Eagalic Music

“A healing wind blows in India.”
    - Banta Singh Sihota
           Victoria, B.C. 1985

Early morning in a clearing mist and rising sun I am walking along a precarious crumbling curb carrying two year old Nika in my arms. 

It is early January of 1986.  The air is cold but the dry dusty street shows little sign of the night’s moisture.  Karen follows close behind me with four year old Shannon in tow.  We are leaving the hotel in Connaught Circle and walking into old Delhi towards the Red Fort, our first “tourist stop” in India. 

I can’t believe these streets.  The curbs are nearly a foot and a half high and breaking off in huge jagged chunks along the cement gully that passes for a sidewalk.   It is not fully light yet.  An ox cart creaks by pulled by two ancient white beasts of burden, the traffic weaving by around it. 

At a bus stop ahead, a group of elderly sanyasins clothed in orange robes await the bus.  They seem to have stepped out of another century and appear specter-like in the dim morning light. 

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The Crofton Mill

To listen to mp3 click player above…

(written by Ted (Baba Farid) Katrensky, © ℗ Sunram Music/Socan August 1991)

Down at the beach in the heat of day
There to watch the children play
It’s natural to hear them say
The water is fine

Come on in, let’s go for a swim
There goes Jim, let’s follow him
Come on Dad, won’t you come in
Cause the water is fine

I tell them, when you’re fishin’ here
The water ain’t so clear
Cause the pulp & paper mill is near
and the fishing is dying

People came here for years and years
To harvest their clams and their oysters here
But the price they pay these days is dear
Cause the water’s not fine

Chorus:
And if you can’t see the signs
That something is ill
Just take a deep breath, you can be sure you will
You can’t ignore that smell that kills
It’s the Crofton Mill

Well the Great Blue Heron nested here
But these days he’s all but disappeared
Cause the ecosystem’s toxin smeared
And the water ain’t fine

The newspapers said they moved away
But the faithfull herons in the mudflats stay
And they dine on the bullheads and die that way
Cause the water ain’t fine

Well I lived here nearly 20 years now
And I think of this as home somehow
And so when my kids go swimmin’ I allow that
The water is fine

But as I look out there across the bay
I can smell that smell so strong today
I want to drag my kids in from their play
Cause the water’s not fine

Chorus

For reference see:

www.croftonair.org/

In 2004 Neil Young, Randy Bachman and the Barenaked Ladies put on a concert in Duncan on Vancouver Island to protest the burning of alternate fuels at the mill (about 6 miles from the downtown area), that may have been even more toxic than the emissions from the mill.

There was an old saying on the island that when tourists came to the area and commented “What’s that smell?” refering to the foul odors emerging from the smokestacks at the mill, the answer was: Money!

I was hired by the brokerage firm Adanac Customs Brokers to run documents to the trucking terminals, the airport, the docks and to various businesses around town in a little VW Rabbit. 

A part of the day which I spent in the office was devoted to menial office tasks such as filing, opening mail and a little basic paperwork which, although I worked at Adanac for 5 years, I can’t exactly remember the nature of. 

This memory lapse on my part reminds me that the job served basically to provide me with an income and to take my mind off the concerns of my musical life which had confounded me for so long.  To this day I dream of being back at Adanac up to my ears in my assigned tasks, somehow preserved from my struggle as an artist and its demands. Adanac is Canada spelled backwards and it seemed to me, as it still does in my dreams, that I had returned to my native land, the land of my school days where progress was a straight line ahead, passing grades, following orders and ultimately, getting a good paying job.

Years ago, when I had started out to follow the path of my musical dreams and left the solid world of work and career that school had been preparing me for,  I left Canada too, metaphorically speaking and entered a much larger country, not surrounded by national boundaries, the country of the artist.  But in those days, I could not have defined it that way.  

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In between excursions around Laguna Beach with the James family, I meditated in my room under a print of Van Gogh’s sunflowers. I was also faithfully keeping my journal.

I had an experience just before I left for Hawaii of waking up within a nightmare, still dreaming, but conscious enough to begin to chant a mantra. This banished the nightmare completely and woke me up. It was an auspicious start to my journey, I felt, for it seemed to signal a new plateau in consciousness, a growing awareness in me of the power of meditation in my life.

I found my cheap charter flight to Hawaii and soon found myself walking through the exotic, somehow dreamlike landscape outside the Maui airport, guitar in hand as always. It was the one possession I could not leave behind me.

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Back in the Cowichan Valley, my friend Robert James introduced me to Jeevan Singh Mangat, an elementary school teacher and gentle friend who hired me to work on a government funded (LIP grant) project called KARMSAR, an attempt to form a bridge between the East Indian, mainly Sikh community and the local community which was largely ignorant or even superstitious of the Punjabi cultural traditions.

Jeevan was also a writer of poetry, a lover of beauty and a living example of the kind of personality that is cultivated in the mystical traditions (in the world, but not of the world - in Jeevan’s words). He was a loving family man, friend to many, humble and unassuming and at the same time sweetness and strength personified. Jeevan was the first person to introduce me to the name Baba Farid. He loaned me a book by Sikh author Gurbachan Singh Talib titled Baba Sheikh Farid.

I guess I had been discussing the writings of Inayat Khan with him and Sufi philosophy. He told me that Baba Farid embodied the Muslim, Sikh and Hindu traditions and that his bani or writings was included in the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh holy book. He also told me he was a famous sufi…I had no idea at the time how famous!

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