Water Night

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BYU Choirs, Eric Whitacre, Octavio Paz, S:t Jacobs Vokalensemble

💜🙏

Salutation

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BYU Choirs, Rabindranath Tagore, Ēriks Ešenvalds

In one salutation to thee, my God,
let all my senses spread out
and touch this world at thy feet.

Like a rain-cloud of July
hung low with its burden of unshed showers,
let all my mind bend down at thy door
in one salutation to thee.

Let all my songs
gather together their diverse strains
into a single current
and flow to a sea of silence
in one salutation to thee.

Like a flock of homesick cranes
flying night and day
back to their mountain nests,
let all my life take its voyage
to its eternal home
in one salutation to thee.

Rabindranath Tagore

put to music by Ēriks Ešenvalds

performed to perfection by two amazing choirs:

💜🙏

While clouds dance

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BYU Choirs, Ola Gjeilo

across the vast, eternal sky…

Warm clothes, tahini-bread, hot tea, and

off I am to clean our apartment building.

We are snow-kissed with

strong cold winds today,

and my lungs are filled

with the intense

sacred beauty

of the North:

Homeward Bound

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BYU Choirs, William Wordsworth

Aren’t we all?

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(im)personally, BYU Choirs, Elaine Hagenberg, Fellow beings, Marina Kaiser, Sacred darkness, Secret Garden

You know

when strays
are just so kind?

How it feels when
in the dark of night
you take the garbage out
and they greet you as family,
even when you cannot feed them,
even they who do not come close anymore
because they are dying and withdraw
so that you don’t have to feel their pain?

How serene the thought sometimes
of leaving your last breath curled-up
among such gentle fellow creatures
who harbour no accusations against anyone,
whom no noise stops from purring:

It is all between each one of us and God…

Thank you for allowing me to see you
from the enormity of our one love…

We are all uncomfortable with our existential aloneness
before its acceptance can lead us into true togetherness.

We are all strays.

Until we see we are Eternity,
we are all strays from it.

All fellow beings of God, non-verbal or verbal,
start acting more and more healingly and kindly
when we have started truly meeting them in stillness.
And stillness doesn’t have to be their forte at all.

But we have to meet our Self in silence first.

And that requires us to direct ALL of our energy accordingly.
No more wasting time with time-wasting things.

Gentleness with ourselves when we fall short
of any internal or external expectations.

Knowledge that we are always
Loved and watched over

A L W A Y S

God bless you friends.
Thank you for our
shared music of
stillness.
Leon

💜🙏

Let all our songs gather together

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BYU Choirs, Jack Kornfield, Rabindranath Tagore, Ēriks Ešenvalds

Rabindranath Tagore‘s poem Salutation, set in music by Ēriks Ešenvalds,

divinely sung by some of the beautiful, beautiful BYU Singers

in this new video, with poem on screen.

God bless you friends.

I love you.

Leon

 

In one salutation to thee, my God,
let all my senses spread out and touch this world at thy feet.

Like a rain-cloud of July
hung low with its burden of unshed showers
let all my mind bend down at thy door in one salutation to thee.

Let all my songs gather together their diverse strains into a single current
and flow to a sea of silence in one salutation to thee.

Like a flock of homesick cranes flying night and day
back to their mountain nests
let all my life take its voyage to its eternal home
in one salutation to thee.

💜

🙏

Ladies and Gentlemen

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BYU Choirs