Author: Asha
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11m 22sLenght

Asha (Asher Quinn) sings 'Sweet wood-smoke' from his album "Calvary Hill." This album is still being recorded, so the download and CD is not quite ready yet... soon, though! Calvary Hill (Kálvária-hegy) is where I live when I'm in Budapest... about half of each month. It lies opposite my bedroom window in Hidegkút, heading north west out of the city up in the Buda hills. This mountain calls to me, and has tremendous spiritual power. I experience a real sense of clarity, coherence, inspiration, love and joy up there, and I feel the silent, protective silvery Christ and Mary beams at night pouring in through my little bedroom window. This place is inspiring many songs for me, including this one. It's been a long, hot summer and I must have been up to the summit through the forest path a hundred times, to film, meditate, explore, picnic with friends and commune with nature and spirit. It's a very interesting place, not just subjectively. East meets west here, and the vertical meets the horizontal... Hapsburg meets Ottoman; Tatar meets Celt; middle Europe meets southern and eastern Europe, and the spiritual world meets the earthly world in a powerful portal. I have been drawn by a sense of a Grail in the earth, rising to the surface to meet the magnificence of the sun-beings... of something happening here of cosmic significance; a trembling; a disturbance; an awakening; a renewal. My little rented house happens to be here in this location quite by chance... I did not know the significance of this mountain when I made what felt like a bold, creative move to be here part of the time, essentially to compose and make song-films, and to attend spiritual presentations. It feels fated, blessed, that this magical hill is on my doorstep. I have discovered a whole new world there, where inner and outer intertwine in a constant courtly dance. Nature tumbles right into the city of Budapest, pouring down a corridor from the sacred Pilis Mountains, with rock and forest just minutes away from the busy Széll Kálmán tér, as a little tram snakes its way out of the metropolis, and up to the outlying villages on the edge of town, where Kálvária-hegy lies. After the quaint, alpine-like tram terminates, I get a bus a bit further up the hill, and I alight at Szárvashegy... Deer Hill. It's cool, dewy and aromatic in the evening after the heat of the city, and I can see the bonfire or wood-burner smoke hanging in the golden sky, with its shades of aqua and rose... and the fragrance is sweet. I have many friends up here and in the valley, especially painters, dancers, poets and musicians... souls united by a community that aspires to the esoteric values of the Grail; a modern-day Mystery School which espouses Love in action, and spiritual integrity. From the hill I can see my house and all their houses... and somewhere in there is the house of my muse... my shepherdess and hostess... who introduced me to all of this; her friends who are now my friends, the Mystery School itself, the community, the culture, the language, the magic... just regular guys and girls in jeans and T-shirts (no robes!), struggling to make a living and raise families, and yet Grail disciples and new apostles of the spiritualised heart. My shepherdess then withdrew... we belong to the same community, but don't meet now. It broke my heart, and yet I realise more and more that the greater healing for my whole existence was contained within the wounding. Trying to unravel that mystery alone is like Raiders of the Lost Ark... a cosmic detective thriller that leads all the way to the Covenant, hidden in some secret temple. Who is she? Why did she call to me? Why does the mountain now sing to me? I fell in love with it all, and love is what draws me to this Grail story... somehow I feel I will find my own Calvary and redemption here, so I guess that was the song she sang... I love the fruit stall, the little blue bus, the health-food store that's like Aladdin's cave inside, the curiously contoured mountains, Budapest's metro with its smell of freshly baked bread... the impossibly beautiful bridges across the Danube, that are like Archangels gilding one world to another... the spiritual with the temporal. And I wonder sometimes when I smell the reassuring sweetness of the wood-burning smoke up in the hills, whether she can smell the same smoke wherever she is... and I fantasise that a deer could leave my garden and turn up at her door. I feel I've been with these souls through many lifetimes... so this song is my hymn to that life, which I love so much through all its bitter-sweet revelations. One of my friends has a shared vision, which was offered in an unsolicited way, rather remarkably... she, too, feels that although the crown of Hungary lies in parliament, where dark occult forces are always trying to steal it, the Grail itself lies under the hill!