Listening back: "Sadhu"
“A few strips of cloth, a price it did cost
A price you were glad to pay
A wordless song, known by the river
You gave it up, answered a call, only you could hear
“Sadhu,” about a fictional character who took on the renunciate path, is a bit of a deep cut as Bay Station songs go. I think we played the song live once, incongruously, amid a late-night club set. Still, I have a fondness for the song, recorded in 2015, influenced greatly by the sadhus — those men* who eschew worldly goods and devote their lives to asceticism and solitary meditation — I crossed paths with during my trips to India.
While the sadhus I met relied on charity to get by, their lives were rich in spirit and community, their choices coming both at great expense …and great reward. I saw how sometimes giving up something, sacrificing certain opportunities for experience, only allowed that much more of the world in.
*evidently there are female equivalents to sadhu, called sadven.