Asha ~ Wings of fire

'Wings of fire' is an instrumental piece by Asha (aka Asha Elijah & Asher Quinn) from his album "Stardance". CD/download here: http://www.ashaquinn.com/stardance.htm

I composed and recorded this in 1990, at Phil Thornton's studio in the UK. We started out as New Age musicians together signed to New World Music. Phil has gone on to become a world music indie artist, and I soon began to mainly write & record spiritual love ballads, which I still do to this day.

Originally it was the title track to my 4th New World album, but now 31 years later it's on an instrumental compilation album of my early pieces, called "Stardance".

It's an epic track that begins with a sung invocation to the child Mary, mother of Jesus, and which then blossoms into a hypnotic, quite trance-like Celtic reel, before shooting off dramatically to Mexico!

I have history with Mexico, that's why!

In my late teens and early twenties I devoured all of Carlos Castaneda's shamanically-themed novels, set in Mexico. Castaneda was a Peruvian anthropologist. At the same time I was studying Gurdjieff, the Armenian Sufi mystic who devised the enneagram, as well as various European theosophical writers. As Bob Dylan had revolutionised what could happen in a song for me, so Carlos Castaneda revolutionised what could happen not only in a book, but in a way of life for me.

Eventually, in 1979, I bought a one-way ticket to the USA & Mexico, to go in search of spirit. I lived like that, on my wits, for two years, and encountered a Sufi teacher from Baghdad who became my master at that time. Gurdjieff's contemporary, the Russian mystic P.D. Ouspensky, had written a book called 'Meetings With Remarkable Men', and that's what I went in search of... and found; mystics and spiritual teachers.

In Mexico, I followed the trail of the Castaneda novels set in the Sonora desert down to Ixtlan, and the main character, the shaman Don Juan Matus. In my thirties and forties I studied with my own shamanic teacher, Simon Buxton, in the Keltic tradition. Simon's path was faithful to that set out by the American anthropologist, Michael Harner, himself greatly influenced by Latin American traditions, so I came full circle.

I was also initiated into the Sufi mystical tradition by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, and trained to be a psychotherapist and spiritual healer in the spiritual dimensions of psychology.

The shamanic way of healing, the spiritual dimensions of psychology and the ecstatic Sufi tradition where love, lover and beloved are one, come together for me in Christian mysticism, and that is where I feel I've truly come home to myself, as part of an anthroposophical community in Budapest.

Anthroposophy, (Spiritual Science), was initiated by Rudolf Steiner, an Austro-Hungarian humanist and Christian mystic. This is a very devotional path in accord with saints like Francis of Assisi, where the living Christ is experienced as love in action. The healing powers of Christ that we can find within, owe much more to the ancient Shamanic ways than to the dogma of the church.

In Mexico I spent six months climbing volcanoes; busking my new spiritual songs in village festivals; eating street-cooked quesadillas (melted cheese and avocado in tortilla); learning the Spanish for 'prairie-dog', and smuggling a Mexican girl back across the Rio Grande, to earn some better $$ in the USA.

As I took that first train from Nogales in Arizona to Mexico city (a 24-hour ride), I saw forest fires in the shape of a question-mark; cactus-filled deserts; misty, mountain jungles; the immense pacific coast; little urchins hanging onto the outside of the train with monkeys, selling melons or offering to shine your shoes; snakes, scorpions and wild peccary's (like black wild boar).

I sang in Guanajuato and San Miguel de Allende, and visited Frida Kahlo's blue house in Mexico city. I got ill on my first day, as all visitor's do... they call it Montezuma's revenge, a kind of violent, altitude-induced upset stomach.

The Mexican girl and I were finally arrested in Kansas as juvenile illegal aliens, and I got spanked with a paddle for refusing to eat the prison food, preferring to fast. Kinky, but I just put it down to another spiritual initiation. In a cell with 18 Mexicans, the prison authorities thought I'd get eaten alive, but we all sang Beatles & Bob Dylan songs and got on famously. They taught me Tex-Mex border ballads, which I still sing to this day.

With my wife and kids we visited Mexico in 2002, just after the 9/11 event, and this time down in Mayan Tulum, where my wife did a 2-week Qi-jong retreat with an Irish/American Daoist teacher, Michael Winn. There we lived with the iguanas, and giant scorpions.

I also studied with a Central American shaman, Martin Prechtel in later years, and in fact have had three waves of Mexico in my life... Castaneda; my own 6-month adventure, and that Daoist scorpion holiday.

The track 'Wings of fire', and now this film, help to unify it all in my soul.