Arty's Aarti

Chorus: You tell me I please you Because my heart's aching To let your name Baba Escape to my lips Escape to my lips. How is it you love me So much for so little? The bed of the valley Is less stone than I. No matter how far off My life's stream meanders, Your sea of compassion Keeps drawing me hot. Though gloomy impressions Like mists would deny you, Your sun's affirmation Keeps making me sing. Chorus: You tell me I please you Because my heart's aching To let your name Baba Escape to my lips Escape to my lips. Your beauty is blazing Like mountain moons on me, The snows of your silence Wash all my dirt clean. This forest so lonesome I'm hacking to reach you, Is full of birds singing 'He's closer than you!' Ah why should I wonder You give all for nothing? Your glance is so lovely, A steel heart would melt. Chorus My art is the craft of A thundering river Which acts to a pure sea Of stillness, your name. My heart I have mined for Good words and intentions, To burn off like incense All faults in your flame. Chorus. I wrote the words at the Meher Baba Pilgrim Centre in Meherabad, India in 1989. Aarti means devotional song and is derived from Sanskrit words for 'complete love'. Several beautiful Aartis are sung daily - an Australian Aarti; an American Aarti and a variety of Indian ones, the most beautiful of all the Gujarati aarti written and composed by Meher Baba himself. Despite some every eligible candidates (Pete Townshend and Ronnie Laine for example) there is not an English or British aarti. I was for almost two weeks a lone Englishman and because of my regular ghazal readings at the morning and evening songs and prayers was nicknamed 'Arty' by one of the fifty Americans who outnumbered the Indian devotees and staff residing or on pilgrimage there. I played up to my role as the lone stage Englishman and so did everyone else. Sometime in the second week, one of the old Parsi followers comically 'exposed ' me as 'a Welshman in disguise' which all added to my reputation as 'quite the clown... and composer' (as Baba's niece, Meheru, the woman I am pictured with under Baba's picture in the final frame put it.) All of these elements combine in my attempt at an Aarti uttered from the British stiff upper lip. I found the long forgotten lyric in a drawer of Baba papers and composed the music I had never been able to add in 1989 (Bob Brown explained how my original hummed effort was much too complicated) and accompanied myself on bass, adding a higher vocal, drums and harmonium.