My Muse ~ Movies, Music & Books
Journeys and words inspired by the arts...
Imagine a scorching hot summer day, a blistering sun rising higher and higher into the sky. You’ve been baking for weeks in this weather and your skin is brown, armoured against the UV with a waterproof 5,000 SPF screen, hat and shades. The river’s surface roils gently in the inexorable […]
A day of sunshine and warm summery breezes, moving conversation and revealed transformations, a day of intimacy and worries unburdened, of gratitude and the most difficult of life’s moments shared… A day not so much impervious to the hardships, the horrors, the blues, but one that finds itself on the other […]
My first mistake today was climbing into the bathtub and picking up the May 31st, 2010 edition of Canada’s weekly news magazine, Macleans, rather than the copy of Stephen Mitchell’s The Second Book of the Tao, in which I’d thought to have a nice, long spiritual soak along with the […]
A couple years ago, right about this time, my life was a process of transformations. Significant ones. Life changers. World changers. Personal, spiritual, career, love: you name it, it was changing. It seemed like Bif Naked had a song for every single transformation, every single condition I was experiencing. My […]
‘Grace’ is among my favourite words. There is divinity in it, and poise, as there is in this little girl’s voice, and in her being. Rhema Marvanne is, apparently, all of 7 years old. An age of innocence, so there should be no surprise there’s not a hint of wretchedness […]
Sometimes the words bring a song to mind. This poem was in my thoughts this morning and as the words of it washed over me a melody rose out of words. And out of a melody rose k.d. lang’s wail, Crying. Roy Orbison wrote about a cry arising from reasons […]
I can’t remember when I first encountered The Dao de Jing (also Tao te Ching, pronounced the same), which surprises me since it quickly grew to become my favourite written text. It’s brief (just 81 chapters of verse, a page or so each) yet richly nuanced. I’ve read all or […]
I started a post about courage, featuring this song, a couple or three weeks ago. It’s still sitting in the drafts folder. The Tragically Hip are a favourite Canadian band from the late ’80s and early ’90s, a time when I, and many other Canadians, considered them the best rock […]
Bif Naked came into my life in an odd way, the leading edge of a wave of the odd, the uncanny, the revelatory. This song has a lot of meaning for me, coming as it did the fist time amidst upheaval, chaos and — ultimately — awakening. And she came […]
It was a couple years ago that this piece of music resoundingly re-entered my life. The spring in Vancouver seemed to be a never-ending stream of sunny, tranquil days, riding my bicycle along the miles and miles of sea wall ringing the city. This is a spectacularly beautiful city once […]
