For Earrach, Alex, and all the dead

Death is on my mind today. Long-time readers of this blog will, of course, recognize that this isn’t really unusual, since I think a lot about mortality and our treatment of the dead. And certainly with an unusually awful early hurricane season combined with seismic activity in Mexico, I’m thinking about, and praying about, the dead and their survivors in Chiapas, in Mexico City, in Texas and Puerto Rico and Barbuda and beyond. But today I’m thinking specifically about Earrach of Pittsburgh, whose funeral is this afternoon.

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Singing: the voice, the body, and the gods

There’s a certain lift that can happen sometimes, when singing. Or, I suppose I should say, there’s a certain lift that happens to me sometimes when I’m singing, a moment when the composer has written a particularly stirring chord progression. Perhaps it’s a suspension where one line rises, aching, tipping on the edge of dissonance before resolving into the cadence. Or perhaps an unspooling of harmony, the voices calling out in unison and then peeling off until the music shifts from one monochromatic tone to a welter of harmonies intertwining. Or the inverse, a tangling near-cacophony of complex lines combining as if by magic to ring out one spare, simple motif.

The mists, the sea, and the passage of souls

Earlier in the evening we had had a Grove study meeting. We concluded by going through a series of guided meditations, recording them for the convenience of future meditators. After a pair of grounding-and-centering meditations, I took the last reading, a brief trance journey passing through the Mists to arrive nearer the Otherworld. As the guide, I wasn’t able to make the journey myself — I was too involved in pacing my delivery and keeping an even, guiding tone for the others — but it seemed to be a successful experience, judging by the faces of the others when the meditation concluded.