May 21, 2006
Voice of an Angel - Jean Rohe
up close with voice and vision in orange
Jean Rohe, the graduation speaker at the New School, (where John McCain campaigned all over their ceremony), was recruited by angels, probably born to and raised by them too. She's a singer, and she sings like one. Draw your own conclusions.
The last paragraph of her commencement address:
"Finally, Senator Mc Cain will tell us that we, those of us who are Americans, 'have nothing to fear from each other.' I agree strongly with this, but I take it one step further. We have nothing to fear from anyone on this living planet. Fear is the greatest impediment to the achievement of peace. We have nothing to fear from people who are different from us, from people who live in other countries, even from the people who run our government--and this we should have learned from our educations here. We can speak truth to power, we can allow our humanity always to come before our nationality, we can refuse to let fear invade our lives and to goad us on to destroy the lives of others. These words I speak do not reflect the arrogance of a young strong-headed woman, but belong to a line of great progressive thought, a history in which the founders of this institution play an important part. I speak today, even through my nervousness, out of a need to honor those voices that came before me, and I hope that we graduates can all strive to do the same."
Here' s what she was going to talk about, a wonderful message that shouldn't be missed:
"I wanted to speak about communication, and how I have found that one of my strongest and most enjoyable methods of communication is music. I wanted to talk about the New York City public school preschoolers with whom I work each week and how they've been empowered through music, how they've been able to learn linguistic and social skills by singing together. I wanted to talk about my grandfather, who, despite the fact that he has Alzheimer's disease and cannot remember even my name, still knows all the songs he sang in his youth. I wanted to talk about music as a powerful tool for peace. I wanted to encourage everyone to identify his or her talents and to always use them for the greater good."
I hope that Jean Rohe is catapulted to fame for speaking the truth. I hope that people will hear her message over and over again through her music for years to come.
Photo note: How's this for a metaphorophoto-metamorphophoto combo? I do have a couple of angel shots that are a little more classic, but I thought this looked like a modern angel, luminous, embedded in the material world --seeing and speaking the truth, thus the touches of orange at the eyes and throat. And the flowers! " LILY, WHITE: Purity, modesty, virginity, majesty, it's heavenly to be with you. The white lily is linked to Juno, the queen of the gods in Roman mythology, by the story that while nursing her son Hercules, some excess milk fell from the sky creating the group of stars we call the Milky Way, and lilies were created from what milk fell to the earth. The Easter lily is also known as the symbol of the Virgin Mary." Mother's milk, the milk of human kindness.
Pussywillow: "Motherhood" -
also seen as "a sign of spring, characteristic of this time of year's spiritual rebirth. It harbors leaves in itself but does not put them out and thus gives us to understand that our joy from the feast of the Lord's Entrance, is not complete but conceals itself in the beginnings of the great joy of Pascha. " You could call the pussywillow a container (bayt) for the unstructured energy of the universe (aleph), I suppose. You could call it the symbol of containment and directed expression of universal life force energy into the material world through vision, communication and consciousness That is, if you're so inclined.
Let's hear it for the sacred feminine!