Hiya people! 🙂
Today I decided to share with you an instrumental piece by Loreena McKennitt. A lot if not all of her music has a strongly Celtic feel due to her own Irish and Scottish roots and her fascination with Celtic culture, but she also draws from folk music of other regions, such as various parts of Asia, or the Mediterranean countries. And we can hear a lot of the latter influence in this particular piece.
Hey people! 🙂
Today I have for you a Swedish song about star gazing. It was written by Swedish author and poet Levi Rickson who wrote under the pen name of Jeremias i Tröstlösa, and set to a tune composed by Gustav Wennerberg. Many contemporary artists have performed this song but the only version I actually like is Jack Vreeswijk’s. Although I have very little to no idea about stars as I’m blind, I do think that night is a very particular time, and sometimes it really is good not to sleep it through when you can. I find it very interesting how I, but also people in general, somehow seem to think in a bit of a different way at night, and feel a lot more creative, think more deeply and feel sort of more open to everything, like if I read something or listen to music it tends to impact me a lot more, and sometimes I get cool ideas. Below is Bibiel’s translation of this song. Actually, the original was apparently written in närkingska (I don’t know what it’s called in English if anything) which is a dialect used in Närke in Sweden, but there’s also a standard Swedish version and that’s the one that Jack sings.
One should not sleep when the night falls
For then the stars shine high in the blue sky
It is so quiet and peaceful
It would be wrong to sleep
I walk my paths over plains and through woods
And the stars they follow me so I have company
They say they are a thousand miles and even more away from us
Yet they burn with a steady glow
Yet they blaze like flames
Like silver and crystals
Now their sparks are falling
And an occasional one keeps flickering when it has burnt out
So when she falls, it’s like a streak of smoke in the end
One can never dream so finely and wonderfully
Like the night itself appears then when stars are shining clearly
It is as if it could be heard
Like a silver game that moves
One should not sleep when the night falls
One should look at the stars, and one should be two
Hi people. 🙂
This one of my newest re-discoveries. I found this song somewhere recently and I realised I had to hear it sometime in the past, can’t remember the circumstances, only that it was a long long time ago and that I have some nice memories with this song. How interesting is that. Sometimes you can’t recall the memory or what was going on, but the music you heard then stays in your brain and can get you back to those feelings you experienced in the past. This is not really my type of music, but because of those nice associations and memories, I do like this song a lot, and boy I didn’t even know before re-discovering this song that the name of the singer is Jack! 😀 How cool. 🙂
Hi guys. 🙂
So today again I’m participating in Bee’s Music Monday Care & Love.
Since this week, Bee is following Julia Cameron’s book “The Artist’s Way” as a prompt for Music Monday Care & Love. In this book Julia Cameron writes about creativity, how many of us don’t use their creative potential and don’t have enough space for creativity in their lives, as there are so many important things we have to do in life and not everyone finds the time to be creative. It seems like her idea of creativity or being an artist is pretty similar to mine – I talked about it in the past in one of my question of the day posts where I asked you whether you consider yourselves artistic. I think that art is generally quite a narrow idea – the way that many people look at it – so that it only includes those generally accepted so to say creative arts, or even just visual arts. For me though, art is something aesthetic, beautiful. Creative or artistic people are those who are sensitive to beauty, and in general. They don’t have to do any of the common creative arts, they can do anything – but in their own way, with a lot of enthusiasm, and wholeheartedly, withh a lot of dedication. That’s an artist to me.
And I also agree with what THE Bee said, that being creative, doing creative things, can be a way of self care, a very good and helpful one in my opinion.
Because it helps us to find some point in our life, because being creative we can do what we love, and because via our creative activities we can let out emotions, so it’s generally therapeutic. And it simply gives us something to do and focus on.
I like Julia Cameron’s ideas of “morning PAGES” and “artist’s date” – I send you to Bee’s blog if you’d like to read more about those things.
I always liked journaling and writing and it was always greatly helpful to me in understanding, figuring and letting out my emotions, which, particularly that last thing, can be often very tricky for me, therefore Julia cameron’s idea of writing 3 pages as first thing every morning and letting out spontaneously what’s on your mind without any editing kind of spoke to me. I can’t do it this way, because morning is usually part of the day when there’s the most hassle around and I have the most to do, and it was always hard for me to establish some consistent, more sophisticated morning routine, plus sometimes with my messed up sleep cycle it is hard to figure out when morning actually is, as I can wake up pracctically any time. 😀 And of course handwriting isn’t doable as I’m blind.
Still though, I do journal every day, or even if not, I always catch up on my journal if I miss a day or two, and my diary is incredibly important for me. And who knows, maybe if I counted it, many of my entries would turn out to be 3 pages long or even longer. 😀
And I love the conception of artist date, to do something you’ve never allowed yourself doing, but always wanted to, and that sounds fun. Something that will awake your creativity and allow your inner creative child to play.
