The Indian Serenade by Percy Bysshe Shelley

The Indian Serenade by Percy Bysshe Shelley – A video montage by LeScintilla

Read by LeScintilla

“The Indian Serenade”
I arise from dreams of thee
In the first sweet sleep of night,
When the winds are breathing low,
And the stars are shining bright.
I arise from dreams of thee,
And a spirit in my feet
Has led me -who knows how?
To thy chamber-window, Sweet!

The wandering airs they faint
On the dark, the silent stream –
The champak odours fail
Like sweet thoughts in a dream;
The nightingale’s complaint,
It dies upon her heart,
As I must die on thine,
O beloved as thou art!

Oh lift me from the grass!
I die! I faint! I fail!
Let thy love in kisses rain
On my lips and eyelids pale.
My cheek is cold and white, alas!
My heart beats loud and fast;
Oh press it close to thine again,
Where it will break at last!

This charming short lyric is one of Shelley’s finest, simplest, and most exemplary love poems. It tells a simple story of a speaker who wakes, walks through the beautiful Indian night to his beloved’s window, then falls to the ground, fainting and overcome with emotion. The lush sensual language of the poem evokes an atmosphere of nineteenth-century exoticism and Orientalism, with the “Champak odours” failing as “The wandering airs they faint / On the dark, the silent stream,” as “the winds are breathing low, / And the stars are shining bright.” The poet employs a subtle tension between the speaker’s world of inner feeling and the beautiful outside world; this tension serves to motivate the poem, as the inner dream gives way to the journey, imbuing “a spirit in my feet”; then the outer world becomes a mold or model for the speaker’s inner feeling (“The nightingale’s complaint / It dies upon her heart, / As I must die on thine…”), and at that moment the speaker is overwhelmed by his powerful emotions, which overcome his body: “My cheek is cold and white, alas! / My heart beats loud and fast…”

Read more about Shelley’s poem here

Autumn Leaves Sung by Laura Fygi ~ A Video Montage by LeScintilla

Visit my channel on Dailymotion to view the French version of this video here

I Find Beauty in my Scars

Beauty is a concept I struggle with—what it means, why it matters. I struggle because huge chunks of my life have not been beautiful. They have been ugly, marred by trauma, with pain, and anger.

We think of beauty and often visualize glossy magazine pages and wafer thin models. We see beauty as superficial—eye color, hair texture, and numbers on a scale. We see beauty as something to be measured and weighed.

I don’t see beauty that way. I see beauty as the grace point between what hurts and what heals, between the shadow of tragedy and the light of joy. I find beauty in my scars.  

We all have scars, inside and out. We have freckles from sun exposure, emotional trigger points, broken bones, and broken hearts…

Read the full article “Finding Beauty in Your Scars” by Alexandra Heather Foss here…

Apathy

I have a very strong feeling that the opposite of love is not hate – it’s apathy.

It’s not giving a damn. ~ Leo Buscaglia

My Darling Daughter

The Pearl of Great Price

The Legend of White Eagle – A Video Montage by LeScintilla – English Version

 

I spent a long time looking for the right images that would fit what in my mind was a good interpretation of this legend. The most difficult part in creating this montage was matching the text with the images. The horse, from the movie “The Silver Stallion”, was perfect for this project, because there were many good scenes in the movie I could use to show the conversation he carried with the eagle, his frustration at the beginning etc…. At the time I was working on this montage, I was very new at it, and struggled trying to learn how to use my new video editing program. I needed to learn how to do special effects which added to this challenge for me.This was a very difficult project and I almost gave up several times, but I persisted and finished it.

I See You ~ A Video Montage by LeSCINTILLA

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xwcyn1_i-see-you-a-video-montage-by-lescintilla_music

 

I got the multiple clips I used to create this short film from the videos listed under video footage (see below). I wanted to show the tender relationship we can experience with animals and emphasize how we can benefit from deeper more meaningful contacts with other living things sharing this world with us. The quality of all the clips was superb so it was pure pleasure working on this project. The sources for this project had many scenes of women with animals; I had viewed them a few months ago but it was when I heard the song “I see You” that the idea for this video came to me. I assembled all the clips I wanted to use and matched the rhythm of the music and the lyrics, and made a story about our relationship with animals.

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.
~Henry Beston

Claude Debussy “Beau Soir” ~ Live in the Moment ~ A Video Montage by LeScintilla

 

Music “Beau Soir”  by Claude Achille Debussy (1862-1918)

Beau Soir (French for “Beautiful Evening”) is a setting of a poem by Paul Bourget.

