that came when my grandmother was dying in the hospital and I could not travel until the next day. I later was drawn to read Prometheus Unbound from Percy Shelley, and came across the same words “Child of Light” in one of the passages. These words spoke right to my soul and I decided to include another passage from the poem in the song “My Soul” on the album.
“It seems…the world, the loud and ailing, has just been destroyed, abruptly dispersed and only for me does the world-thought the large remain within the breast. Then it is as I have thought it; each discord has played all its notes: Around me gently, on golden Sun Wings green comfort of the forest floats.”
—RAINER MARIA RILKE
During a period of time I spent many days walking in the forest of the Land of Medicine, a nearby sanctuary where I sometimes took field recordings of my walks. These recordings of nature’s sounds of birds and wind chimes and a dog barking in the distance became part of the compositional landscape for certain songs on the album.”
—HC Love
H.C. Love’s Light Breaks arrives in stores on November 4.
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