Categories
Ordinary Miracles

Steaming River

steamingriver.jpg

Last week I spent three days at the foot of Daisetsu-san, the highest mountain in Hokkaido, for an intensive English learning camp with some of our students.

One afternoon during a break I trekked up the road, passing only the occasional cross-country skiier. The snow began to fall in thick flakes, coating every adhesive part of my clothing with whiteness. The rushing hotspring-laced river curled around the path, orchestrating each step up the hill. I imagined if the snow fell any heavier a person could easily get lost in the woods, but I didn’t feel afraid at all. I felt at home in the warm absence of human beings.

Categories
Ordinary Miracles

Daisetsu-san Tree

snowtree.jpg

Categories
Ordinary Miracles Space is the Place

Son’s First Song!

thecomposer.jpg

T. composed a 6-minute song all by himself two days ago. It is his first independently composed song, though he has sung backup on other songs of my husband’s.

A friend emailed me some info on throat-singers from Tuva (an independent area in the Tunna Mountains of southern Siberia and northwestern Mongolia) today, and reading about it triggered my memory of my son’s song.

Hmmm….maybe he, too, is singing at some harmonic tonal levels we cannot hear?

Check out some Tuvan throat singing here: http://www.ubu.com/ethno/soundings/tuva.html . In particular, I found this one clip amazing; and, yes, this is the human voice, and not John Coltrane’s trumpet in “Naima” as I first thought!

T’s song:

Pranatronic had been working on some vocals when T. leaned over to the microphone (I mean, we’re talking, he really was mouthing that microphone–it got all soggy!) and started to sing this tune. To me, it is a very peaceful and meditative song, although if you wait until you get past the 5 minute mark, then he gets into creating some final and rather bizarre high pitch sounds, like a baby trumpter swan. And a very wild baby trumpter swan at that.

Link is here.

Here, also, is a very short video clip of that latter part of the song production process. Both of these are big files, so they may take a while downloading.

Please enjoy!

Categories
Uncategorized

Fox Alert

fox_alert.jpg

Okay, everyone, here is an actual documented photo (courtesy of my husband’s cell phone, hence a bit fuzzy) that we have two actual foxes as our downstairs neighbors. One was reclining atop the bicycle shed, while this one was nosing about the snowy field.

My husband tossed him some bread, and he jogged over to eat it, taking close scrutiny of my husband’s, a.k.a. ‘the food-giver’s’, visage.

Spam prevention powered by Akismet