The weather took a turn backward after our recent snowfall and the temperatures soared into the 70’s this weekend. Colleen took advantage of it to go a camping/paddling trip to the Green River Reservoir while Ambiana, Jakobi and I stayed home and enjoyed the wonderful weather in our own little corner of the world. We made a fire in the Long House fireplace and had a small dance party then watched Enola Holmes on Netflix with Eleven from Stranger Things as Sherlock Holmes younger sister and then slept out under the stars on the Long House Roof where we saw a zillion shooting stars before falling asleep.
On November 1st we celebrated our Ancestors with a Feast of Family Recipes from the Kutin, Steiber, Kmiecik, Travis and Glavin Families. We ate Spaghetti Carbonara, Kutin Dressing, Pineapple Jell-O Mold, Sweet-n-Sour Cabbage and Butter Cookies. Jakobi definitely got the Kutin Spaghetti Eating Gene.
Nada Brahma…Sound is God
I have been listening a lot this week to the Allman-Bett’s Band album ‘Down To the River’ which I mentioned in an earlier post. It’s been a while since an album has captured my full attention like this one has. It’s the guitar solos I find so intoxicating. They have a devotional quality upon which my spirit soars. I like to listen to them on the Long House roof in the late afternoon when the sun setting in the southwest casts its golden light over the tops of the trees on the slope below me and deep into the hemlocks on the slope above.
I let the music fill me up as I move and spin beneath the autumnal sky and am overwhelmed with an infusion of the divine which lifts me above the mundane aspects of what our lives have become and re-awakens an awareness of what a beautiful, mysterious world we all live in. Music is sacred as are a lot of things we take for granted these days which are subsumed within our culture into the service of those who would exploit us.
Language is also sacred and full of power. Especially the written word. You could say the ability to read, write and talk envelopes us within an all consuming spell in which we struggle to exist not realizing we are ensnaring ourselves and each and every day. We have been taught to believe that what is truly sacred is forever apart from us and unknowable and that faith trumps experience. Dance where once we were caught up in rapture and an interconnectedness with all being has been dumbed down to a drunken and drugged state of wild abandon, an escape from the trials of living, a reprieve from the nightmare that is our lives. Something we do, or used to do, on the weekends to make the rest of the week bearable.
One of my earliest and most poignant memories is of singing with my father as we drove somewhere when I was very young. I remember strongly the joy as we sang loudly about what I dimly recall were some flowers blooming in a mountain glade. This was not something I recall ever doing again which is probably why the memory has such a hold on me. It speaks to me of an unbridled joy that was not a part of our familial life but that could have been. That moment is more sacred to me than the countless hours spent in the ensuing years in a church pew on Sundays. The exception being Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve when the sacred hymns aligned with an inner recognition that the birth of the christ-child was an awakening of the divine self within.
Every time we moved, which was often, one of the first things I did upon arriving in a new place was to search for the local radio station that broadcast the music for which I craved. I collected 45’s and as I got older albums. My brother liked KISS, I liked Kansas and the Eagles
At that time I did not dance. We moved to Toledo when I was 13 years old. During our first week there Brian, a year older than me was sent over on his moped by his mother to make friends with us. Disco was all the rage across the country and he wanted to know if my brother and I wanted to go to the Disco Kid that weekend. Situated in a shopping center near our home the Disco Kid was a disco for teenagers open on weekend afternoons. I was definitely a rock and roller and though I went because it was something to do with someone who would become one of my best friends I was not into it. The music was not rock n roll, the lit up dance floor and bar like atmosphere was not something I was interested in at thirteen years old and though it was eminently popular with lots of kids I never went back
Later that year I went to my first Rock N Roll concert at the Toledo Sports Arena. Sitting in the dark with 5000 others to see and hear the songs available until then only upon the radio or record, cassette and 8 track was a transformative experience. When a DJ from WIOT 104.7FM came out on stage before the show started and began a call and response I found my self yelling back. When he yelled Rock we all yelled Roll, when he yelled disco thinking back to the popularity of that teen disco in the shopping center I yelled out Kid which to my utter joy and surprise was drowned our by a deafening roar of SUCKS! There in the dark of a hockey arena turned concert hall I had found my tribe and seldom missed a concert. I had a lenient mother who would drop me off before the show and pick me up afterwards at a near by 7-11 where I would call her from a payphone, buy a $5 bootleg t-shirt and made a ritual of drinking a lemon-lime sprite while I waited.
