[Shaahayda Rizvi]

Hello John Bucher and Stephen,

What a beautiful topic! I know there are great musicians among us here, but thought I’d add my own journey with the Japanese flute (A Shinobue)

“Both the troubadours of yore and the Grateful Dead are storytellers who use song as their medium to explore the human condition (often in beautiful yet bittersweet ballads of love and betrayal); both skillfully wield rhyme and rhythm to pull back the curtain and offer a brief glimpse of transcendent mysteries.”

Flute came to me in a dream, and the sound of the flute was so beautiful that it played in my head for days. The sound of that  Native American Flute was, hmmm, how should I describe it — it was “light, and ethereal” it was “mysterious, and sacred”. It was as if  the wind whistled and called me to my destiny, it was as if the faes sang a new song.  So  to explore the dream, I took flute lessons. The music lessons were not easy for me, because in the course of my flute training, it became clear that I was tone deaf. Yet I carried on, hoping to make a connection with the dream and what I brought forth through my flute.

I’d say I have not had a major pull back of the curtain, except through the ‘mystical, airy, mysterious’ music of my dream, Joe’s message became clearer:

“The mystery of life is beyond all human conception. Everything we know is within the terminology of the concepts of being and not being, many and single, true and untrue. We always think in terms of opposites. But God, the ultimate, is beyond the pairs of opposites, that is all there is to it.” ― Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

Shaahayda