s p i r i t g a t e

Ceremony

I went to a performance/art installation recently as part of the Philly Fringe Festival. I thought it was sublime, fun, full of wonder and mystery. It changed how my body felt and the thoughts in my mind. It connected me to the hundred and fifty or so other people in the room.

The artists, The Headlong Dance Theater, figured out how to lead a whole bunch of strangers into really participating in a conscious ceremony with a beginning, middle, and end. Neither an exact trajectory nor the outcomes of the event could be predicted. However, the combination of the compassionate and curious intention of the artists, the way they stayed committed to their best creative thinking, no matter how daring, and the way an already beautiful and intentionally holy space was infused with the love of the artists created a huge opening. And, given each audience member’s natural desire to connect and to heal, it was hard for most everyone not to go ahead and walk through towards a transformative and hopeful experience.

It was also hard for me not to walk out thinking about community acupuncture, the spaces where it takes place, and the caring, artful intention of those making it happen. Holy.

The performance was partly about the tension between our wanting to watch, on one hand, and the choice we have, on the other hand, to participate. For most people, each gentle encouragement was enough to go ahead and join as an active part of what was unmistakably ritualistic in nature.

All attendees were asked to wear blue. Most did. Everyone was divided into four groups before entering the old abandoned Christian Science rotunda. I was in the first group. In the foyer, we were told a story and invited to think about an unexplainable event in our lives, and, then, led through a fabric membrane into the huge domed cathedral where the old wooden floor had been cleared of everything. Explore the space freely, we were told, walking in. A short piece of music played while 6 dancers in orange made swirls of movement around the gigantic space. We all seemed tiny under the ocular window at the zenith of the towering dome. The dancers’ movements were lovely or silly or solemn or rhythmic or not, connected to the others or not.

The music ended, and we, the first group were divided further into a few organic collections of individuals and invited by the artists to create, when the music begin again and the second group entered, patterns of movement of our own choosing which related to the space and the music. This was just the beginning of a long series of group motion-poems facilitated brilliantly by the dance troupe, which all eventually linked together into a fluid ceremony.

One thing that got revealed was our relationship to the space around us, how Everything is intimate and touching. That as energizing as it is when we’re open as individuals to the universe’s qi, when we’re inviting hand-holding with a hundred people, or at least not actively avoiding one another, the energy is even more vast, complex, awesome, potentially delicious.

Some audience members had initial resistance to being led toward this kind of activity. There were slumped shoulders, puffed chests, turned heads, and nervous laughter. Most of these folks got swept up by fun and beauty, not by peer pressure.

About a week after we opened Philadelphia Community Acupuncture, Ellen and I were readying the space for another day. It was five minutes or so before our first scheduled patient and in my excitement I shouted like a carnival barker “it’s show time!”.

I certainly don’t think we’re creating fiction or illusion, or that Ellen or I are playing some role other than ourselves. I do believe there is a delicate choreography we undertake to make the clinic click and flow. And, in best moments, patients find themselves floating not only in the acupuncture-induced Shavasina-like state within their own bodies, but also in a collective swirl of benign reality, a real relief from the just barely capped terror, or sadness, or rage we all walk with quite often.

I just thought how interesting it would be to create a time-lapse bird’s eye movie of a whole shift’s activity, the clockwise flow of patients around our space from coming to going and everything in between. You’d see a constant and calm orbit of arriving, checking in, heading around the corner to the bathrooms and into the treatment space, and out the other way back to the reception area. Inside that circle, you’d see the spoke tracing arrows of Ellen and I moving decisively between needle stands and patients. You’d see the subtle movements of the front desk person in the middle of it all, reaching out to every patient, the shifting light from sunbeams across surfaces and textures lovingly and skillfully prepared by Ellen’s artist husband who had to anticipate at least some of this celestial-like symphony.

Art need not hold the beholder away from its body. Religious experience doesn’t happen for me when being told how I’m supposed to feel gets in the way of connecting with mystery. We get to act with the kind of intelligence and love the Headlong Dance Theater showed me. We get to do something that allows this kind of holy space to move through. We get to know that we join all kinds of artists/medicine people doing this work today and all kinds of ancient traditions where opening and listening and moving to the stars with one another makes sense and mends the world.

A white northerner dreaming about the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Fest

So, every year since '99, the last time I went to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, I commence a bittersweet period of grieving in early February. Thats when the festival organizers announce the line-ups for the musicians who'll play sometime during the 7 day event in April/May.

