Here we go.
So I'm supposed to be catching up on work right now, but I'm obviously not going to be able to concentrate properly until I get some of this down. This is likely to be a long, rambling, and possibly overwrought post, so I'm going to put this behind a cut tag to not be too much in your face about it:
To start out with: what I thought I was going to was, well, a drum circle.
squirrelhaven and I jokingly called it my 'hippie drum camp,' like summer camp but with dreadlocks: there'd be lots of drumming, a few workshops -- mostly I was looking to play music at a more intense level than I've been getting in my regular drum classes. That was about all I had in mind.
And, yeah, there was all that. But that was just at the surface.
Here are the mechanics, the literal:
There's a fire. Around the fire is a circle of soft earth. On the earth is a sand mandala, a new one redrawn each day. Around the circle is a ring of torches, a ring of grass, another ring of torches. Drummers at one end, a tiny secondary circle around a totem at the other; altars at the four corners. Each night, we would enter the space together, some masked or painted, some in costumes, some in plain old shorts and t-shirts. The fire would be lit, people would begin to move around the circle, drummers would begin to play, others might start singing, and we'd continue like that until dawn.
All that is true. It's also about as accurate as describing a Catholic mass as "People went into a big room. Someone in a silly hat made a speech, they all stood up, sat down, kneeled with their hands together, sang a song, made another speech and went home."
***
I've never been a religious person. There are too many hurdles I can't get past, or simply don't accept: the us-versus-them mentality, "faith" which can sound more like willful ignorance, the politics and sexism and violence and the Thou Shalts and Thou Shalt Nots that so inevitably seem to get tangled up in what should be a joyful, positive thing.
I know, intellectually, that those things aren't necessarily what religion is really about, that probably the vast majority of religious people find those things as bothersome as I do. But I can't help it: that minority has poisoned the well for me; I can't walk into a church or a temple or a mosque without thinking of the people who've suffered or died because of that particular set of beliefs, without thinking of huckster televangelists and abortion clinic bombers and stickers on science textbooks and on and on. That all gets in the way, and prevents me from experiencing church worship as anything but sitting in a room listening to a speech.
All of which is to say by contrast: if there is a form of worship, a form of religion I could accept, this ritual I just engaged in was pretty much exactly it.
***
Here I pause for a very long time as I try to figure out how to explain how dancing around a fire in the middle of the night translates into a religious experience. Especially when what I mean by 'a religious experience' is so different from what I usually understand religion to mean: there's no deity to be pleased or displeased here, no moral rules to convey, no "worship" in the traditional sense, really.
Only this: what we were all doing there, in that space -- the only actual "rule" as far as I could tell -- was that if you were in the circle, you were contributing to the circle. Which could mean many different things, depending on the energy of the moment and your own particular inclinations: there are four broad categories of activity -- drum, dance, voice, and "seva" (an interesting one, I'll get back to that later) -- but within those you might be adding your own musical or physical or emotional ingredients to the mix, or supporting those already there, or something as simple as making eye contact with someone to let them know what they're doing is working, or sitting quietly beside someone who needs it. At some points we would be dancing and shrieking and leaping and drumming as loudly and as energetically as possible; at others there would be total silence except for the fire and the night insects and soft footsteps in the earth. None of this was planned or scheduled, except for the beginning and the end point at dawn: between those points everthing just moved fluidly wherever it was needed.
It was something like being in a play, but with no lines to memorize, and no audience but ourselves -- which was crucial, for me at least: spectators would have killed the sense of freedom, I'd have been unable to take part as I did if I felt like somebody was watching. It was something like improvising music, but without necessarily needing to make any sound. It was something like ritual, but with barely any prescribed forms or practices. It was a little tiny bit like those team-building exercises they put you through in corporate retreats, where you have to fall backwards and trust someone to catch you, or work out as a group how to cross a fake river without using your feet or talking, or whatever. Except that those are universally mortifying and false, and this was genuine.
I'm still not explaining this well.
One last try: that space was made sacred, by virtue of the fact that we were all there choosing to make it sacred, supporting each other in that, as an end in itself. Once achieved, the use we each made of it differed: some just tranced out, some treated it as performance, some as ritual, casting totems and symbols into the fire or meditating at the altars. Many people talked about it in terms of healing, or lessons to be learned. I came to think of it that way myself. (My lessons were mostly about self-consciousness, and constraint. That an enthusiastic gesture or sound might look foolish or sound off-key, but a tentative or fearful one definitely will. That looking foolish is maybe not such a bad thing, in the end.)
I think that's about as close as I'm going to get.
