Asha ~ Sweet wood-smoke

Asha (aka Asher Quinn & Asha Elijah) sings 'Sweet wood-smoke' from his album "Calvary Hill."
CD & download available here ~ http://ashaquinn.com/calvaryhill.htm

Calvary Hill (Kálvária-hegy) is near where I lived in Budapest, when I first came. It lay opposite my bedroom window in Hidegkút, heading north west out of the city up in the Buda hills. This place called to me, and I feel it has a great spiritual power. I experience a real sense of clarity, coherence, inspiration, love and joy up there, and I felt the silent, protective silvery Christ and Mary beams at night pouring in through my little bedroom window. This place inspired many songs, including this one.

It was a long, hot summer and I must have gone up to the summit through the forest path a hundred times, to film, meditate, explore, picnic with friends and commune with nature and spirit. It's a very interesting place, not just subjectively. East meets west here, and the vertical meets the horizontal; Hapsburg meets Ottoman; Tatar meets Celt; middle Europe meets southern and eastern Europe, and the spiritual world meets the earthly world.

My little rented house happened to be here in this location quite by chance. I did not know of this place when I made what felt like a bold, creative move to be in Hungary more of the time, a country that I love, essentially to compose and make song-films, and to attend spiritual presentations. It felt fated and blessed that this magical hill was on my doorstep. I have discovered a whole new world there, where inner and outer intertwine in a constant courtly dance.

Nature tumbles right into the city of Budapest, pouring down a corridor from the sacred Pilis Mountains, with rock and forest just minutes away from the busy Széll Kálmán tér, as a little tram snakes its way out of the metropolis, and up to the outlying villages on the edge of town, where Kálvária-hegy lies. After the quaint, alpine-like tram terminates, I get a bus a bit further up the hill, and I alight at Szárvashegy; Deer Hill. It's cool, dewy and aromatic in the evening after the heat of the city, and I can see the bonfire or wood-burner smoke hanging in the golden sky, with its shades of aqua and rose; and the fragrance is sweet.

I have made several friends up here and in the valley, especially painters, dancers, poets and musicians; souls united by a community that aspires to the esoteric values of the Grail; a modern-day Morality School which espouses Love in Action, and spiritual integrity. From the hill I can see my house and all their houses, too, and somewhere in there is the house of my muse, who introduced me to this way of life, but then wrapped herself in an invisibility cloak and retreated from view.

I fell in love with it all, and love is what draws me here. Somehow I feel I will find my own Calvary and redemption here, so I guess that was the song she sang to me.

I love the fruit stall, the little blue bus, the health-food store that's like Aladdin's cave inside, the curiously contoured mountains, Budapest's metro with its smell of freshly baked bread; the impossibly beautiful bridges across the Danube, that are like Archangels gilding one world to another, the spiritual with the temporal. And I wonder sometimes when I smell the reassuring sweetness of the wood-burning smoke up in the hills, whether she can smell the same smoke wherever she is, and I fantasise that a deer could leave my garden and turn up at her door. I feel I've been with these souls through many lifetimes, so this song is my hymn to that life, which I love so much through all its bitter-sweet revelations.

One of my friends has a shared vision, which was offered in an unsolicited way, rather remarkably. She, too, feels that although the crown of Hungary lies in parliament, where dark occult forces are always trying to steal it, the Grail itself lies under the hills! I seem to be living in a Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark film!

Видео Asha ~ Sweet wood-smoke канала Asha