The Creative Stream

Freya's mailbox this cold and cloudy Okieland 10th of 2023 February was filled with notes from musicians, poets, and novelists . .

59 years ago yesterday, in 1964, the beginning of the "British Invasion" of music in the United States began when The Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show for the first time. The live audience was filled with screaming teens who seemed never to stop during the entire time the “Fab Four” were on stage. The program was watched by 73 million at home viewers which was a record.

Yesterday also marked the birth dates of poet Amy Lowell, in 1874 Brookline, Massachusetts; in 1944 of novelist Alice Walker, born in Eatonton, Georgia; and in1940 the Nobel Prize winning author J.M. (John Maxwell) Coetzee, was born in Cape Town, South Africa.

Today is the 125th anniversary of Bertolt Brecht's birth. The playwright and poet was born Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht in 1898 Augsburg, Bavaria. It is also Boris Pasternak's birthday 133 years ago today in an 1890 Moscow.

No matter where we are, we can step into the stream of the Great Mystery occupied by the great teachers of then and now and find a real presence that can transform us, not by lifting us out of ourselves but by opening us into the joy and struggle of being human incarnate amid an infinite and eternal flow.