***
And even if you set all that aside, these moments would have been enough:
A quiet moment late on -- I think the third? -- night. Or early that morning, really. A woman named Brighthawk -- literally the best drummer I've ever heard in person, no exaggeration -- sat with a guy whose name I never caught; the two of them playing a rolling tips-of-the-fingers tune on this odd sort of inside-out steel drum together. Someone else with an accordion, long slow breezy ocean notes. It called us all to silence, nearly to stillness, just listening to the three of them together. Brighthawk, so totally caught up in the experience, let out this choking noise that could have been sobbing or orgasm or anything in between. They had to help her stand, afterwards, her legs were shaking so. She never missed a note.
Or:
Throwing a new element into the mix, just a simple clapping rhythm, and having the entire circle instantly pick it up as though they'd been waiting for just that thing at just that moment, and carry it forward. That's a good feeling. Finding that you feel safe enough to carry something solo -- and getting looks from those around you that say, yes. That works. Keep going. That's even better.
Or:
I had stepped into the dark outside, to let go for a little while, catch my breath. On my way back, still some distance away, I could hear that in my absence a new chant had started. (I should mention: the singing was mostly short, one- or two-line measures that would repeat until everyone had picked up the words and the tune: "We are a people at the full height of our power / this is the place / now is the hour". I don't remember most of them in their entirety, but they were generally of that sentiment: "I am opening," "I am rising up," and so on. Some of them interlocked together in pairs, or people would just start harmonizing and varying as the moment called.) Anyway. So this new chant I could hear echoing across the field turned out to be a very familiar one, accompanied by a whole lot of laughter: "If you're happy and you know it clap your hands.... if you're happy and you know it clap your hands...."
(Pagans. So dour and humorless. :) Another slow, serious chant gradually transformed into a faux-gospel revival, one guy at the side taking on the role of a carnival-tent preacher, others joining in with half-serious shouts of 'preach it, brother!' -- again with laughter, but this wasn't mockery; it was genuine too. The chant continued underneath, transformed for the moment into a choir.) (or yet again: at one point the drumming somehow fell into a plain 4/4 rock beat, and before anyone could jump in with some fancy polyrhythm, voices rose up from the other side: "We will / we will / rock you". Boom boom thud. Boom boom thud. Okay, that one was mockery, fair enough. But good-hearted.)
(I don't think it's coincidence that the night that had the most humor and laughter was also the night that had the most people literally shaken off their feet, taken by ecstasy or catharsis or both, gently guided to safety and watched over.)
Or:
Dawn, on the last day. A long, slow trance ends as the sunlight touches the tops of the trees; the music leaps up and out, soap bubbles sparkling through the air above the dancers spinning wildly, the music speeds up yet again beyond possibility, my hands are aching but I can't possibly let go now: shouts and cries as the dancers finally abandon the constant clockwise motion they've maintained the past four nights and swarm towards the music and Brighthawk plays the final break -- we stop as one -- the sun rises --
Yeah. It was like that. It was just like that.
***
I haven't even talked about the people.
I think most everyone reading this, we already have a shared meaning for the word 'tribe' -- this group was very much a tribe in that sense, and an exceptionally open and welcoming one. You all know how hard it is for me to enter a new situation, deal with new people; it was a huge deal for me just to walk into this place alone. Within, I'd say about five minutes after my arrival I wasn't alone anymore. Which is not to say I didn't still have periods of panic, scouting around for a conversation I could plausibly join, or else running away from one and needing to hide in my tent for a while. (I seem to have this very strange and contradictory mixture of "Notice me! Befriend me!" and "I'm afraid! Leave me alone!" which I never consciously noticed before this.)
Though I plan to drag as many of you as possible along to this thing next year, I'm glad in retrospect I did the first one on my own: it forced me to get over it, get out there and interact. Just for one example: if I hadn't been wandering around lonely looking for something to do that first day after setting up my tent, I wouldn't have seen little Hannah struggling to hold up her end of a cooler, so wouldn't have offered to help carry it to their tent, so wouldn't have been introduced to Lillith. Who then wouldn't have had the chance to take me under her wing as she so generously did, and my whole experience would have been immeasurably poorer. (Though, actually, now that I think of it I suspect she would have found me out somehow, no matter what; she's just that sort.) (It's Lillith's birthday today. Happy birthday, Lillith.)
***
Okay. I've been writing this for... six hours now, and I'm kind of out of steam. There's a lot more I could say but I think perhaps it's time to cook dinner.... I'll resist the temptation to spend the next two hours proofreading and tweaking, and will open the floor to questions and comments at this time. :)
Edited to add: I spent a lot more time experiencing than documenting, but for the benefit of those not reading the
danielbeck feed, I do have a handful of photos from the event which I've posted here.
