I want to share two things with you. “Expanding Peace” (this month’s Composers Choice) and a picture. Expanding Peace is a deep trance piece – so please don’t operate the dishwasher! The other day I was feeling stressed. After finally realising that there was no sabre tooth tiger about to eat me , I was able to break the fight / flight chemical ‘stress-trance’ I was in, by reminding myself to go find something beautiful. This is a habit I have nurtured over time. It works. Simply go discover something beautiful…immediately. At the time, I was in a museum. I found a brass plaque with the most exquisite light bouncing off it – I saw within the golden metal, a landscape – a seascape – with a beautiful horizon line like the ocean. It looked like a painting by Turner. I took a photo out of disbelief. Shortly, I realised I was back in balance again, having discovered my ‘little wonder’. So, when you need to quickly find remedy for stress-ness start looking for ‘little wonders’ around you. Put on your close-up cinematic eye. Force a state of playfulness as a circuit breaker and take a few pictures with yourPut Yourself In Beauty’s Way
Beloved – by Stephen Fearnley
A clear warm afternoon, a dusty road, a verandah, a view. Summer in Australia. This month’s Composer’s Choice composition is called “Beloved”. I wrote it for our special Valentine’s Event. It’s about old friends, country comforts and the sound of crickets and frogs in the early evening as there are dogs jumping through the tussock grass aglow with the rose-gold light of sunset. For all our friends in the northern hemisphere this is a bath of sunlight for you. It’s full of pinks and ochres. It’s full of swelling orange tones and slow, very slow transitions of saffron converging with the crimsons. It’s also in the key of F as well as the Lydian scale – The heart zone – and all the instruments are tuned to 432 Hz. – Play it when you need to fill the space with this particular ancient prescription of sound and vibrational form. Sonically yours Steve Stephen Fearnley is an award-winning filmmaker, artist and composer. He composes transformational soundscapes for the meditation journeys guided by Naomi Carling and facilitated by Naomi Janzen for One Mind Live – a unique worldwide online group meditation community. To sample One Mind Live, go HERE
Song For A Green Man – by Stephen Fearnley
This month’s Composer’s Choice is… A pentatonic journey through the seasons and back again. A cyclic soundscape invoking nature spirits. Atmospheric changes: light through mist, light through forest canopies, creatures echo and drums unfold. Drums are the sounds that humans make. I see an ancient pathway taking us through a series of brilliant ecosystems: water, sky, rainforest, plain, craggy cliffs and rivers. We all have a very deep memory inside our cells that’s still connected to nature. Its a universal thing and “Song For A Green Man” was made to invoke this connection. You will find the green man everywhere throughout Europe. Faces of a man, sometimes scary-funny, sometimes benign and bi-gendered, found carved all over churches and graves and grottoes and rocks and trees, anywhere a strong message can be sent to remind the observer, a mirror to ourselves via art, that we are the green man – that we are born from nature and that we are directly tied to the fate and fabric of the world. Some folk think the Green Man represents a male counterpart to Gaia – a figure which has appeared throughout history in almost all cultures. In the 16th century church at St-BertrandSong For A Green Man – by Stephen Fearnley
Portals Opening – by Stephen Fearnley
I think the first time I became aware of the idea of opening portals was probably somewhere in the early 1960’s, glued to the old black and white TV watching “The Time Tunnel”, “Star Trek” and “Dr Who”. The process of opening portals was something that was initiated by some high tech device that one slipped through, usually arriving in another place or time… I couldn’t get enough of it: I wanted to be Dr Who (Patrick Troughton), Spock and Dr. Tony Newman (James Darren from “The Time Tunnel”) all rolled into one. Then one day when I was 7, I slipped into another reality without the aid of TV or any high tech. I was sick at the time and was lifted out of my body, up above my bed, by an engulfing light which was accompanied by a soothing voice that reassured me that everything was OK. I was gently placed back on my bed feeling better. In retrospect, I could say it was a fever dream – but since then I have had this experience, and heard the same calming voice, on numerous occasions quite often during meditation. I have had a lot ‘high strangeness’ in myPortals Opening – by Stephen Fearnley