So our country has been taken over by criminals manipulating crazy people, and these criminals and crazy people have brought our country into a catastrophic war that will, at the very least, cause terrible harm to billions of people. And there is the very real possibility of a global economic collapse and even nuclear weapons being used with unimaginable horrors to follow.
I don’t mean to be alarmist, but that is the consensus of the brilliant and knowledgeable people I listen to. And as I’ve written before, there is almost nothing, practically speaking, that I or anyone I know can do about the situation except hope and pray for a better scenario to unfold.
So I’ve been feeling sad and worried about this for many weeks now while carrying on with gardening, shopping, cooking, walking, communicating with friends, chopping kindling, meditating, writing a novel, playing piano, and recording new songs.
I recently completed an album of songs entitled Much Too Beautiful. I’m now waiting for copies of the CD to arrive, after which I will arrange for the tunes to be available from various digital platforms so you’ll be able to hear them. In the meantime I’ve been listening to the album, 26 tracks, and loving the collection of piano solos, songs, and poems accompanied by piano music.
One of the tunes is a piano improvisation entitled The Golden Light. I recorded this improvisation to be the musical accompaniment to my story The Golden Light that appears on the audio book I just made of my book Oasis Tales of the Conjuror and other stories, available from Apple and Audible and Amazon. The story is about two young men, soldiers, lost in a tropical jungle in the aftermath of a battle that left one of them, Kersh, badly wounded, and the other, Moony, trying to keep Kersh alive.
Kersh has no conscious understanding of the spiritual aspects of reality or any knowledge of the natural world, whereas Moony is a thoroughly spiritual being deeply connected to animals and plants and the forces of nature. In the course of their odyssey, Moony tries to teach Kersh about the golden light, an ethereal light capable of healing and transforming us. I improvised a piano piece to go with the audio version of the story and to be on the album Much Too Beautiful.
I find listening to the piano solo The Golden Light wonderfully trance-inducing and I’ve been listening to it every night before I go to bed. Last night as I was listening to the piece I found myself thinking about the terrible war and feeling at a loss about what to do, and in the music I heard be a warrior of love.
I take this to mean that along with hoping and praying for peace we can be warriors of love, whatever that means to you.
Fin
Mystery Love piano/bass duet from Todd’s album Mystery Inventions