To start out with: what I thought I was going to was, well, a drum circle.
squirrelhaven and I jokingly called it my 'hippie drum camp,' like summer camp but with dreadlocks: there'd be lots of drumming, a few workshops -- mostly I was looking to play music at a more intense level than I've been getting in my regular drum classes. That was about all I had in mind.
And, yeah, there was all that. But that was just at the surface.
Here are the mechanics, the literal:
There's a fire. Around the fire is a circle of soft earth. On the earth is a sand mandala, a new one redrawn each day. Around the circle is a ring of torches, a ring of grass, another ring of torches. Drummers at one end, a tiny secondary circle around a totem at the other; altars at the four corners. Each night, we would enter the space together, some masked or painted, some in costumes, some in plain old shorts and t-shirts. The fire would be lit, people would begin to move around the circle, drummers would begin to play, others might start singing, and we'd continue like that until dawn.
All that is true. It's also about as accurate as describing a Catholic mass as "People went into a big room. Someone in a silly hat made a speech, they all stood up, sat down, kneeled with their hands together, sang a song, made another speech and went home."
***
I've never been a religious person. There are too many hurdles I can't get past, or simply don't accept: the us-versus-them mentality, "faith" which can sound more like willful ignorance, the politics and sexism and violence and the Thou Shalts and Thou Shalt Nots that so inevitably seem to get tangled up in what should be a joyful, positive thing.
I know, intellectually, that those things aren't necessarily what religion is really about, that probably the vast majority of religious people find those things as bothersome as I do. But I can't help it: that minority has poisoned the well for me; I can't walk into a church or a temple or a mosque without thinking of the people who've suffered or died because of that particular set of beliefs, without thinking of huckster televangelists and abortion clinic bombers and stickers on science textbooks and on and on. That all gets in the way, and prevents me from experiencing church worship as anything but sitting in a room listening to a speech.
All of which is to say by contrast: if there is a form of worship, a form of religion I could accept, this ritual I just engaged in was pretty much exactly it.
***
Here I pause for a very long time as I try to figure out how to explain how dancing around a fire in the middle of the night translates into a religious experience. Especially when what I mean by 'a religious experience' is so different from what I usually understand religion to mean: there's no deity to be pleased or displeased here, no moral rules to convey, no "worship" in the traditional sense, really.
Only this: what we were all doing there, in that space -- the only actual "rule" as far as I could tell -- was that if you were in the circle, you were contributing to the circle. Which could mean many different things, depending on the energy of the moment and your own particular inclinations: there are four broad categories of activity -- drum, dance, voice, and "seva" (an interesting one, I'll get back to that later) -- but within those you might be adding your own musical or physical or emotional ingredients to the mix, or supporting those already there, or something as simple as making eye contact with someone to let them know what they're doing is working, or sitting quietly beside someone who needs it. At some points we would be dancing and shrieking and leaping and drumming as loudly and as energetically as possible; at others there would be total silence except for the fire and the night insects and soft footsteps in the earth. None of this was planned or scheduled, except for the beginning and the end point at dawn: between those points everthing just moved fluidly wherever it was needed.
It was something like being in a play, but with no lines to memorize, and no audience but ourselves -- which was crucial, for me at least: spectators would have killed the sense of freedom, I'd have been unable to take part as I did if I felt like somebody was watching. It was something like improvising music, but without necessarily needing to make any sound. It was something like ritual, but with barely any prescribed forms or practices. It was a little tiny bit like those team-building exercises they put you through in corporate retreats, where you have to fall backwards and trust someone to catch you, or work out as a group how to cross a fake river without using your feet or talking, or whatever. Except that those are universally mortifying and false, and this was genuine.
I'm still not explaining this well.
One last try: that space was made sacred, by virtue of the fact that we were all there choosing to make it sacred, supporting each other in that, as an end in itself. Once achieved, the use we each made of it differed: some just tranced out, some treated it as performance, some as ritual, casting totems and symbols into the fire or meditating at the altars. Many people talked about it in terms of healing, or lessons to be learned. I came to think of it that way myself. (My lessons were mostly about self-consciousness, and constraint. That an enthusiastic gesture or sound might look foolish or sound off-key, but a tentative or fearful one definitely will. That looking foolish is maybe not such a bad thing, in the end.)
I think that's about as close as I'm going to get.
