What?! A meditation on George Harrison…
The Beatles hit the big time when I was a young teen. It was mass hysteria among all of us teenage girls. Cry! Scream! Keep crying and screaming! Even if you were only a mild Beatles fan, the peer pressure of crying and screaming was a MUST. (Remember peer pressure at that age? Do what everyone else does or be dropped from the tribe. Oh no, oh no, oh no!)
I recall watching newsreels of the Beatles deplaning when they first arrived in America, of that famous first Ed Sullivan show performance, and how ALL of us seemed to be shaking our heads back and forth in a hysterical fugue and, of course, crying and screaming. (Oh, please, please, if I have another life, spare me the trials of young adolescence. Peer pressure is sooo toxic!)
Back to the BOYS - John, Paul, Ringo, and (oh, yes) George. You had to have a favorite Beatle. Had to…Of course, Paul and John jousted for the NO. 1 SPOT. Something in the way they moved (it’s a pun-figure it out), choreographing the shaking of their long hair, back and forth, simultaneously, while singing, drew even more hysteria. Ringo was, well, Ringo - an offbeat character, an attractive curiosity. George, um, well, he was the quiet Beatle, the one whose hair often hung down, covering his face while playing the guitar.
The Lennon-McCartney songwriting catalog just grew and grew. And, let’s not forget Ringo who wrote “Yellow Submarine,” definitely an attention catcher. George, um, well, let’s be honest, I paid little attention to George except for feeling a bit quizzical regarding his interest in Eastern meditation and spirituality. OK, he’s allowed. (Clearly, I was relatively magnanimous at that young age.😉)
Life moved on (as did our teenage hormones) and the Beatles receded to background music. Yes, it was VERY upsetting when they broke up and Yoko Ono, purloining John, well, I’m not going there…
Present day which is many, many (many) days past the Beatlemania of my early teen years. Both John and George have died, Ringo is still Ringo, and Paul is now Sir Paul. AND, I’ve reached the stage where daily exercise on my stationary bike is a necessity that I could never have even contemplated during the raging days of Beatlemania. Ever. Sigh.
Somehow, I have to make that 30-minute daily stationary bike ride palatable. And when I say “palatable,” I don’t mean eating dark chocolate while I’m cycling! (Don’t I wish!) So guess what comes to the rescue? My new best friend, Alexa. For those who have not yet experienced the world of AI (artificial intelligence), Alexa provides a seemingly endless supply of songs I request, while I’m pounding away on the (very) boring stationary bike. However, even the playlists I’d created became boring with daily listening. Sooo, I was forced into branching out - finding NEW (to me) songs to support the interminable passage of time while peddling.
In this much longer-than-expected piece, I bet you’re wondering what happened to my early mention of George Harrison. Well, here goes! One day, some bug in my bonnet (synchronicity, magic, that inner light, whatever) pointed me toward looking at his music listed on Alexa. I saw, listened to, and fell in absolute LOVE with his lyrics and I am far from being a lyrics aficionado. And his music? Totally captured by his guitar work and I am a guitar know-nothing. I was a goner…for George Harrison. As gone as I was as a young screaming teenager during those early Beatle years. (Well, minus the screaming and peer pressure to prove that I bowed to the gods of Beatlemania.)
I now have a considerable number of George Harrison songs rotating in my playlist. George even has his OWN separate playlist for those moments when I want a FULL George Harrison immersion. FULL?
His lyrics have touching drifts of the spirituality and mindfulness that are now woven into my life and, yes, about which I need constant reminders. Harrison’s unexpected reappearance in my life offered words I needed to hear: “Little things that will change you forever, May appear from out of the blue…” (“This Is Love”.) A reminder that hope abides, the universe unexpectedly opens, fill-in-your-own-blank….
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