Summer Moon of the First Harvests
As the third phase filter got added to my lens, certain books, art works and movies began to pop up, unbidden. They had been there all along of course, but now I see certain works as pertaining to this new moment of my life.
To Wit. Wit, the long decline and death of the professor of English literature starring Emma Thompson raises many quality of life issues for chronically or terminally ill people and couches them in the poetic context of the metaphysical poet John Donne. Definitely worth seeing.
Last night Kate and I watched Buena Vista Social Club. It’s a 1998 documentary so you’ve probably seen it, heard the album and moved on, but from a third phase perspective it’s worth another look. Ry Cooder, American guitarist and champion of American roots music as well as traditional music from another the world, went to Cuba in 1997 to record Cuban music. When he got there, the folks who had agreed to play either couldn’t come (West Africans) or couldn’t be found. So he began asking around and found musicians, many associated with the Buena Vista Social Club which closed in 1944.
The musicians he found were legends of the Cuban music scene who had passed into obscurity. The group, which called itself the Buena Vista Social Club, put out the best selling album of the same name and toured, playing the Netherlands and Carnegie Hall. Here’s the third phase connection. Many of these resurrected musicians were in their 80’s and 90’s. They had, most of them, given up music for one reason or another, i.e. too little money, arthritis, boredom.
Brought together they reignited in each other the passion, love and craft they shared, making music. It is a remarkable story of gifts found, nurtured and revived, just as it is a story of men and women found, nurtured and revived. What can we do, I found myself asking, to retain the gifts, the passion, the loves we have so they vitalize and revitalize us as we grow into the further reaches of the third phase?
