Tag: orchestra

🦢🦢🦢 A Pod 🦢🦢🦢, 🥁🪘🪵 A Drumming 🥁🪘🪵, and a  🦅 ☕🦅 A Kettle 🦅 ☕🦅 

It isn’t often that one feels like the poet, Mary Oliver. The October mornings are starting to feel crisp, and then one remembers that this is California – so we have a beautiful mix of windy, cloudy, frosty, and this year, rainy days. 

🥁🪘🪵 A Drumming 🥁🪘🪵

The vibes that morning seemed to be around the themes of: Ready to bear moisture, and don the colors of autumn. Some trees had started turning orange, and the little family of woodpeckers I stopped to observe on my morning walk had me enthralled. There is something about the morning sun through the orange leaves, and little downy woodpeckers flitting and pecking their way through their morning that has to be experienced. They are called a descent of woodpeckers, or a gattling or a drumming of woodpeckers. I like the last term more – suits their percussion band theme. 

The trees reached and yearned for the blue skies, the birds tittered and chattered. I couldn’t say they sounded happy exactly, but they sounded content. The Earth around me at that point felt content to be part asleep, part awake. 

🦢🦢🦢 A Pod  🦢🦢🦢

Thinking of this and that, I made my way to a little spot I knew was favored by pelicans for their spot of morning fishing. Watching pelicans do a spot of coordinated fishing is one of the best experiences of nature. For all these men and their wars and their power trips, they should learn a lesson or two from a pod of pelicans. 

Glide, swim, swoop,

Glide, swim, swoop,

Glide, swim, swoop,

Glide, swim, swoop

Ballerinas and group dancers they are – It isn’t a rhythmic time-based swoop, for sometimes, they glide, glide, swim, and then swoop. 

Community creatures they are, and so totally in sync with each other, it is a joy to watch their companionship. Maybe they are territorial with their nesting and breeding grounds, but they also have an immense sense of taking care of each other.  

https://nourishncherish.org/?s=coordinated+fishing

🦅 ☕🦅 A Kettle 🦅 ☕🦅  

By the time I came home, my spirits were soaring with the kettle of hawks overhead. Hawks really do have a musical cry. They swooped and cried high in the skies, and really, they could be called a Swoop of Hawks. The agility!

Musical cries, percussion bands and group dancing is more than a morning’s worth of excitement, don’t you think?

A pod, a drumming and a kettle put me in mind for a hot cuppa tea, and I bustled into the kitchen full of purpose. A few minutes later, I sat sipping my brew content in the knowledge that mornings like this are not easy gifts. They are meant to be savored one precious breath at a time. After all, poetry, music, orchestra and words can only try to capture beauty.

Heralding the Vegetable Orchestra Era

Something tells me this is going to be the next ‘in-thing’ at South Indian Brahmin weddings:
Chinese vegetable orchestra
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newsvideo/weirdnewsvideo/9138002/Chinese-brothers-create-orchestra-from-market-vegetables.html

Let us list the potential positives:
1) It has vegetables and no meat. “We are very chaste you know?” a Meenakshi Maami or Chachu Maami will proclaim as they swallow a burfi whole (with the silver lining).

2) The first set of weddings to have it will be talked about in glowing terms till the next wedding has the same thing. Then, that wedding will talked about in glowing terms and so it goes.

3) I am sure paying these artists will be expensive and therefore, tie in nicely with the unnecessary-exorbitant paradigm. Maybe James Band can diversify his talents in the direction. Who is James? And why his band? (Please go here for answers: https://nourishncherish.wordpress.com/?s=James+Band)

In short, James Band was the illustrious band that performed at my brother’s wedding, confused music with noise and received glowing tributes from one and all.

4) There is no active participation of the audience required. One can flit like butterflies or flies near the show, smile vaguely and flutter away towards the edible end of the hall.

5) In general, we like things that knock the wind out of ya. This one has wholesome yams & potatoes.

6) It has a wind instrument touch to it that appeals to South Indians – one can make it loud and also ignore the artistes and turn to look at the cut vegetable show on the side. A simple Google search throws all of these different things one can do with vegetable cutting. I must also point to the fact that weddings now have a vegetable show where one is allowed to go and see the creative pursuits of the wedding contractor’s vegetable carver. Of course, the v.carver is never there to see/hear the appreciation, but a true artist does not wait for them apparently. He has the next set of carvings to get to.

Given that our food decoration wonders stop at the star-shaped carrot like in the dish below(The mother made the dish for the Cancer Institute Foundation fundraiser, but we were tasked with decoration and we pulled off the only thing we are adept at ), we can but marvel at the ingenuity while listening to the vegetable band:


7) The whole lot of the ‘instruments’ can make its way from Srinivasa Maama’s wedding to Vaidyanatha Iyer’s wedding and then morph into kootu at Pataamani maama’s daughter-in-law’s seemandham.

It will be nice to be able to look back at this post a few years from now when the vegetable orchestra is the in-thing.