At first, I had some difficulty though to choose something that I could do as an artist’s date. There are many things that are really fun and that I love and that I’ve always dreamed about doing, but they’re not always manageable to do just whenever you want.
And then I thought – but hey, there are so many creative and fun things you already do, about which you dreamed for so long and finally you can do them!
And that’s true. There are so many things. If you told me like four years ago, or earlier, that I’ll be doing them, I’d probably just laugh in your face and think you’re foolish and unhealthily optimistic or something. But now I do them.
I can learn my languages. I can horse ride. I can write how much I want and no one can tell me I can’t. Moreover, as for my languages, I’m learning those that I’d almost accepted that are out of my reach because of accessibility – or lack of it – like Welsh!
SO I decided I won’t be trying to come up with something new, at least not this week. I’ll rather try to appreciate those things thaT I can do, and that are creative, even more, and have fun doing them, so that they would be even more pleasurable and not just a part of my routine.
So both yesterday and today, I was doing my Welsh, and was having A LOT of fun with it – with learning new words, with all my small successes and all – and I hope I’m gonna do some of it every day.
And a special thing this week – which I’m gonna treat as my artist’s date – will be tomorrow, because tomorrow at 10 AM I’m going horse riding. I just hope I’m gonna feel good afterwards, and not as crappy as last week hahaha. Then all will be great!
So that’s my self care plan for this week.
The milkshake about which I was writing in last week MusIC Monday post, didn’t work out, but I still have tons of kefir in the house to comfort myself with. 😀 I think overall, on a daily basis, kefir is much better than milk shakes hahaha.
OK, so as for the music, Bee suggests us to choose some music from the year we were born.
I was born in 1997. Most of my music is either on my Spotify, or on my SD cards, and if I’m honest – apart from my music crushes – I’m not always oriented from which album which song comes and when it was released (as numbers have little to no value for me), so I wondered for quite a while as for what to choose. Enya has released a compillation in 1997, but it’s just a compillation, so… I wasn’t really sure. I filtered my whole Spotify library to find all the stuff in it that has been released in 1997, meanwhile making lots of interesting discoveries as I didn’t know that many songs that I listened to and loved and had in my Spotify library were released in the same year when I was born, but I still hesitated, and then I realised that this Enya’s compilation that I mentioned, it has two tracks that haven’t been released before. One is “Only If”, and another is just as the compillation’s title “Paint The Sky With Stars”.
I think many many people may know “Only If”, as this song has been quite popular, and if I’m honest, although Enya is my music crush and I like almost everything from her, in my opinion “Only If” isn’t as haunting and beautiful as most of her pieces, though it’s still beautiful and very positive overall.
So I thought “Paint The Sky With Stars” would be a perfect choice. This is such a beautiful song, isn’t it?And again, like last week, I’m sharing with you something from one of my music crushes. As some of you may remember, Enya is my very first one.
This is a newish artist to me. I recently got to listen to her EP “Poems”, consisting of poems to which she wrote the music, and two song with lyrics of her own. “The Fault In Our Stars” is one of those two. I haven’t found any evidence online, but it seems to be inspired by the famous John Green’s book, which I absolutely love, and I love this song too.
If you HAD to vote for any celebrity to be president right now, who would you vote for, and why?
My answer:
A very very tricky question for me to answer, simply because I don’t trace any celebrities with a particular interest and I don’t know anything about their political views. Being a rightist with a liberal mind, I think I wouldn’t mind to vote for a celeb to be a president unless our views would be similar and they’d seem trustworthy, and I wouldn’t care if our president would be a celeb, unless they’d be serious about the role they have in the country and wouldn’t be more focused on their celebrity career instead of duties they have towards the society. We have one celebrity who is a well-known politician in the Polish parliament and he has his own party. I can’t say I liked him as a celeb, he was a pop musician and his music was as colourless as so much other pop music, nothing particular. His party is in alliance with our currently ruling party which I voted for and agree with their views overall, so his party shares some things with them, but sometimes I have an impression they’re incredibly labile with their views and I think their popularity is mostly because of popularity of their celebrity, or ex-celebrity leader.
I think, if I really had to choose, I’d choose him, because as I said most of his party’s views are reasonable and matching with mine, and he is the only one celebrity I can really see ruling here without making a full-blown nation wide drama. 😀 However I’d be concerned about unstability of his views as I said and it definitely wouldn’t be a great material for the president imho, just the best among the celebrities I can think of.
What would be your choice for your country? 🙂
Happy Easter everyone! 🙂
Yes, happy Easter, I’ve just come back from Holy Saturday celebrations so actually it’s Easter. We had Zofijka’s Easter muffins already. They’re so yummy. But that’s not what I’m going to talk about in this post. Wanted to share Saturday’s song of the day before the day finally ends.
It is brilliant. I like Callum Beattie. He is a new-ish artist, comes from Edinburgh and although he’s pretty young, his music is ambitious. Here’s the song “We Are Stars”.
My Inner MishMash 