A Luminous Life

Om, music, and the golden journey

Once, long ago, a group of us girls formed a chorus to sing a melody built entirely on the syllable OM, for one of the Ashram's monthly programmes. Before we performed, the Mother gathered us and showed us, forming her lips carefully, exactly how the "O" should be rounded and full, and how the closing "M" must never be clipped short but drawn out into a long, resonant humming — because, she said, there is a humming sound at the very heart of the universe. It is why Sri Aurobindo always wrote the word as "O-M," never "A-U-M" — though the two vowels A and U do combine, phonetically, into that single rounded "O." I have always found it striking, too, that this seed-sound is itself woven into our two Gurus' names: the "O" of Aurobindo, and the "M" of Mother — the Shakti, the force that creates and manifests the universe.

I still sing in that OM choir on Fridays.

Some of that same music went into Yvonne's dance-drama, Le Périple d'Or — The Golden Journey — for which the Mother herself supplied all the music and read, in her own voice, the part of the Purusha, with Yvonne reading Prakriti, the Shakti. I was chosen, to my great and lasting fortune, for the small, wordless role of the Angel Musician — sexless, neither male nor female, dressed in an orange robe, seated on a little swing built to my own slight measurements, playing the tanpura throughout as a silent witness to the whole unfolding drama of the Two who are One. The recording itself was made upstairs, in the very room where Sri Aurobindo used to sit and look out at the sky, with the Mother's part written out for her in large handwriting, since she read without spectacles. Before we began, she once turned to me and asked, quite simply, "Can you come? Do you have the time?" — to me, who would have given up anything at all simply to be near her. Sitting there through that long recording, playing my tanpura at her feet, I came to see, quite vividly, the whole of creation as their eternal play — every relationship in the world only another guise of the Two who are One.