It’s gray and drizzling outside but at this point I’ve just got to ride. It’s not the weather but the fact that I’ve also recently had a tooth extracted and a car making a right turn last week bumped me. Torn rotator cuff. All the pain is distracting me from the focus of riding. The rainy drizzle is at worst only annoying and at best it feels like god caressing my face with liquid.
The latest CD sampler from Silver Wave Records titled Come To Me Great Mystery; Native American Healing Songs features the musical talents of various artists including; Doug Foote, Thirza Defoe, Lorain Fox, Allen Mose, and Dorothy Tsatoke. The CD is a showcase of songs from such varied cultures as the Inca, Lakota, Ojibway, Algonquin, Navaho and others.
“This collection of new recordings is another unique conceptual project by Grammy award winning producer Tom Wasinger. As with his ground breaking World Music and Native American Lullaby collections, he works with a talented and experienced cast of Native American singers. . .”
This is not a singer/drummer a capella sort of recording. There is a diversity of sounds here including traditional flute, rattles, various drums, synthesized sounds, both ambient and specific, and the overall production quality is solid. These arrangements are diverse, complex, yet, subtle with a profound spiritual depth.
By the time I’ve got my gear on I’m listening to Doug Foote ask the creator to Hear My Prayer. I wince with pain as I hit a pothole at the end of the driveway. The pedaling gets harder by small increments as I make a right on 28th Street and head for the West Bank.
I pray my pitiful mitakuye wyasin to the creator to help me through this one. I am reminded that there is much grief in this life. There is so much pain. It makes us humble. We understand our own mortality and the mortality of others.
I’m rippin’ down the East River Road toward the West Bank, home to some of the worst drinking establishments in Minneapolis. I remove my eyeglasses as they get wetter by the second and don’t really help me to see when it’s raining like this. I think I’ll stop at the Hard Times Caf? for a cup of anarchist coffee and wait it out as I roll along listening to The Beauty Way by Allen Mose. The Beauty Way is the Navaho cosmology or their understanding of their universe and their place in it. If I remember it correctly N. Scott Momaday writes in House Made of Dawn; “May it be beautiful all around me. In beauty it is finished.”
I finish my coffee and step outside to find the rain has lifted some. Coming across the parking lot next to the caf? is a man shuffling on a single crutch an “I’ve had a stroke shuffle” through the pouring rain, one slow painful existential step at a time headed for his morning coffee.
I pray another mitakuye wyasin for him as Doug Foote starts singing A Prayer From Above. When I hear him sing I recall the sweat lodge and those in attendance, how hot it was, how beautiful the prayers were; all of it comes back to me in 3D as I roll on through the gray wet mist of this Minneapolis morning. We are all made stronger through the suffering of others. He looks older than he is but he’s beautiful.
The sun breaks through the clouds like it’s a stained glass window in the cathedral of the world just as the song Kaio Kaio blesses me with legs that can pump these pedals. It’s the miracle of asking the creator for help. I am blessed to be able to ride these streets and I am thankful for it. For those brief minutes it takes to ride this course, I am healed as I head west down Franklin Avenue into the flesh of my day. In beauty it is finished.
