Asha ~ Cool water

'Cool water' is an improvised piano piece from Asha's album "Sketches of Innocence". (Asha aka Asha Elijah & Asher Quinn). CD/download: www.ashaquinn.c...
Back in 1993 I released an album of improvised piano pieces called "Art of Love". This was when I was courting my wife, and just before our first son Theo was born. We didn't have much money, but we wanted to go on a long, improvised exploring holiday together, so we headed from London to Devon in England, and then took a ferry across to Brittany in France with a tent and my old car.
The impulse came just to keep heading south, across the Loire, then the Dordogne & the Basque country, over the Pyrenees and into Spain. We found agreeable camp-sites, occasionally hostels, and very occasionally a night in a romantic hotel.
Gradually we became aware that we were following the ancient pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostella (St. James of the Field of Stars) in Galicia, Spain, about which we had hitherto known nothing. Symbols kept appearing, like the scallop shell, and so we investigated it as each village brought more information, and we started to speak to pilgrims.
My wife was sketching water-colours, and writing, and I was absorbing it all musically. After Rome and Jerusalem, Santiago is the most important centre for mainstream Christianity, and the pilgrimage route is the path of the heart, rather than the church or knight defender. It is the path of the mystic.
Legend has it that St. James the apostle, a disciple of Christ, settled here to teach and transmit, but was beheaded when he returned to the Holy Land. His own disciples then smuggled his body & relics back to Galicia in a miraculous boat to bury him there, and these relics were later discovered by a hermit, Pelagius, who had been drawn to them by strange lights in the sky. This spot became known as Compostella (the field of stars), and a great cathedral was built there, now the site for pilgrims the world over.
Many undertake the pilgrimage following the route from their own country to Santiago, often taking 6 weeks or more, and speak animatedly of their meditative, transformative experiences.
The year before this, my wife and I had visited Crete, and so my album "Art of Love" became a collection of piano sketches or vignettes drawn from first Crete and then the journey through France to Santiago. This particular track here, 'Cool water' was actually inspired by bathing in cool, early morning Cretan waters.
In 2005 I put many of these tracks plus other improvised pieces I had recorded into a compilation album called "Sketches of Innocence".
This weekend I finally filmed for 'Cool water' not in Crete or Galicia, but in Hungary! I've become a Hungarian resident, and the refreshing glory of the magical & mysterious Lake Balaton is well known to me! In the hot Hungarian 'Mediterranean' summers, Balaton is the perfect place to cool down!
It is a place of innocence, purity and charm, an inland sea in countryside not unlike the rolling, Grail-like hills of Avalon, and the route to Compostella. I was there just with friends & their kids this last weekend, having fun and cooling down in the heat.
As I played with these kids, I missed my own. Our two sons are now 27 & 23, and I wondered afresh at how I have come to be in Hungary, following a spiritual calling, whilst my wife has stayed in London with our boys (and cats!) following her own strong, spiritual calling. Hers is exclusively inner, whilst mine involves an actual territory migration.
And yet we have both remained faithful to the atmosphere and feeling we discovered on the route to Santiago back in 1993; the path of the heart. I felt inspired to insert into the film a nostalgic notion about innocence and purity, a kind of child-like state of being at the heart of the message of the Christ: "Ye must be as a child to enter the kingdom of heaven".
This does not refer to unknowingness or naivety, but to the atmosphere in one's consciousness when one is truly connected to eternal love, and immortality of the soul.
Hungary as a nation, and the magyar peoples as a folk spirit, have a divine mission on earth to preserve, maintain, protect and renew that quality of pure, eternal Christ-love in everyday life.
I find that simply being in the Hungarian countryside, quite apart from my spiritual experiences and studies here, transmits this atmosphere to my soul, and inspires my own journey 'home' to the heart as a spiritual pilgrim, and my creativity.
That year back then, 1993, when we found ourselves on the path to Santiago, inspired two other albums as well, the improvised instrumental album "A Concert of Angels", which is still my most successful album to date, and which contains the track 'Santiago', and one where I also sing, called "Field of Stars".
I have it in mind to re-visit Santiago to renew the pilgrimage, and to film for those tracks from back then that I have not yet filmed for.