'from the north to the south'

This post was published one year ago on Oct 25, 2023. I thought it was time to reprise it.

‘from the west to the east
hear the prayer of the mothers
bring us peace bring us peace’

A frame capture from the video below.

Since I discovered this video from a friend’s post on WhatsApp I’ve played it a bunch of times, each time discovering something new, my eyes filling with tears by the end. That’s powerful. It was powerful for me. I’m just sayin.

Everybody has a different trigger but music does contain healing vibes and a way of bringing people together. It has that potential. This is a good thing.

Forget politics for a moment. There are other ways of relating to each other. Art, as well as dance, theatre, literature, whatever kind of art, subsumes the connection between two people: the person who made the art and the person who is looking at the art. It’s a subconscious connection that bypasses all the logic of our frontal brain. We need to explore more parts of our brain.

Like where does our consciousness lie, that which is aware? Where do our bad habits reside and where does our courage live and how much of it do we have? And what about our innovation and our aspiration, our hopefulness? What about that? It’s inside us too. That’s part of who we are.

This video (link below) has so many compelling elements. The music, the sound of those women’s voices, the candid shots of women grieving, women giving support, old women, little children women, women with their hearts alight with love, women protesting, women marching, women beating the drum. Israelis and Arabs standing together.

And you know what else? Music as a world-wide unifying force is very much alive. Raves have been going on for decades now all around the world. All night dance parties. Feeling the oneness and the big bass beat.

A very large rave party from somewhere.

Rap is worldwide. Kids are rapping in Saudi Arabia. All the YouTube music, which is where I get my music. It’s been a renaissance similar to my twenties when I was discovering music and taking it home from the record store in a cardboard sleeve and playing it on the turntable. Then I bought a reel to reel tape recorder so I could record continuous albums while I sat in the attic all night writing poetry.

Sami Hamed aka ‘skinny’ is probably the most famous Saudi rapper.

So, if you don’t listen to this video I may not be able to convince you of the power of music to bring peace, but I still believe in it. It has brought me alot of peace, joy, deep appreciation.

Everything is a vibration vibrating from the one original giant cymbal crash of primordial nothingness. It’s been vibrating ever since. Everything is vibrating. And this music is vibrating with the power of peace.

“This video "Prayer of the Mothers", was born as the result of an alliance between singer-songwriter Yael Deckelbaum, and a group of courageous women, leading the movement: ‘Women Wage Peace’. This movement arose in the summer of 2014 during the escalation of violence between Israel and the Palestinians.
On October 4, 2016, Jewish and Arab women began the joint "March of Hope" project. Thousands of women marched from the north of Israel to Jerusalem in a call for peace. A call that reached it’s peak on October 19th, in a march of at least 4,000 women half of them Palestinian, and Half Israeli, in Qasr el Yahud on the northern Dead Sea.”