***
And even if you set all that aside, these moments would have been enough:
A quiet moment late on -- I think the third? -- night. Or early that morning, really. A woman named Brighthawk -- literally the best drummer I've ever heard in person, no exaggeration -- sat with a guy whose name I never caught; the two of them playing a rolling tips-of-the-fingers tune on this odd sort of inside-out steel drum together. Someone else with an accordion, long slow breezy ocean notes. It called us all to silence, nearly to stillness, just listening to the three of them together. Brighthawk, so totally caught up in the experience, let out this choking noise that could have been sobbing or orgasm or anything in between. They had to help her stand, afterwards, her legs were shaking so. She never missed a note.
Or:
Throwing a new element into the mix, just a simple clapping rhythm, and having the entire circle instantly pick it up as though they'd been waiting for just that thing at just that moment, and carry it forward. That's a good feeling. Finding that you feel safe enough to carry something solo -- and getting looks from those around you that say, yes. That works. Keep going. That's even better.
Or:
I had stepped into the dark outside, to let go for a little while, catch my breath. On my way back, still some distance away, I could hear that in my absence a new chant had started. (I should mention: the singing was mostly short, one- or two-line measures that would repeat until everyone had picked up the words and the tune: "We are a people at the full height of our power / this is the place / now is the hour". I don't remember most of them in their entirety, but they were generally of that sentiment: "I am opening," "I am rising up," and so on. Some of them interlocked together in pairs, or people would just start harmonizing and varying as the moment called.) Anyway. So this new chant I could hear echoing across the field turned out to be a very familiar one, accompanied by a whole lot of laughter: "If you're happy and you know it clap your hands.... if you're happy and you know it clap your hands...."
(Pagans. So dour and humorless. :) Another slow, serious chant gradually transformed into a faux-gospel revival, one guy at the side taking on the role of a carnival-tent preacher, others joining in with half-serious shouts of 'preach it, brother!' -- again with laughter, but this wasn't mockery; it was genuine too. The chant continued underneath, transformed for the moment into a choir.) (or yet again: at one point the drumming somehow fell into a plain 4/4 rock beat, and before anyone could jump in with some fancy polyrhythm, voices rose up from the other side: "We will / we will / rock you". Boom boom thud. Boom boom thud. Okay, that one was mockery, fair enough. But good-hearted.)
(I don't think it's coincidence that the night that had the most humor and laughter was also the night that had the most people literally shaken off their feet, taken by ecstasy or catharsis or both, gently guided to safety and watched over.)
Or:
Dawn, on the last day. A long, slow trance ends as the sunlight touches the tops of the trees; the music leaps up and out, soap bubbles sparkling through the air above the dancers spinning wildly, the music speeds up yet again beyond possibility, my hands are aching but I can't possibly let go now: shouts and cries as the dancers finally abandon the constant clockwise motion they've maintained the past four nights and swarm towards the music and Brighthawk plays the final break -- we stop as one -- the sun rises --
Yeah. It was like that. It was just like that.
***
I haven't even talked about the people.
I think most everyone reading this, we already have a shared meaning for the word 'tribe' -- this group was very much a tribe in that sense, and an exceptionally open and welcoming one. You all know how hard it is for me to enter a new situation, deal with new people; it was a huge deal for me just to walk into this place alone. Within, I'd say about five minutes after my arrival I wasn't alone anymore. Which is not to say I didn't still have periods of panic, scouting around for a conversation I could plausibly join, or else running away from one and needing to hide in my tent for a while. (I seem to have this very strange and contradictory mixture of "Notice me! Befriend me!" and "I'm afraid! Leave me alone!" which I never consciously noticed before this.)
Though I plan to drag as many of you as possible along to this thing next year, I'm glad in retrospect I did the first one on my own: it forced me to get over it, get out there and interact. Just for one example: if I hadn't been wandering around lonely looking for something to do that first day after setting up my tent, I wouldn't have seen little Hannah struggling to hold up her end of a cooler, so wouldn't have offered to help carry it to their tent, so wouldn't have been introduced to Lillith. Who then wouldn't have had the chance to take me under her wing as she so generously did, and my whole experience would have been immeasurably poorer. (Though, actually, now that I think of it I suspect she would have found me out somehow, no matter what; she's just that sort.) (It's Lillith's birthday today. Happy birthday, Lillith.)
***
Okay. I've been writing this for... six hours now, and I'm kind of out of steam. There's a lot more I could say but I think perhaps it's time to cook dinner.... I'll resist the temptation to spend the next two hours proofreading and tweaking, and will open the floor to questions and comments at this time. :)
Edited to add: I spent a lot more time experiencing than documenting, but for the benefit of those not reading the
danielbeck feed, I do have a handful of photos from the event which I've posted here.