Heart Gift 20: Beethoven in the desert

My father would have been a ‘Burner’, living by the 10 principles some 30 years before Burning Man was born. He lived an eccentric life and would go to almost any length to squeeze the sweetest nectar from life. My Heart Gift today is one of my favourite stories of him in 1953 alone in the Iraqi desert. I encourage you to play Beethoven’s Fifth, imagining yourself, alone as far as the eye can see, in the Iraqi desert with your Gramophone and then read my father’s words below.

‘On another occasion, I lugged a gramophone into the desert outside Bagdad to play Beethoven’s Fifth and Seventh Symphonies at full volume. The cascades of sound billowed across the solitude, impassive, enduring, as the dunes surged and rippled into the distance, into the expanses of grandeur. As if both were drawn from the Absolute, the sound and the stillness coalesced to conjure up moments of that rare ecstatic rapture, when one’s spirit transcends time and identity to partake of the Divine.’

Heart Gift is a community of people who give from their hearts. You are invited to join to be inspired and, when ready, to share your favorite quote, letter, joke, prayer, advice, music, art piece, story, song, ritual, Grandma’s recipe — anything. We can all help create a more beautiful world when we are Permissionaries — giving each other permission to be authentic, vulnerable and heart led.