Eunoia

Eunoia. Beautiful Thinking.
This weekend I dragged (his word) Dave to the South Country Fair. He bore it all in good humor I must say.
The South Country Fair is a magical event that takes place once a year in Ft McCleod where some 500 poets, hippies, artists, hillbillies, musicians and so on gather to make some noise.
I am so covered in mosquito bites I want to tear off my own skin.
What you have is 2 stages, the main stage and the east stage, one tent devoted to spoken word poetry, one awareness tent for yoga, chanting, drumming, gardening etc., several food vendors, and a huge camping area in the trees with little villages built haphazardly of tents, trailers, campers and cars between winding dirt roads. It is next to the Old Man River, which the hippies whose little community we joined say is called the River of Love since it flooded. Im not sure why since it is much higher, faster and more dangerous than before, but I wasn’t going to argue.
I was disappointed not to be able to swim but I was later shown a place where it was safe to do so, though the water was icy and we had to trek for 15 minutes through deep, mosquito infested brush to get there. This was the second morning, however, by which time I was really in need of a good rinse.
As we walked I looked down at the heavy, soft mud with brand new baby willow trees sprouting up everywhere in it. I realized how far this river must have flooded as we walked and walked over the newly deposited earth. It made me think of Egypt, and the Festival of the Tear, as the Nile flooded, and reinfused, rebuilt, the soil.
At night when the awareness tent closed up and it got dark, they projected films by local artists on the side of it. The best was a cartoon called Mr. Reaper’s Very Bad Day, all about Death trying to catch a bus to Calgary to do his job there when a meteor falls from the sky and destroys it while he watches from far away. He takes it out on a flower which pops through the pavement at his feet, but which keeps popping back up no matter how many times he slashes it down with his scythe. The flower is singing Beethoven’s 9th, the Ode to Joy in a lovely tenor. Finally Death blasts it with nukes, and it returns gigantic and mutated with several blossoms which all sing in weird harmony. It was great. It was later shown without sound projected over slides of war scenes while a standup bass player and a trance dj who also played a thing kind of like a theruman but all vibrate-y, did weird music and a poet shouted verse in the middle with the scene projected over him.
The first night Dave went to sleep early like a big lightweight, after pitching our tent near some people who had big signs all around proclaiming that they were the Hoo Devils. I remembered them from the last fair I went to. A big group of old hippies and their kids, who wore tie-dye and batik and scruffy denim and played music till dawn after the stage performances ended.
I don’t know how Dave slept that night, because after he went to bed I went and sat at the campfire and befriended them all. One of the first things they asked me was if I played an instrument, which I did, a drum, which I was then ordered to go get since there were no drummers there. It was already 2 am when this happened and I was almost ready for bed myself, but I went and got the drum and played with them until the sky became light.
This is what real folk music is like, cram as many instruments around one campfire as you can, and make sure you have a guy like George, who knows and loves nearly every song ever and can make any one of them into a bluegrass tune. We had 3 guitars, 1 mandolin, a washtub bass, a maraca shaker and me. Others came and went. I was impressed with myself for being able to keep up at all, and by the end of the night I was dubbed "the relentless drummer". I fell minutely out of time quite often, but no one noticed or cared. When I finally went to bed they booed at me and insisted I come back the next night.
The next day it rained and rained and I was depressed about that but got up and went out with Dave who was kind enough to hold the umbrella while I bought coffee from a vendor and we made our way around the fair. I received a painful and unexpected shock that morning. I noticed a book of poems in the merchandise tent written by a friend I hadn’t seen in quite awhile, who brought me to my first sc fair and helped me a lot in getting over the very intense writers block I suffered at the time, which has not returned since. I said "Oh good! Is he here?" the vendor said he thought so. I took a program and wandered in the direction of Lotosland, the poetry tent. I scanned the program for his name, and found it. It said there would be a memorial reading in his honor at 9pm that night. I found this hard to fathom and thought (as we always do at these moments) that there must be some mistake. Perhaps he just hadn’t been able to make it to the fair?
I was unable to ask anyone when I got to Lotosland, as 2 of the poetry coordinators were celebrating their handfasting. As I stood witnessing this beautiful ceremony of uniting (which was already the 3rd time they had repeated it, they were doing a tour to include everyone they knew at fairs like this across the country) I scanned the assembly and realized that it was probably true, he was probably dead, memorials are not held for living people.
I tried to rationalize my feelings about this, I had, after all, not seen him for 2 years. I tried to concentrate on the ceremony, the poetry of the vows, the beauty of the moment. I was overwhelmed and wept silently as the couple was bound together.
Afterwards I approached, after everyone had congratulated the couple and there was milling around and chatting a walked up to the man and asked him what had become of Steve. He told me he had died of a drug overdose in a hotel room in Vancouver, nearly a year before. It was believed to be intentional, though no one really knew for sure. I struggled for a moment trying not to burst into tears, failed, and was enfolded in the embrace of the many people who knew exactly how I felt. This man was loved at the South Country Fair.
I was invited to read in his honor at the memorial service after I explained what he meant to me creatively. I read a poem, which is posted earlier in this blog, about the dancing skeleton. Steve was the person who had told me it was a poem, and in light of the news I had received, it took on whole new meaning.
The rain let up in the afternoon. Dave and I made masks in the awareness tent. They told us to make a mask that reflected an element or a being that we wanted to be and tell them something from the perspective of that being. I made the sun, and Dave, without looking at what I was doing, made the moon.
