Hello —

Last Sunday night, as if to remind us of "the things found true ... delving under and soaring over the wreck of the present,” a super moon (scientific term, not mine) adorned the sky.

We’re told that the moon will not swing so close to the earth for another 75 years.

Most of you, and certainly Jo and I, will be long gone by then. Our son, Chap, will be 106. The recent election will be almost exactly as far in the past as the attack on Pearl Harbor is now in the past behind us.

Here in Cincinnati the sky was clear all night long. When times are troublous sleep is intermittent; during the wee hours that night, I went outside to look at the moon. Call me moonstruck; it was astonishingly bright and beautiful.

It brought to mind "The Lake of the Mind,” a prose-poem by Paramahansa Yogananda.

In ruffled water the moon’s reflection cannot be clearly seen.
Only when the surface is perfectly calm does the moon’s reflection appear.
So it is with the mind.
When calm, you see clearly reflected the mooned face of the soul.
And our souls are reflections of God.
Withdraw all restlessness from the lake of the mind and behold your soul,
a perfect reflection of God.

Back in 2010, when hopes were higher, I set these quiet, lovely words to music, fashioning them into a motet for two-part women’s chorus. The pure, clean sound of women’s voices seemed more apt than the more usual mix of male and female voices in a four-part mixed chorus.\.

I tried to make the music paint the words, evoking the “ruffled water” with a gently rippling melodic line, casting the rising sopranos as the moon and the descending altos as the moon's reflection.

The ‘mooned’ mystery of the opening music evolves and resolves into clarity as the poet expands his metaphor with the assuaging assurance that "our souls are reflections of God.”

May we all be assuaged and assured. Perhaps the music will offer as much, even for those of my friends who may be indifferent to the theology.

To hear my setting of "The Lake of the Mind" sung by the women of the Harvard University Choir, click on the link above.

To see a PDF of the score, click on the link above.

Rick Sowash
Cincinnati, OH
Nov. 20, 2016

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

“Stay in the field and you will catch the animal.”

… and …

“A move to the south will prove beneficial.”

Such was the trajectory-altering counsel of the oracle I consulted.

The oracle I consulted was not some faux-gypsy fortune-teller handing out horoscopies in exchange for filthy lucre. Nor a mom in a booth at an elementary school fund-raiser.

It was, in fact, the world’s most respected oracle; the oracle most frequently consulted by the greatest number of believers over thousands of years. It was the I Ching, usually translated as The Book of Changes.

The I Ching is an ancient Chinese divination text that has generated more than two and a half millennia's worth of commentary and interpretation. It is at the heart of Asian culture.

When I served a four-year term as a County Commissioner in Richland County, Ohio, one of the responsibilities I took on was to oversee our sister county relationship with Taipei County in Taiwan. I led three cultural exchange groups to Taiwan and hosted visiting dignitaries and artists when they visited us in turn.

Prior to my first visit to Taiwan, my hosts thoughtfully wrote to inquire about my interests; they were eager to devise an intinerary that would be meaningful for me. I told them I was interested in Chinese culture: I wanted to learn about Chinese art, music, literature, cuisine, parks and the I Ching, about which I had read. They loved me for that. They discovered, to their great delight, that my interest in their cuture was foretold by, of all things, my last name -- Sowash -- which they pronounced “Tsu Hua Chi.” In Chinese, they informed me, this means: “curious about China.” Who could have seen THAT coming?

Accordingly, during my first eleven-day visit, my hosts escorted me to museums, recitals, parks and the studios of painters and ceramic artists. And they took me to the Taiwanese center for I Ching studies, a library curated and directed by a team of scholars.

The building’s exterior was unimpressive, an undistinguished, soiled hulk on a crowded, badly littered street.

Inside was another world. A hushed sanctuary, dim and musty, redolent of thumbworn books.

Five scholars greeted me and my interpreter. They were wizened little men, very old, hunched, bespectacled, their faces as wrinkled as dried apples. They wore narrow black neckties, dirty white shirts and crumpled black suits, threadbare, with shiny elbows. The cuffs of their sleeves and pants were badly frayed, their shoes scuffed, the heels worn down. They wore scraggly, white goatees; their mustaches were as wispy as their eyebrows.

My interpreter introduced me. They bowed politely but seemed uninterested and unimpressed. She explained that I wanted to know more about the I Ching. One of them gave what appeared to be a rote speech, recounting how, in response to a query, coins are tossed to generate a sequence of apparently random numbers and that each sequence has a vast library of metaphors to assist our understanding of the meanings of the ‘window of time’ during which the coins were tossed. The coins fall the way they do because they have been tossed during a particular window of time and each window offers its own wisdom, metaphors and meanings.

I asked a few obvious questions. What if the same question is asked twice in a row? Is the meaning altered if the coins fall differently the second time? Their responses were patient but perfunctory and I guessed they were eager to be done with me and to return to their studies.

I was about to ask my interpreter if she thought our visit had gone on long enough when one of the scholars suddenly looked me in the eye and challenged me to ask a question of the I Ching. I was not prepared for this.

“But what shall I ask?”

“Ask anything you like. Anything at all. It doesn’t matter.”

