Asha ~ Broken

Asha (Asher Quinn) sings ‘Broken’ from his album “Calvary Hill”. Track download & CD available soon. Mandolin & guitar by Géza Kremnitzky of Hungarikum együttes (www.hungarikumzene.hu)

I filmed for this track by the frozen Danube in Budapest, my adopted home. It was amazing and surreal to see gulls on waltzing icebergs drift by, in time to the music! I had not even intended to film this song on that day, I was heading for the snowy Buda hills to film something entirely different. But on the tram at Margit Sziget (Margaret Island), an inspirational inner voice clearly nudged me, whispering: “Get off here, and film the frozen river. You know it makes sense…” So, with a complete change of plan, I did as I was bidden… for I am obedient to higher command! Once down at the riverbank I saw the point… the song is called 'Broken', there were lots of broken ice chunks, and icebergs that waltzed in time to the music. So I had an enchanting few hours filming it all… the misty spires, the ice ballet, and my blue lips! It had been minus 18 the night before. I needed some inner creative fire to warm me up!

Then, happy and inspired, I headed for the hills at twilight, and was planning to film a frozen waterfall in Solymár, where many friends live. I had plausible-looking boots on, but after 20 years they had no tread, and as I blithely left the road and took to the steep forest path I tumbled over onto the rock-hard ice… backwards… twice! I landed on my ribs. I broke one, and bruised all the others. It was a slow-motion “Noooooooooooooo…” moment. Crash!! Thud!! I knew the moment I landed that this was major seismic, skeletal activity. As it stiffened during the evening, I realised I could not lie down, cough, sneeze, laugh or cry. All of which I wanted to do! Broken, indeed! Very droll! As I write this, 3 weeks later, I am 73.86% better. It is safe to laugh now! But something happened in the aftermath of that fall, something so beautiful that I treasure the accident as a moment of grace. The same inner voice that had prompted me to leave the tram at Margaret Island, now spoke to me anew. It’s really hard to put this felt vision into words exactly, but it amounted to this: the spiritual world is a magical world, because the divine is present in all things. In us, in nature and in the world of ‘things’! And it is the ONLY reality. Everything else is but concept and construct. In the spiritual world there is no time, death or illness. Through the pain, I got taken out of the purity of the spiritual world, the world of the natural child, and thrust into the world of pain, mortality and illusion. I got given a guided tour, but all the while I knew I kept a single connection with the spirit world, a single thread like Leonardo da Vinci’s image of the two fingers touching in his “Creation of Adam”. I got taken to hell.

The pain was so intense and incapacitating that I saw the devil’s work behind it; how pain, all pain… physical and emotional… ambushes us and robs us of our spiritual birthright. In the pain body, we are locked in with doubt, fear, despair, confusion and weariness, and we can lose touch with the magical, spiritual world. I say magical, because when inspirited, everything is painted in love! We are in love with everything, even the mundane. It’s like life is our lover… we feel loved by life. Life is the partner we long to get home to!

So, getting a bus pass to hell created a beautiful moment. And the moment is this: we have a choice! We can either throw in our lot with faith in the unseen, spiritual world, or we can choose to inhabit (or stay in) the disconnected place. It’s quite hardcore, because there is a moral challenge to give one’s whole heart to Love, without any proof of its existence. But if we choose this, we enter the kingdom of heaven, here on earth. From the spiritual world ALL is given in grace, everything sublime, but also the falls, losses, hardships, deprivations and life-threatening moments. Each can be received as a gift; as an act of love. I can promise you, I never felt more loved by Love than when I fell and entered the world of pain. The pain was horrendous, but the Love feeling trumped it. Because I’ve learned to trust in giving my whole heart to God every day. This is the key; that atunement. It is a sacrifice of the good (materialistic thinking) for the greater good (spiritual truth). And this was what the song was about in the first place. Through losing a long-lasting, profound, personal love to complex circumstance, I felt broken, but then through feeling broken I felt Loved, because I offered up my whole heart to Love, in prayer, and knew that my loss was an act of grace. It confounds our ordinary logic, I know… but this is a spiritual reality. And then having written and recorded the song, I got initiated into the deepest meaning of what I wrote. Whatever we do in life, if we do it for real, the truth of it comes calling, somehow, and takes us higher.