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You are invited to our exploration of Wabi-Sabi, a Japanese approach to life and art especially suited to this time of the year. We have music from Japan, America (Otis Redding, Robert Johnson, and more), Britain (inc. a tribute to Jack Bruce), poetry from Ryokan, William Carlos Williams, Rumi, and Stevenson, RLA’s Autumn meditation from Journey through the Seasons, and finally a famous passage from Whitman’s “Song of Myself”: a lonely woman’s fantasy about romping naked in the water with twenty-eight men, of whom “the homeliest of them is beautiful to her”.
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"You settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over upon me"
Lots of music this week: love songs, many from Motown, but also Frankie Lymon and the Mothers of Invention (great lovers, they) and Donovan and Otis and Dylan. And then one of those passages that got Walt Whitman banned. We today recognise the sexual ambiguity, but you are invited also to attend to the love-making between the Ego and the Soul.
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We are attending to the Autumn Energy of Departure: life seems to diminish, and calls us to depart on a new journey, first into darkness, and then springing into new life. But first, the Calling out of the Wasteland, and the testing to see if we are really ready for this journey. It’s threatening only to the ego. So let’s look at some Wastelands, some methods of Calling and being Tested.
