June 20, 2016

Badal Sircar, Manmohan Desai, and Ramli Ibrahim

Wednesday, June 29, 2005

Lightness of Being and Bearable Joy
Vidya Rao
[TOIST: 26 Aug 2000]
The flute is an ordinary, everyday instrument. A humble reed, played by cowherds, it is the symbol of pastoral simplicity. Made of bamboo the flute is earth-born; yet it contains air, the breath of prana itself, bringing together the heaviest and the lightest of elements-- that which is most rooted, most visible and tangible, and that which is imperceptible and inexperiencable, except in its absence.
Like the nature of the flute, we are indeed small, frail, humble. Flute-like, equally, we hold within ourselves the emptiness that is the playground of prana-- of that there is much to be proud of now-but not so much the vanity and false pride that comes from... objects, relationships, position. It is, instead, a self-respect, and inner dignity, the knowledge of an is-ness and a poise that come from an understanding of the richness of the flute's simplicity, the completeness of its empty space, is elemental paradox of earth and air.

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