I see the list when it comes out, and I just want to cry. It's always that I havn't figured out getting the money together for travel or getting the time free. But every year, I dream about going, imagine being there barefoot Zydecoing, soaking in the deliciously heavy spring air in the Crescent, indifferent to whether I'll go next to hear, like, Oumou Sangare at the Congo Square stage, or the New Orleans Klezmer All-Stars at the blues stage, or Snooks Eaglin, or Eddie Bo, or Irma Thomas, or the Wild Tchoupatoulis.

Today, here at the Greenline Cafe, Amy's working on her thesis, while I'm trying to read some acupuncture cases, but am being distracted by the New York Times. And, there it is: the List, along with an article about how although there will be some national acts this year, New Orleans local music will be even more emphasized than usual. I start seeking commiseration from Amy about how when I finally put a little money down this week on the new bike I need, I'll be closing the door on any chance of going to this year's extra miraculous, post-Katrina Jazz Fest. How I want to be there, and what it will represent. What WILL it represent? Who's performances will transcend this year, and transcend what; and to where? Will the festival, like a pan-hemisperic May Day, help lead another few hundred thousand people into the misbehaving second line of the city's never ending funeral march and never ending re-birth? Will people parade themselves into various trances just above the late spring fairgrounds?

Early February in Philly, I'm noticing. So different than early May in New Orleans. Struggling to create some community here in the socially cold and busy busy Protestant Northeast, and not even with the benefit of our lifetimes of connections made back in Boston. At the end of a day here, Amy and I are pleased to just see each other in one piece, returning on our bikes and having once again cheated the deathly pace  and violent indifference of the workday streets and sidewalks. We search the memory of our days, a little desparate to report some warm connection with a stranger, an honest interaction with any person who's not middle class and white. The coffeeshop here has served as our church social, a place where there's a chance of a little softening of civic potential or creative collaboration. But, mostly, we miss it, like everyone, in our everyday lives, in the every moment.

We're 40 and 35 years of age, the first generation  where two youngest children could be "making a decision" at this point in our lives about whether to have children or not. And we're looking at that decision as U.S.-ers, 7 years into a century presided over thus far in its entirity by a mob of the richest rich inheritors using the playbook of fascists, terrorists, supremicists, apocolyptic survivalists; spreading death and hatred and talking only of freedom in order to sustain their stranglehold on the world's resources.

I'm old enough to notice that while I can despise our legacies of slavery and genocide and ecological destruction,  I can still love the People of the U.S. for having fought and continuing to fight against all this to build lives of love and liberation and stewardship of the earth and celebration of human creativity, and for our own bodies and families and neighborhoods and languages and traditions.

I spend ALOT of time LONGING to live among fellow Americans and fellow world citizens who are ready to celebrate the security and vitality of our combined and clashing identities and languages and music and movements. What a relief it is for any of us to spend time inside this kind of conversation, trading the chokehold of the ultimate ultra-racist bogey-man story we're whipped with every day for the hard questions of historical responsibility and the even harder questions of just how Good we actually all are, and could be. Let's dance, PLEASE, like they do in New Orleans, to all the brilliant and fierce, the radical and creolified beats and melodies, all the astoundingly perfect little moments of music where god-magic-blood-sound-bone get compressed into a string of notes by today's dedicated sons and daughters of thousand year Caribbean kings and queens, the umpteenth generation shamans of devotion, exorcism, necromancy, re-birth, elation. Songs and rituals written and practiced in the uncompromised voices of who everyone really is, and with all the subtle inflections of who we'll continue to become.

I want to be There, taking nothing for granted.

Allen Toussaint , I swear, could dance the thousands hundreds of years back into the illuminating truth of the south, where everyone will shake hands with themselves before sighing and continuing to two-step. I swear there'll be others I don't know yet who'll have everyone dancing hundreds of years into a very bright and funky looking future.

So, Amy lets me cry. Then she writes something down on a little piece of paper, and folds it up like an envelope, hands it to me smiling. It says "I'm buying you a plane ticket to New Orleans for your birthday."

I'm going. I'm on fire, and my excitement hasn't stopped since then, almost two months ago. But, there's the voices, the lies, that I'm wrong, or the questions about how could I possibly be welcome after what we continue to do to New Orleans.