Fire Cools. Water Seeks its own Level.
An excerpt from 365 Tao by Deng Ming-Dao:

"No matter how extreme a situation is, it will change. It cannot continue forever. Thus, a great forest fire is always destined to burn itself out; a turbulent sea will become calmer. Natural events balance themselves out by seeking their opposites, and this process of healing is at the heart of all healing.
This process takes time. If an event is not great, the balancing requiring is slight. If it is momentous, then it may take days, years, even lifetimes for things to return to an even keel. Actually, without those slight imbalances, there could be no movement in life. It is being off balance that keeps life changing. Total centering, total balance would only be stasis. All life is continual destruction and healing, over and over again.
This is why, even in the midst of an extreme situation, the wise are patient. Whether the situation is illness, calamity or their own anger, they know that healing will follow. "

 "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us, it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others." -Marianne Williamson

I found this powerful and disturbing poem on my friend Jim's page.
Check him out!
myspace.com/darthmaul005


The Panther - by Rainer Maria Rilke

From seeing the bars, his seeing is so exhausted
that it no longer holds anything anymore.
To him the world is bars, a hundred thousand
bars, and behind the bars, nothing.

The lithe swinging of that rhythmical easy stride
which circles down to the tiniest hub
is like a dance of energy around a point
in which a great will stands stunned and numb.

Only at times the curtains of the pupil rise
without a sound . . . then a shape enters,
slips though the tightened silence of the shoulders,
reaches the heart, and dies.

I originally posted this as a bulletin.  It received such a positive response so I thought I'd post it here as a blog.  Enjoy!  I have a whole book of these so if you want more just holler! ; )  -Carol

"Nothing is more odious than music without hidden meaning."-Chopin

"The colour of my soul is iron-grey and sad bats wheel about the steeple of my dreams.' - Debussy

"My music is best understood by animals and children." Stravinsky

I was interviewed just prior to the Women's Work 2007 concert at the Greenwich House Music School.  To hear the concert please visit  myspace.com/womenswork2007

http://www.gharts.org/ww2007podcasts/carolalbaninterview.mp3

The concert was reviewed by Mark Greenfest.

"This piece, an elegy for the victims of Hurricane Katrina, is a gorgeously crafted short piece, with lovely melody – even harmonics – insightful and moving. " - Mark Greenfest

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
   If this be error and upon me proved,
   I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

~William Shakespeare