A few weeks ago my family gathered to deliver my father’s ashes into the ocean.
Dad was a watercolourist and his mastery was particularly expressed in either early morning or late afternoon wet-sand beachscapes. So to honour the occasion we sent him off at his favourite beach- Mudjimba on the Sunshine Coast, Queensland.
We chose the outgoing tide just before sunset: wet sand and pink light infusing everything.
Dad called this time of the evening “galah-galah” time, after the bright pink feathers of the Australian rose-breasted cockatoo.
Because we were at the beach we just had to have a big bag of hot steaming chips – and to top it off- I suppose to ‘ground’ the whole affair with our typical irreverent Irish-Australian sense of humor- we popped a bottle of Veuve Clicquot to wash down the chips. Sorry to the French.
My mother, at first a little tentative, became ebullient as we grabbed handfuls of ash, laughing as we avoided being caught by the waves.
There were some onlookers who could clearly see what we were doing. Some were smiling in simpatico but some had little scowls of disapproval. To them we must have been doing the ashes thing with too much joy. If only they knew how perfect it was: the rose light, the joy and the water: my dad’s favourite medium .
Mixed into all of this, was a statement from Chris Phillips our August Guide, that she loved sitar music. This of course meant a bass drone (also a sitar) to be the accompaniment to a top-end sitar. I then tuned down my instruments from the key of D towards a C. Which in chakra terms is the sacrum (orange) down towards the base chakra (red). Not quite pink, more like vermillion, but certainly like afternoon light.
End of the day music. Evening crickets. Gentle water and slow pulsing drone-waves like the long frequencies which the warmest parts of the visible light spectrum provide.
With love to you my Dad.
Steve
Stephen Fearnley is an award-winning filmmaker, artist and composer. He composes transformational soundscapes for the meditation journeys of One Mind Live – a unique worldwide online group meditation community. To sample One Mind Live, go HERE