we are the lucky ones

“I’ve been lucky,” Stephen Sondheim said in his last major interview.

Daniel Dorsa for The New York Times

That was Stephen Sondheim one week ago, speaking to our theater reporter about the two Broadway shows he was about to see. It would turn out to be his last major interview.

There was little indication that Sondheim was unwell. One of the greatest songwriters in the history of musical theater, he died on Friday at 91, leaving “a life’s outpouring of rapturous, hilarious, gorgeous and tortuous song in his wake,” our theater critic writes in an appraisal.

Impromptu wakes filled New York City piano bars with tunes and tears. “Our industry and our art form owes everything to him,” a voice teacher said.

Stephen Sondheim, the dexterous composer and lyricist of musicals including Sunday in the Park With George, Into the Woods, and Sweeney Todd was the elder statesman of American theater even if he always stood outside of its trends. 

An iconoclast whose vital music tested preconceived notions about what belonged on stage, he created songs for a murderous barber, a neurotic neo-Impressionist, and a vengeful witch. His work always teemed with moral ambiguity, never providing the easy answers some looked for in musicals. 

Reticent to share anything about his own life, Sondheim constantly examined the nuances and complications of being human in his work. He proved that breaking out into song didn’t need to be trite or simplistic, but could contain frustration and confusion. 

*Reprinted from NYTimes & Vanity Fair

Mary | holy mystery

"This holiest of mysteries, of which one was also disinclined to speak, was the connection between Mary and the Holy Spirit, that Mary was felt as giving human form to the Holy Spirit. . . .

"The Holy Family" by Pompeo Batoni detail

If mankind would experience Christ in His new approach to man, it must undergo a change in consciousness. Just as the first Christ-event was directed to the being of mankind, so the second Christ-event, towards which we are moving today, is directed to human consciousness.

But then, in order to Experience the Christ, a heightening of consciousness is needful, from the level of mere intellectual consciousness to an ensouled spirit-consciousness so that the ability may arise to feel and gradually to recognize the sphere in which Christ is approaching.

Insofar as this can be realized, the second Christ-event will awaken a new epoch of the Holy Spirit for humanity.

A form of Christianity must arise which gives cosmic content once more to consciousness, and which reunites human knowledge with the feelings of piety which live in the soul.”

~ Emil Bock (translated by John Meeks)

The whole lecture ‘The Mystery of Mary’ can be found in ‘Golden Blade 1986’

in & out

As the day dawns I light some incense and the candle on the mantle. Smudging some sacred smoke over myself and out into the world. I offer up the day's prayer and purposely encircle each room as I fan the wafting smoke all around myself and my space. 

I sit in silence for a quieting moment. Breathing gently and intentionally. Centering carefully before my day begins. Lots of thoughts - floating and bobbing, coming and going. Surrounded this way in suspended animation - a fetus in its amniotic fluid. 

Enclosed in the cocooning world of a warm and throbbing womb. All externals muted out and drifting far into the fog. Waves circling and undulating as I sink into the emptiness. Submerge deeper. Slowed down. Each atom of my being weighed down more and heavier. The self disintegrating into the void. 

Immersed. Isolated. Internalized. Into the vast unknown I go. 

elements in space & time

Change beyond the speed of thought. A dozen years ago I stepped out of community life. Bereft and adrift I stayed clear of any group. I took a masters in adult education and training. Loved what I learned, the gang who shared this with me, and how I absorbed the new with the old.