I thought about asking how my wife and children were doing, 13,000 miles away, back in Ohio. Then I thought more deeply about the opportunity. What if I were to consult an oracle that warranted my respect? What would I ask?

It came to me immediately: Should I continue in politics? Should I make politics my career? I had been elected by a wide margin and it seemed that, in a few years, I could get myself elected to the state legislature and after that, who knows? Yet, I thought of myself as a composer and a writer, not a career politician. On the other hand, I had a family to support. What should I do?

Thinking about this, I “stared in a hole” for a time. When I raised my eyes, I found that all five scholars were staring at me with intense interest. I had become ‘real’ to them.

I told my interpreter, “I want to know whether or not I should continue my career in politics.”

She translated. When they grasped what I was asking they nodded ever so slightly. They tossed three coins onto the floor a number of times, the five of them bending over, peering through their little round spectacles to note the combinations of heads and tails that resulted from each toss.

When the tossing was completed, they had their answer; they had determined during which ‘window of time’ the coins had fallen. After twenty minutes of lively discussion amongst themselves one of them wrote two short phrases on a piece of paper and handed it to my interpreter. They said that these phrases distilled the essence of the vast library pertaining to my particular question and the particular ‘window’ the coin tosses had indicated.

She translated:

“Stay in the field and you will catch the animal.”

… and …

“A move to the south will prove beneficial.”

It was not the clear and conclusive guidance I had expected, but I thanked them, we all bowed, and my interpreter and I took our leave.

The remaining days of my stay in Taiwan were so jammed with activities that I only began to ponder these utterances during the long flight home.

Having no plans to move south, I dismissed the second phrase. A year later we did move thirty miles south, to Gambier, Ohio, and six years after that we moved another 150 miles south to Cincinnati. Both moves proved enormously beneficial in many ways.

What was this about catching an animal? I wasn’t a trapper or a hunter in pursuit of game. The utterance mentioned a field. Was it the ‘field’ i.e., the ‘profession’ of politics? You don’t catch animals in politics. Could re-election or being elected to a higher office be understood as the political equivalent of catching an animal? The image could readily apply to a trapper or a hunter, yes, but could it apply, as a metaphor, to me? A composer / writer who had strayed into politics?

Which begged the question, why are you in politics? Why, indeed? It had seemed like a good idea at the time and I had enjoyed campaigning, shaking hands, marching in the Labor Day parade wearing a “Sowash for Commissioner” t-shirt, giving short speeches at candidate’s nights.

I even kissed a baby! A woman in the crowd at the edge of the street where I was passing in the Labor Day parade held up her infant child and shouted, “Aren’t you gonna kiss my baby?” What was I supposed to do? I kissed the baby.

But the actual work of running the county was tedious. Other than the routine chores of the job I achieved little more than hiring a competent and humane dog warden, instituting a bike trail and causing a sewer to be installed over the furious objections of the citizens whose waste the new system would process. And I led the exchanges with Taiwan.

Sitting in the airplane, I imagined myself catching an animal. A snarling, slavering creature, with shiny teeth and a rank smell, a cross between a skunk, a badger and a wolverine. Shooting it would be bad enough. But catching it? With my bare hands? Imagining what they would be like filled me with horror, but I forced myself to really think about it: grasping a living creature by the scruff of its neck, lifting it off the ground, maybe trying to jam it into a cage as it squirmed and screamed and twisted, trying to claw me, to bite me. That was what catching an animal would be like. Was that something I wanted to do? Definitely not.

The oracle’s utterance was a warning: remain in politics and, yes, you will succeed; you will have the proverbial tiger by the tail. To be successful in politics is to have ‘caught the animal.’ Is that what you want to do with your energy, your creativity, your life?

It was not. When my term was up, I left the field. I did not run for re-election nor have I sought any office since. I poured my energy instead into writing music and books and promoting my creations, bringing my gifts to the world. That is what I have done, quite happily, ever since.

Staying with metaphors from Nature, I opted, rather than trying to catch the animal, to catch the moon’s reflection on the water, a much pleasanter undertaking.

Which brings me to my setting of "The Lake of the Mind,” a prose-poem by Paramahansa Yogananda.

In ruffled water the moon’s reflection cannot be clearly seen.
Only when the surface is perfectly calm does the moon’s reflection appear.
So it is with the mind.
When calm, you see clearly reflected the mooned face of the soul.
And our souls are reflections of God.
Withdraw all restlessness from the lake of the mind and behold your soul, a perfect reflection of God.

Back in 2010, I rendered these quiet, lovely words as a motet for two-part women’s chorus. The pure, clean sound of women’s voices seemed more apt than the more usual mix of male and female voices in a four-part mixed chorus.

I tried make the music paint the words, evoking the “ruffled water” with a gently rippling melodic line, casting the rising sopranos as the moon and the descending altos as the moon's reflection.

The ‘moon-ish’ mystery of the opening music evolves and then resolves into clarity as the poet expands his metaphor with the assuaging assurance that "our souls are reflections of God.”

May we all be thus assuaged and assured. It sure beats catching an animal.

To hear my setting of "The Lake of the Mind" sung by the women of the Harvard University Choir, click on the link above.

To see a PDF of the score, click on the link above.