The Brimming Stone

Words and Music by Jenni Roditi

Greetings!

🙏⭐️🙇🏻‍♀️

I am excited to let you know that I’ve just completed a substantial new composition. It is 40 minutes in duration. It has taken me from July until now to complete the score.

I begin the journey next of planning to get it performed. Above is a two minute tiny-taster in which you can follow the score and hear the music played on Sibelius music software.

The piece is scored for SATB. That is, (I think!) going to mean four solo singers. But in another incarnation it could also mean a choir. It’s quite tricky in places so, a good choir.

I can provide full score and mp3 to interested parties. If you are a trained singer you might like to audition for one of the four solo roles.

There is so much to share about this new music. For now, I just wanted to let you know it has been created.

Hurray!

The starting point was the poem below. That is what ignited the music. The poem is called The Brimming Stone. Below, I reflect briefly on some meanings within the poem. I hope you can sense and understand what I’m getting at… !?

Next year I’ll be sourcing singer-lists and putting out an audition call. This is your early bird heads up, as you are on my mailing list or a friend on Facebook.

I will be putting together a funding bid, which will include all collaborator/s.

Thank you for your support and interest in my poetry and music. ✨⭐️✨

May I take this opportunity to wish you
A HEALING AND LIFE AFFIRMING 2024 🥂 💐🧁🥗

Keeping alive the kindling spirit, is more important now than at anytime I can remember in my lifetime. May we bring hope..

Peaceful wishes
Jenniti

The Brimming Stone

Moving backwards
Through the future
On my way
Past now

To arrive
For the first time

This is a Zen map
The original place
Your original face

Edges slide down
To prayer

I am here
Not nowhere
I have every human right to live

Out of the brimming stone
Of fissure

Blinking
Breathing
New
Now

© Jenni Roditi
June 2023

This poem is about a strong sense of disorientation leading to ‘a fresh seeing’ as if for the first time. Conditioned patterns are shaken up in a present chaos, summoning trauma and then, in a flash, creating a brain burst leading to an undoing of the conditioned narrative. There is a blanking out, a bringing down to one’s knees, and then a blinking-back, into what ‘is’, the present, breathing, just being and gratitude, for the new and the now.

The perceiver of all the layers of turbulence is thrust into a bigger knowing releasing the chaos and surrendering memories. All that is left is alive, fresh, even unborn, yet sensed as connected to life, possibly even before and after the bounds of birth and death.

This is the catalytic starting point for the piece and ends up being one vital element of several. Other layers of the piece find their way into the score as the piece is developed. 

As the composing began in earnest there was a recognition that this poem was riding waves of feeling and intensity and a call from others parts of my sensibility began to demand attention.

The first ‘other’ layer was sparked into focus by a classical Buddhist teaching which is often mentioned by the British compassionate non-duality teacher Jeff Foster. He speaks regularly of the inseparable play between the surface waves and the peaceful depths of the ocean. He includes inclusive awareness of both as the core of a spiritual practice. He does not consider it compassionate to ignore ‘the waves’ and just work, in a divided way, on the ‘meditational’ ocean, as it were. Therefore, there is an integration and invitation to meet the waves as they too are part of the ocean.

The ocean metaphor reminds us that we are not just being tossed around by the waves of life, but we can sink deeply into other layers of our being at a subtle depth of consciousness.  In this compassionate non-duality approach, there is a gratitude and love of the human waves - an inclusion and loving kindness towards them, an acceptance of the way we get caught up in the waves – and that, as our most likely way of finding peace, we might be wise to include the parts of us that cannot feel, are lonely, isolated, abandoned, raging, grieving. Spirituality is not a static space, but an intensely emotional aliveness, which, if we lovingly allow it to weave, with its own truth, through us, will lead us to a path of peace.

So, this new text arose, as part of the composition - a meditational ‘prompt’, more than a poem, to remember the analogy of the ocean and the waves.

Waves upon the ocean, roll
Upon the ocean, deep
Wave upon wave, rolling along,

Strong current below
Goes slow.

Dive down, seabed, silent
Sink down, steep drop,
Deep peace, breathe.

Surface, waves roll,
To and fro, come and go.
Waves are part of surface flow.
Sea bed, quiet, and low

Current's tow!
Still below.

Silent silence

Many waves
One sea

Tumbling in waves!
High tide, low tide,

Still sea, below

Waves upon the ocean roll
Waves are only surface flow.

© Jenni Roditi October 2023

Both pieces of text, Brimming Stone and Waves and Ocean, contain the interplay between different levels of experience and awareness.

The Brimming Stone composition is subtitled Four Songs as One and these two poems above are two of the four songs. The third song has a nonsense text:

La Di Da

That’s it! The text comes in with various moods and intentions.. I’m calling it the Cosmic Joke Song.

The fourth song is The Listening Gong. A large gong features in the composition and in several parts, comes to the fore.

I hope this has whetted your appetite to find out more. I will organise a “listen/follow score” gathering on Zoom, soon. I will send an invitation via Substack (and other channels).

Thank you again.

Jenniti