Welcome to 2025 on Eartotheground! I can’t believe that it’s been nearly 6 years since I started this blog to contribute to a culture of awareness, resistance, and celebration of those whose voices are so often marginalized. But as Covid19 swept through the globe, and then the genocide in Gaza started, my preoccupations were often…
Tag: music
Winter Solstice: A Creative Journey with Art and Music
I’ve pretty much run out of things to say about the state of the world that are not being articulated better and with great persistence, by comentators and journalists like Wizard Bisan (Bisan Owda), Motaz Azaiza (photographer and speaker), Vijay Prasad, Jemima Pierre, Aaron Mate, Youtube’s Neutrality Studies, Breakthrough News, and some other independent sites….
Going Up the Mountain!
Ya Taleen, performed by Dana Salah An old song from the Galilee, it’s believed that Palestinian women used to sing it as they visited their loved ones in prison. Through the seemingly confusing lyrics, the women would convey subversive messages, perhaps informing their loved ones that they would soon be liberated by freedom fighters. This…
Poetry for the Peeps! A Litany of Refusals to Become Ghostly!
We had the honour of supporting the students in response to their encampment for disclosure and divestment from Israel at Universities across the U.S, Canada, and internationally. This blog is dedicated to the young people who show us that conscience and compassion are still bringing hope to those who wish for justice against settler colonialism…
Poetry for the Peeps! Silvio Rodriguez on Chile
This September 11 2023 marks 50 years since the terrible coup in Chile, replacing democratically elected progressive President Salvador Allende with CIA and ITT backed dictator General Pinochet. Assassinating Allende and torturing and killing hundreds and hundreds of other local activists, artists and social organizers, the new military government brought in the first Neo-liberal experiment…
Children’s Books and my Father: A Remembrance
Culture and memory share a root, like branches of the same plant. That root is us, human beings, in our most creative and unself-conscious renditions. Once again, after the whirlwind of systemic violence and structural upheaval engineered through the COVID19 pandemic response, the time has come to honour the memory of those we love who…
National Poetry Month with Chabuca Granda!
María Isabel Granda Larco (3 September 1920 – 8 March 1983), known as Chabuca Granda, was a Peruvian singer and composer. She was a trailblazer as a woman lyricist and composer, drawing on Peruvian Criollo music, as well as Afro-Peruvian rhythms, which were much devalued in high society of Lima at the time. It was…
Who’s Your Troubadour? Fifty Years of Chico Buarque
More than fifty years ago, a young singer songwriter burst on to the exciting and boundary breaking music scene in Brazil, a country grappling with the legacy of cruelty, colonization, migration, and above all, enslavement. Burgeoning movements for racial and regional equality, along with student and feminist movements, workers, and small peasantry, found themselves clamouring for…
Solstice 2020
Today marks the shortest daylight in our hemisphere, and the arrival of winter’s official season. But as of tomorrow, the days will lengthen again imperceptibly, and for those of us who need the light, like morning glories or sunflowers, hope will gradually be born anew. Indigenous and pagan peoples celebrated and celebrate the energies and…
One Hundred Posts Against Solitude!
Today marks a very special day for me. It is the occasion of my hundredth blog post. I started this project as a labour of love and as a way to contribute to a culture of resistance, love, and hope for a more just and equitable world about a year and a half ago. I…
Post-Equinoctial Saudade
No much up to writing lately, and they say a picture is worth a thousand words. 5 Septembers ago, the equinox gave me the gift of a new face. I was afflicted with a virus called Bell’s Palsy. It changed my life. We are all judged on first appearances. I used to be excruciatingly self-conscious…
Poetry for the Peeps!
Just this past week, Cuba had its Saint day, as La Virgen de la Caridad de Cobre, her patron saint, was celebrated in Santiago de Cuba on September 8th. On the 12, Yoruba deity, Oshun, the syncretic counterpart of Cachita (Caridad), daughter and goddess of rivers, love, femaleness, guile, and beauty, is celebrated. One of…
The Soloist
I’ve been having a hard time with this solo-self-isolation. All members of my family are thousands of miles away, experiencing their own lockdowns. Music, books, cleaning, and cooking are losing their charms after the 2 weeks I’ve been doing this! And I fear there will be weeks more. As a person with disabilities that make…
Ear to the Ground 