Years back, I was given a shakuhachi. This generous gift branched into myriad explorations, that enriched my life and the lives of many I interacted with. With Kelvin Falconer I explored flute making and saw how this closely paralleled healthy human making. The metaphoric mystery of music and musing, – flute making and human making –– increasingly crept into dharma teaching. We produced a book, beautifully illustrated by Robert Sinclair called Something Beautiful for the World: a shakuhachi sadhana. About a year ago Antoinette Wilson of “Happen Films” was attending a course at Wangapeka where she came across this book and thought it could make the basis of a wonderful short film. Today, I’m happy to invite you to enjoy the fruition of that inspired aspiration.
For all of us, it’s been a rich exploration of communal creativity-in-action, a distillation of many conversations, three days of filming, gigabytes of data, artistic editors, composers, technicians; all of us contributing the best we could offer, trusting the others to work with sensitivity and integrity to produce a 17 minute film which is bigger than any of the individuals involved. Isn’t this how life works!