Balance

A few years ago I wrote a 3 act musical, Skyway Blessing. As anyone who’s ever written a play, screenplay, musical, etc., knows, there are a lot of moving parts involved, and at some point you just have to go with which parts are moving and put the ones that aren’t aside for the time being. Such is the process for any creative project, I suspect, including that of life! So, with roughly 9/13 of the songs now recorded, I am circling back to the beginning to build video content for the songs that are ready while continuing to revise the rest according to what has changed within and around me since I began. I am eternally grateful to Kyle Lamar of Digital Myle for helping me manifest this vision through the art of videography, and to Trevor Huster/The Personal Producer for helping me manifest it musically thus far.

The book to this musical is an adaptation of primarily three myths of the following cultural origins: Iroquois, Navajo, and Greek. Utilizing mythic structure, the composite story is an allegory of what happens when we lose our reverence for the beauty of the cosmos which we are heir to, symbolically and literally, and when we paradoxically reduce ourselves to mechanical yet savage ways (the setting is a postmodern dystopia). “Balance” is the opening number at the conclusion of this Prologue:

SKY WOMAN

A very long time ago, I jumped through a hole in the sky,

From another land to what has become this one I jumped.

Some say I was pushed or fell, but all that should matter to you is that I went-

After all, that’s what creation is:

Moving into the unknown unaware, but willing or willed to keep going.

Kind and gentle creatures prepared a place for me to land.

I then gave birth to my daughter and we lived as without beginning and end,

Enjoying all the gifts of what always Is

Until she, having slept in the sun as I had once done in the world I came from,

Gave birth, though not how I’d imagined it’d be...

She was carrying twins, and while one child was born the natural way,

The other came into the world through her heart, and so my daughter died.

The grief was too much for me so I collected the light from her eyes, and

I jumped up as far and high as I could, making myself very round and bright-

A shield of light against the darkness I had suddenly come to know.

My daughter’s body became this very place you call Earth.

She is Earth Woman or Earth Mother to all here,

Although I think of her as Morning Star, and now Evening Star,

Because I have known her long before she was either Earth or a mother,

Because I have known her as Beauty, and always will...

The twins set about to make the details of life as you know it,

In ways according to their opposing natures:

One to make something grow, the other to make it stop growing,

Back and forth - health to sickness to medicine to poison to resistance-

Dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, until the Earth was Its own.

To remain so, in balance, as long as there is

Wonder to free the imagination and awaken the mind to Beauty,

Beauty to open the heart to Gratitude, and

Gratitude to distinguish Lust from Love,

For Love is the only protection from Time...

Then the People came to know me as Grandmother Moon

The People learned to recognize and honor

How the rhythm of my turning away and returning affects their own rhythms

The People learned that turning and returning

Is a way to mark and increase what is meaningful to them.

So although it is tempting to resent one twin

For disrupting what had been the natural order of things,

Know that disruption here is part of the natural order.

As Sky Woman, I have watched from the beginning and I know:

without Balance of opposites, nothing can change or grow...

© Trixie Silver 2015. All Rights Reserved.