Then we went and walked the labyrinth. A labyrinth is a big diagram that in this case was mapped out in stones on the ground, marking one winding path to the center. It is used for a walking meditation. At the center was a stone altar with various offerings placed on it, stones and flowers. I have walked one before which was a big mat inside Knox United Church. This one was beautiful. I wound my way to the center to the hypnotic music coming from the east stage. 2 men were doing tai chi with swords on the hillside. We all fell into one rhythm. The whole weekend was like that.
The awareness tent was hosting a drum circle later that day. I brought my own drum, but could not resist trying out the great big djembe that was with a bunch of drums to be lent out to those who did not have their own. The facilitator wasn’t there yet, so I set my drum down in the middle and started playing the big one. One man joined me, then another, then a few more, then we had a crazy rhythm and people just started packing in with their drums and sticks and bells and whatever they could make noise with, one guy had a digerido.
Because I had the biggest drum, I guess, I got to sort of lead the rhythm. I didn’t notice at first, but I gradually realized that if I changed anything I was doing, the whole circle changed. If I got funky, pretty soon we were all playing funky, if I went slow and hypnotic, soon we were all trancing. This went on for 20 minutes before the facilitator showed up. I could tell who he was right away. There is something about every drum circle facilitator that makes my teeth ache. Being a good drummer is partly about commanding rhythm, keeping time even when others fall out to keep the sound cohesive and give people a place to pick up from. However its also about feeling for the groove and working with what’s already trying to happen. Drum circle facilitators are great at the first and clueless on the second, in my experience.
So the guy stood there, radiating the desire to take over everything, and we ignored him. Finally he clapped his hands together and started talking over us. Did not attempt to get our attention first, just started yelling. He irritated me, can you tell? We moved outside and spent the next 2 hours playing like he told us to, every time we would get into a decent groove he would stop us and make us do something else. I guess its good to know what a samba is, but I only just wanted to play. At least I got to keep the big drum for the whole thing, since someone else grabbed mine, and I just let them, cause I had the big drum. I need a big drum.
Anyway, mostly good times. That night there was more jamming and I got to just play all I wanted then. Its funny how much fun you can have playing music you don’t even really like. Dave hung out and entertained the girls that showed up.
Security finally came and shut us down around 6. By this time the sun was fully up and doing that wonderful thing it does only in the early morning when it is low slanting through the leaves and gilding everything it touches, lighting the depths of everyones eyes so the irises seemed to glow. I opted not to go to bed, but Dave did.
All through the night there had been a young man by the fire that everyone regarded as kind of ADD and not to be taken seriously. He kept saying everything that I was thinking. All night long I would be musing something to myself, about the weird déjà vu I kept experiencing all night, or some point of philosophy that I could not have expressed if I tried at that time. I would hear him trying earnestly to explain it to someone next to me. it was weird. At about 4 am I suddenly looked around me and realized that I was sitting just barely above the mud, in a village of trailers, with a bunch of hicks playing hick music and me trying desperately to keep up on my drum, and I felt a little ridiculous suddenly. I was about to put the drum down and go to bed and then this guy comes up to me and takes my hand, and he says, " You know how everyone is trying to get somewhere? What if where you’re supposed to be is where you are? I mean, it’s the only place you can be, when you’re there. Its always beautiful if you can see the way to see that."
I stopped feeling dumb and remembered that it was exactly where I was supposed to be.
Im still only on the second night, 3 pages later.
I never went to bed, I danced to sweet funky jazz in the sun, I bathed in the river and luxuriated in mud. I reunioned with another dear old friend that I met at the last fair. I sang chants to the goddess in the awareness tent and then wandered over to the main stage to groove to bluegrass gospel. I sat with a druid sage who sold stones and jewelry from the back of his Oldsmobile and taught spiritual lessons using his own body, covered in tattooed symbols and glyphs, as a blackboard. I sang to him and his daughter when something he said made me think of a song I knew.
The purpose of the fair, for me, is to unlock creativity and release inhibition. I go around lecturing people constantly about their responsibility to themselves and the world to manifest their creative ideas. I believe that the creative impulses that come from the depths of the soul are sacred gifts, messages from the divine, and not to express them is sacrilege and dishonor to the gods.
So many people hang around waiting for someone to tell them the right way to express. They do not realize their own personal authority. They are afraid of doing it wrong. They don’t realize that individual people invented everything they currently have, and that they did so by honoring and expressing their creativity. Had they stayed in the shadows waiting for the validation of others, we would still be waiting for the wheel.
The words that occurred to me to express this are "I am responsible for creating the perfection of experience I expect from the world." I will never be bored or disappointed with anything if I remember this. If I am not happy with the music I am hearing, I can make my own that I do like. If think the story is boring, I can make up a new one. All weekend long I found myself participating more fully in group things than I ever usually do. When we sang chants I began making harmonies that would simply not have been there had I chosen not to show off what wicked pipes I have, and others got the idea and did it too until we had a glorious song of praise instead of a monotonous chant. We never would have gotten to have a real drum circle of free expression had I not taken it apon myself to begin it. No one looked at me and said, "who the hell are you to go making things happen?" Hardly anyone looked at me at all, and that’s the weird part, they just responded to me.
As I wandered dreamily down the path toward the end of the festival a woman I passed smiled at me, held out her hands and said "Isn’t this a perfect moment?" Which was exactly what I myself had been thinking.
When it was finally all over I tracked down the man who had been the first to welcome me to their campfire. He was the washtub bassman. He gave me a wonderfully warm goodbye hug. The jammers were beginning already and he rocked me while humming to it and I started humming with him, for just a minute, and then he said "Now get outta here and go do it for real."
So here I go.
Stay tuned.