Adam Blatner

Harry Belafonte co-wrote a song and performed it on the televised Muppet Show in the late 1980s: “Turn the World Around.” (You can see it on YouTube.)
“We come from the mountain,” the song goes. “Living on the mountain;
Go back to the mountain, turn the world around!” Then the song repeats for fire instead of mountain, and again for water instead of fire. It finishes with
Do you know who I am? Do I know who you are?
See we one another clearly: Do we know who we are?
Oh, oh! So is life!
Water make the river, river washes mountain;
Fire makes the sunlight, turn the world around!
Heart is of the river, body is the mountain;
Spirit is the sunlight, turn the world around!
We are of the spirit, truly of the spirit;
Only can the spirit turn the world around! (Repeat)
(An infectious rhythm of ten beats, too.)

This song recently struck me with new meaning! It expresses the simplicity of the growing emergence of consciousness, with an edge also of mystery. I suspect this sentiment is more true of the shamans for peoples whose sense of time is more timeless, cyclic.