Luke Sweeney - Rishi

RISHI (Hindi: “the sage”, “teacher”)It was Rishi’s dancing atop my heart that wouldn’t let me return to sleep until I committed to travel to the place of her namesake: Rishikesh, Uttarakhand, India. This was in the spring of 2017. She had been pulling me in her orbit since long before I was born - but I didn’t know it yet. I didn’t pack an instrument on our trip to India, so I didn’t record any music there. But I heard it everywhere: in the rush of the Ganges outside on the gaat, the bells and singing at evening aarti, the beeps and honks of motorcycles along unmarked roads, and even in my own breath. I filled up notebooks in Rishikesh, in Haridwar, Jaipur, Vrindavan, and Delhi, before we surrendered our half-baked epiphanies and retreated back to the spiritual desert of the United States. I’d been gone for weeks, but hadn’t mastered any new revelation or philosophy - I hadn’t even written a song.But there were bigger forces at play, and they started showing up in a mysterious way. Th