Lorsque au soleil couchant les rivières sont roses
Et qu’un tiède frisson court sur les champs de blé,
Un conseil d’être heureux semble sortir des choses
Et monter vers le coeur troublé.

Un conseil de goûter le charme d’être au monde
Cependant qu’on est jeune et que le soir est beau,
Car nous nous en allons, comme s’en va cette onde:
Elle à la mer, nous au tombeau.

English translation
When streams turn pink in the setting sun,
And a slight shudder rushes through the wheat fields,
A plea for happiness seems to rise out of all things
And it climbs up towards the troubled heart.
A plea to relish the charm of life
While there is youth and the evening is fair,
For we pass away, as the wave passes:

The wave to the sea, we to the grave.

Life’s Challenges~Les Choses de la Vie ~ A Video Montage by LeScintilla

Music by Philippe Sarde

Video footage:
Nick Vujicic – “Something More” Music Video
Mormon Messages videos

“Out of difficulties grow miracles.”

~Jean De La Bruyere

“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, “I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.” . . . You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”

~Eleanor Roosevelt~

“The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.”

~Unknown~

“Obstacles don’t have to stop you. If you run into a wall, don’t turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it.”

~Michael Jordan~

“You’re on the road to success when you realize that failure is only a detour.”

~Anonymous

“Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in getting up every time we do.”

~Confucius

“Opportunity’s favorite disguise is trouble.”

~Frank Tyger

“People who consider themselves victims of their circumstances will always remain victims unless they develop a greater vision for their lives.”

~Stedman Graham

La légende de l’aigle blanc ~ Un montage vidéo de LeScintilla – Version Française

Saving Hands

Magical Winter~Féérie Hivernale ~ A Video Montage by LeScintilla

Sometimes our fate resembles a fruit tree in winter.
Who would think that those branches would turn
green again and blossom, but we hope it, we know it.

~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

My Mother Kept a Garden, A Garden of the Heart ~ A Video Montage by LeScintilla

“My mother said to me, “If you become a soldier you’ll be a general; if you become a monk you’ll end up as the pope.” Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.”
Pablo Picasso

Music:
Caccini’s Ave Maria by Jan Mulder

Poem
“My Mother Kept a Garden”
~Author unknown
Read by LeScintilla

My mother kept a garden,
a garden of the heart,
She planted all the good things
that gave my life its start.

She turned me to the sunshine
and encouraged me to dream,
Fostering and nurturing
the seeds of self-esteem…

And when the winds and rain came,
she protected me enough~
But not too much because she knew
I’d need to stand up strong and tough.

Her constant good example
always taught me right from wrong~
Markers for my pathway
that will last a lifetime long.

I am my Mother’s garden.
I am her legacy~
And I hope today she feels the love
reflected back from me

~Author unknown~

A love Poem Read by LeScintilla

 

Translation from French by LeScintilla

I’ve loved you despite myself
Entwined with your being, in a swirl of disquiet and dizziness
I didn’t want to say, “I love you”
Out of fear of seeing you disappear like a leaf wrenched from its stem
Nevertheless, I love you until my heart screams
Until I lose my breath each time you distance yourself and leave a void

I have loved you hidden behind the curtains of night
My childish glances followed your every step
My eyes drank the words you would not speak to me
Your words. . . that the light emanating from you wrote on the scrolls of shadows
Your words . . . like fiery stars
Shooting from the dark night to light my way
Your words . . . that you sowed from page to page
In the book of our destinies
And I locked my heart away
So it could not follow your path
But . . . my heart is rebellious
It dances with your words, so soft and so powerful
Clings to its emerging dreams
And today, it wants to speak to you
I love you as one loves a dream hung from moonbeams
I love you as one loves a spring on the rippled slopes of dunes
I love you like the majestic eagle loves to soar and be free
I love you with strength and passion as only tigers know to love

And even if the future is unsure, I want to love you forever
I will love you with all my hope, quivering with impatience
I will love you to the depths of your soul, to the enigma of your silence
I will love you until the desperate need to chant your absence,
Until the fragile confession of an invisible secret

I will love you…..

Waking Up This Morning, I See The Blue Sky

Waking up this morning, I see the blue sky.
I join hands in thanks.
For the many wonders of life.
For having twenty-four brand new hours before me.

~Thich Nhat Hanh