A quiet notice V2Melody closes at midnight on , Spanish time.

Closes

A note from Richard

V2Melody will close at midnight on 20 January 2028

This site has been a retirement project in musical poetry: poems chosen with care and set to music, offered freely for as long as it felt right to keep the garden open.

The work no longer holds the place it once did in my life. I have gone as far with it as I wish to go. Like a sand mandala, it was made to be completed and then released. I am not attached to its permanence, and I do not believe any of it needs to last beyond the time it was given. The poems were already here before I arrived and began to experiment with them. They will still be here when these musical experiments, and indeed myself, have been swept away, like the sand of a mandala. Nothing has been lost.

I want a simpler end to my life, days of simple love and enjoyment with my wonderful wife of 20 years. The work of maintaining a server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit that life.

From 4 November 2026 I will not be adding new poems or musical poems to the site.

The experimental music I am making now is on my Suno profile. Those pieces stay there, and are not added to this site.

Until midnight on 20 January 2028, Spanish time, everything remains available exactly as it is. That is when my VPS server contract comes to an end, and it will not be renewed. After that, the server will be switched off and the site will disappear.

The Mandala Is Finished explains this more fully.

Thank you to anyone who found a poem, a track, or a quiet moment here.

The pleasure was in the making.

Richard

Home › Glossary › Letter A

Awakening

World Religion
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A sudden or profound realization of spiritual truth, such as the nature of reality, often associated with enlightenment in Buddhism.

Detailed Definition
Awakening (Bodhi in Buddhism) marks the pivotal moment when an individual breaks free from the veil of ignorance and perceives the true nature of existence. In poetry, this moment is often portrayed as a dawn, a flash of lightning, or the opening of a flower. It is the climax of the spiritual quest narrative. Poets strive not just to describe awakening but to evoke a glimpse of it in the reader, using paradoxical language, sudden shifts in imagery, and a disruption of conventional logic to point toward a reality beyond ordinary perception.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Zen poetry, Awakening (satori) arrives unexpectedly: “A crow’s cry—suddenly, the mountain is inside me”; In Rumi’s verse, Awakening is love’s lightning strike: “You knock at the door; I open—now I am you”; Contemporary poets describe Awakening as shedding layers: “Not a revelation, but a remembering—like finding your name in your own handwriting”; In Tibetan Buddhist poetry, Awakening is the end of dreaming: “The dreamer wakes; the dream dissolves—only clarity remains.”
Additional Notes
Awakening (bodhi in Buddhism, kensho in Zen) denotes direct insight into reality’s nature—impermanence, emptiness, or non-duality; unlike gradual learning, it is often sudden and transformative; poets capture awakening through paradox, nature epiphanies (e.g., Bashō’s frog pond), or moments of stillness, using minimalism to evoke maximal realization.
Also Known As
Bodhi Satori Kensho Illumination
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