The Balance of Power.
Fear is a resource. Love is a resonance. / OR... Thank you, Nina Simone.
There is an old Native American legend that has circulated in the yoga world for years. It’s a lesson in choosing love over fear. There’s a good chance you’ve heard it, but I feel like it’s a good time to share it.
One evening as the sun began to set, a man was walking through the forest with his young grandson. The boy began to hurry his grandfather “If we don’t walk faster the sun will go down. There are too many dangers in the woods after dark.” The young boy began to anticipate and quickly list all of the things that could happen. He explained to his grandfather that he was also scared that they would get lost in the woods and never find their way home.”
As they weaved through the trees, the elder reassured his grandson, “We know these woods and everything in it like the back of our hand. This IS our home.” The grandfather continued, “But I understand your worry. There are also things that make me scared.”
“Everyone has a struggle going on in their hearts” he went on. “There are two powerful wolves at great battle inside each of us. “One is a creature of Love with its compassionate, kind, and peaceful ways. The other is a creature of Fear full of distrust, hate, and chaos.”
Hanging on in suspense the boy quivered, “Which one will win the battle?”
The grandfather carefully answered, “Whichever one you feed.”
Fear is a resource.
Fear is a resource, a precious survival skill. It’s the internal alarm that our emotions and thoughts are on high alert. This instinctual motivation mobilizes a plan for fight or flight. We can become charged with courage through a conscious connection to our fear. A great many things can come when we channel our fear in the right way.
The danger is when fear is perpetuated and used as a weapon. When we are coerced to give our power away before it is taken. It’s the slow poison that disempowers our will.
Love is a resonance.
When caught in an echo chamber of fear, it’s love that draws us out. The call of Love has a resonance. Our own energy aspires to mirror and attune to this frequency. There is a cohesive alignment to its potency.
Love gathers us. It synchronizes our individual and collective aspirations. It liberates us from the confines and limitations of fear. We overcome.
Claim your calm. It is a defiant choice to be in control of our own peace. Don’t let anyone steal it. Don’t easily give it away. It’s one of the most subversive actions you can take.
Be called to Love, Come Ye. Meditation on a song…
The story goes that Nina Simone once hugged Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. - telling him that she was not always about the peaceful approach. Come ye was released the year before Rev. King’s assassination. Friends with many civil rights activists and artists throughout the sixties, Ms. Simone used her music to deliver her messages of protest.
With commanding tones and a voice of breaking emotion, even in darker days she was a mistress of song. Daphne A. Brooks writes in Pitchfork, her songs are “battle cries, folk lullabies and eulogies, blues incantations, Black Power anthems, diasporic fever chants, Euro romantic laments, and experimental classical and freestyle jazz odysseys.”
( ^ It’s a great article about Nina Simone and her life, if you want a deep dive this weekend. Netflix also has a documentary about Nina called: What happened to Nina Simone? )
Freedom is… No Fear
I first learned of Nina Simone’s song, Come Ye years ago when I was in a yoga-dance teacher training at Kripalu. Our final exam assignment was to create and teach a choreography for the song of our choice. As pulse driving as it was, seeing thirty bodies sway to the rhythm and the words was powerful. I can still see it. I can still feel it.
This song moves and stirs. With its consistent rhythm like a heartbeat, it draws people in. Whether “battle cry or folk lullaby,” it summons the wolf of love in the face of fear.
“Come Ye” is the sparest track on *High Priestess of Soul, *an album produced with a fairly heavy hand by Hal Mooney. By then, Simone was seen widely as not just a musician but as a kind of power station of Black consciousness, with the ability to politicize audiences—even white and American ones. In vocals and percussion alone, this is an original African-American folk song: polyrhythmic, in a single tonal center, played with hand drums. In four verses, Simone gradually raises its stakes until it all ends direly: “Ye who would have love,” she sings. “It’s time to take a stand/Don’t mind the dues that must be paid/For the love of your fellow man.” This is the intersection of cultural memory, passion, and action—medicine, warning, and alarm. –Ben Ratliff
Come ye, ye who would have peace
Hear me what I say now
I say come ye, ye who would have peace
It's time to learn how to pray
I say come ye, ye who have no fear
Oh, what tomorrow brings child
Start praying for a better world
Or peace and all good things
I say come ye, ye who still have hope
That we can still survive now
Let's work together as we should
And fight to stay alive
I say come ye, ye who would have love
It's time to take a stand
Don't mind abuse, it must be paid
For the love of your fellow man
I say come ye, come ye
Who would have hope
Who would have peace
Who would have love
Who would have peace
Thank you, Nina. Thank you.
We the people, will continue to celebrate Black history, Women’s history, Asian American History, Pride and all other cultural contributions that made this country the dynamic, creative, empowered country it has become through its diversity and inclusion.
I know “100 ways to keep calm” was long. Let it serve as your guide to revisit whenever you need a little reminder.