Dancing came later when I was in high school. Our school was an urban high school with a roughly 50-50 split between African Americans and White students. The admin was racially biased and sponsored a 50’s Sock Hop when I was a sophomore. Needless to say it was sparsely attended. I was one of the few to go along with a couple of my best friends. We had recently seen Animal House and the frat party dance scene had stuck in our heads. There were maybe 15 people at the dance and the music was provided by a dj spinning records. Those who attended were mostly upperclassmen and to our credit we were into it; dressed in 50’s styles, poodle skirts and knee socks, the guys in jeans and white t-shirts with cigarette pack rolled up in our sleeves.
The small number of people at the dance allowed us to interact with each other without reservation or adherence to our respective class lines. Seniors danced with Sophomores, new friendships were made and we had a lot of fun. The excitement peaked when the DJ played ‘Shout’ and recalling the scene in Animal House all the guys fell to the floor and did the worm, convulsing spasmodically and a bit ecstatically on our backs as the girls danced hand in hand in a circle above and around us. Looking back it is questionable that a high school with 50% Black student body would throw such a white bread dance as a sock hop. I don’t recall it being done again but I am grateful that it afforded me the opportunity to share a dance floor with a small group of people and achieve something approaching an ecstatic dance experience.
The only other dance experience I remember from those years was a hayride and square dance we went to my Junior year on Halloween with my Dad and a few high school friends both male and female. We partnered up and followed the calls as best we could but since this was our first time there was confusion. We didn’t care; the mood was infectious and we frolicked around the square giddy and excited; made merry by the music and the movement. In the midst of our revelry my dad squashed our excitement by urgently insisting that we execute the figures the caller was calling. What was becoming a carefree dance of joy and abandon devolved into a stop and start stumbling of us stuck in our heads disconnected from the music as we looked at the other dancers to see what they were doing trying to get the steps right. We soon reverted to our earlier approach but it was now tempered by my dad’s disapproval and attempts to compel us into the ‘correct’ steps.
So for the next 5 or 6 years through college and the years beyond dancing meant rocking out at shows. The music moved me and impelled me to move within the constraints of the club scene. That meant a gradual progression beginning with nodding my head, to jumping up, down and around and finally diving off the stage and being carried atop the crowd on a sea of hands. Not exactly dancing but as ecstatic as it gets at a Pixies show.
Two years after graduating from college I found myself a ski bum in a Colorado ski town where I came upon Shakedown Street, a Grateful Dead cover band. Now being a rock and roller I had heard of the Dead and their fans who followed them from show to show but having never experienced it I drew on my own experience of numerous Van Halen, Journey, Foreigner and Police shows and thought these deadheads were just really obsessive fans. Now in a ramshackle log cabin watering hole in Breckenridge Colorado called Shamus O’Tooles I encountered the music of the Grateful Dead and their fans together for the first time. Gone was rockin’ out replaced by an exultant style of dance characterized by joyful spontaneous spasmodic movement of the arms and legs intertwined with whirling and spinning bodies which created a convergence between dancers and band through the music. Once again I had found my tribe where I could freely express the music moving through me through movement.
When I was back home in Ohio and out with my brother he called me the dancing fool as I was often the only one moving around on the dance floor when we went out to see a local band. No longer did I rock out as I could now translate my Colorado dance floor experiences through other forms of non grateful dead music. This did not go well. Dancing invites an openness that most others are not inclined to and is hard to do in the midst of a herd of people crammed together in a club in front of a band. Attempts to engage others went no where and on one occasion got me thrown out of a club in Seattle. Often I was consigned alone to the back of the dance floor where there was room to move.
In the early nineties ski bum morphed into backpacker and brought me to the small town of Girdwood in South Central Alaska where Sunday Night Jam Session at Max’s Bar turned into small intimate dance parties. At a Grateful Dead Show in Eugene Oregon in 1993 I exited the stadium and came upon a purple school bus blasting Disco music and 100 hippies getting down around it and was struck dumb with the awesomeness of disco. I waded into the throng and lost myself to all those songs I suffered through all those years ago at the Disco Kid in the Westgate Shopping Plaza in Toledo Ohio.
Disco dance parties at Max’s became a thing and were some of the best dance parties I have ever attended. Here was the spiritual model of music made manifest. Small town, most everyone knows everyone else, united by a shared passion for shredding the slopes of Alyeska, Girdwood’s ski resort, and meeting up on a weekly basis to make merry with music and dance. The disco dance parties led to the formation of a local hippie bluegrass/disco fusion jam band which still plays shows to this day. Back when they began it was a small intimate affair. The band and the audience came from the same community and playing at the many music festivals that dot the state in the summer months and in the bars and pubs during the winter months was an extension of this community. Inviting others in, expanding the family, sharing the joy for what else was the music and the dancing but an expression of the life we lived and the joy we found in living it a progression towards that shining city on the hill.
