Slow down, you move too fast...

As I have posted before, one of my internal song/prayer/mantras comes from St. Paul Simon when he sang:  slow down, you're moving too fast... you got to make the morning last.  And that is what we try to practice on our vacation time together:  being slow, wandering through each day and enjoying whatever might pop up.
  
Yesterday, we said "À toute à l'heure"! to our daughter and son-in-law and headed out to cruise our "hood" in the heart of Montreal's Little Italy. First stop was the local church with a strangely sweet albeit odd statue of Christ that we dubbed:  Our Lord of the Lightbulbs (Jésus et les ampoules.) After a few residential streets, it was back to Marché Jean-Talon for veggies, fruit and vin rouge.

The rest of the day was given over to wandering and free concerts outdoors - about 8 hours worth of people watching and music grooving. One of the truly beautiful things about this festival is how much free music is shared with the public.  From roughly 11 am - midnight there are concerts of all types:  we took in a smokin' big band before visiting the Jazz Festival museum.  Then it was sitting on the grass while a quartet from Vancouver rocked the house.  I lay back on the earth and started to imagine the sounds for one of the seasonal evening prayer "vespers" I want to write during my sabbatical in 2015.  (My hope is to write/create four seasonal liturgies for jazz vespers grounded in each of the changing moods of the earth.)

Lying in the sun - surrounded by music and people of all ages, genders, races and tongues - I want to evoke each of these distinctive realities with sound.  In time, they will become more and more unified and harmonious as a young woman walks through the crowd - an innocent but sensual dancer - who moves lightly a midst the people as she dances towards her family.  When she finally arrives, her parents are playfully dancing with their newborn child who also lies upon the earth and mimics their dance movements.  That's my first idea for the "gathering music for meditation" for the summer vespers liturgy.  How these sounds and notes will come together is, of course, yet to be discovered. But this experience of summer suggests part of how the music for the liturgy might evolve.

We bought some CDs, ate a lovely light dinner as we watched the people from  a street side cafe and then headed back for some more free music.  The night closed - for us - with the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra - a really BIG band of excellent musicians.  They shut things down with a 20+ minute arrangement of Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" that was as visually stunning as it was musically joyous.

Tonight I'm going to a late show by The Bad Plus in an off-sight venue:  the arts church L'église de Gésu (check it out @http://www.legesu.com/) So I suspect that we'll mostly just do more wandering during the day - but who knows?  It really is slow down time... and on Canada Day we are committed to  making the morning last!  (Here's one more photo from the day - one of Dianne's countless "little people at the festival" pictures that she does so well.)