At least that is what it was for me. Others had their own agenda. For what happens to the sacred when it is co-opted by those who desire control and power? It is monetized, made into a product, separated from the experiential to be packaged and sold. It becomes a commodity rather than an experience. This has happened to almost everything that seeks to unite and forge a common-unity among us.
Money and fame drove Jerry Garcia into an early grave and the Dead remained entombed in a money making machine whatever they may have set out to do in the aftermath of the acid test in San Francisco. Could they have been something more if sex drugs and rock and roll had not got in their way? Channeled their sacred music into a sustainable community that could have become a model for a just society. Music as a communal spiritual ritual activity that broke down the barriers that keep people divided against each other rather than united against an unjust system that demonizes the others and serves a small homogeneous elite.
While the small town music scene was still thrilling I craved more connection with my fellow dancers. Even while dancing ecstatically I found others still closed off, unwilling for the most part to make eye contact or interact outside of the personal space they claimed around their bodies. Working one winter at a retreat center on the big island of Hawai’i’ I was invited down to the Rainbow room by a fellow employee who told me that the band playing at the Tropical Contra Dance Week the resort was hosting was really good. I vaguely knew contra dance was similar to square dance and probably because of the negative experience with my dad a decade before I had never inquired further into it.
Now I found myself in a 40′ x 85′ hoop screen house full of whirling bodies as the band Wild Asparagus wove its fiddle, piano, bass, flute and bodhran into a tapestry of musical magic. Dancers formed two long lines and couples moved up and down the lines repeating the same series of figures as they progressed. When the dance ended a woman approached and asked if I was dancing. My head still spinning from the intoxicating vision of movement and music all wrapped together I spluttered that I did not know how to which she replied with a wink ‘There’s only one way to learn’ as she took my hand and led me out onto the dance floor.
That was over 20 years ago and I still have not found a dance medium that I love more. Dancing is always better with a partner male or female and in contra dancing you are always changing partners and dancing with somebody new. Once the figures are nailed down an improvisory nature can be released which can squeeze any style of dance you can think of into the mix allowing spirit to not only manifest but to blossom in all it’s dance floorgasmic glory.
Our family attends two dance festivals a year, Dance Flurry in February in Saratoga Springs NY and the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival in August (technically a music festival but with a large and well attended dance tent and stage) in Hillsdale NY. We have been attending the Falcon Ridge every summer since Ambiana was in utero. We are greeted each time we arrive with “Welcome Home” and it has become our spiritual home. Ambiana and Jakobi look forward to it each year immediately after the one they are attending ends. They have grown up with the friends they have made there and the very festival is an example of common-unity with a festival within the festival made up of the volunteers who arrive early and are the last to leave. Our girls have grown up contra dancing and for awhile when they were younger it did not suit them but as they got older they took to it and before the pandemic shut it down it was more often them who urged us out of the house on a Saturday night to go dancing at the Grange in Montpelier.
For now and forever we have the Long House for small scale impromptu dance parties to tide us over until it is safe to dance in large groups and in enclosed spaces. We did go to a drive in concert this past August. The band on a stage with the audience around their cars in their socially distance parking spaces, not unlike a drive in movie. I had my doubts but it proved to be a lot of fun and exhilarating to experience some live music after so many months without. There was no interaction with anyone not in our parking spaces. There is nothing more I love than to interact with others getting their groove on at a show and my fear is that people actually like this socially distanced dancing and that citing health and safety people will remain in their socially distanced spaces once the pandemic has passed.
It is my fervent hope that this does not happen, if anything we need more socially intimate spaces where we can connect and dissolve the barriers that keep us apart. In the distant past we gathered around a fire, music and rhythms were made and our bodies moved spontaneously with them. We were lifted out of ourselves into a greater sense of being.
Time moved on, speech became the written word, images were created and in time brought to life. An unreality descended upon us ensnaring us in a web of sounds, images and words defining ourselves and our world, limiting our possibilities. A book, a movie, a tv show, a work of art, a song, a performance; each can lift us momentarily out of such self limiting definitions and hint of the possibility of something different than how things are.
Time for change is upon us. If this pandemic has taught us anything it is that joy can be found in the small things. We do not need the cacophony of our popular culture to be fulfilled. Music and dance are sacred as is so much of what we take for granted in our lives. If only we recognized and honored them as such then maybe we could become the change that is so urgently called for in this moment..
