Here I am, lying on my back in bed, surrounded by candles, smiling. The ubiquitous smoke is burning, roiling between me and screen of my laptop. On my laptop a man with nipple length hair is playing guitar into a complicated microphone array. He’s singing in falsetto soprano backed up in thick alto by a woman playing a squeezebox beside him. As it happens, they’re in the same little village in East Sussex that I was flown away to board at when I was eight. Forest Row.
I didn’t think I wanted to go to this. It’s a gathering of the people who were connected to Medicine Festival last summer – the only summer festival we got away with having in the UK, and a beautiful outlet weekend for a very small number of careful sober people connected with healing, heavily policed for social distancing by angry looking security guards used to working Glastonbury and confused about how there was nobody to restrain. Beautiful, needed, and human. I was a lucky boy.
I didn’t want to go on zoom and to connect through a screen to something that we had such a profound physical and spiritual connection with this summer. It’s been better than I expected though. Lovely people. “Always be stepping forwards into the light,” they are saying as I write. These are people full of heart. In part they are my people, as much as the strange and gorgeous people I play let’s pretend with for money. I always exist on the edge if I can, coming in and out of the light of the fire. But this has been a tonic despite the fact it is delivered to me via technology – specifically via my great big noisy gaming laptop. And I feel part of this community.
It’s full moon in Virgo and it’s been bright all day. A powerful time to cleanse and flush out the unhelpful messy stuff we’re carrying around, if we believe in all that stuff – and I find it helpful to do so as you know. There’s a lot of noise at the moment and a lot of opportunity for dark thoughts and dark behaviours. But with Spring approaching and with the end of this time of constraint and fear perhaps in sight at last, it’s a good time to connect with God, or with the gods, or the power, or the universe or the spaghetti monster or whatever you want to call it. There’s a lot of light out there and there’s lots more coming.
This evening of Zoom has helped me feel part of a circle again – connected to a community. Just like with my local Buddhists. I hate Zoom for communication because I always notice what’s not possible. But the variety has been wonderful this evening, and as I’m always reminded by Creation Theatre, much is possible on zoom. People from all over the world, from Forest Row to Costa Rica in the last few minutes and now even The Isle of Man. Songs and thoughts and prayers and wisdom and togetherness. That’s all I really needed for a Saturday night after a practical day.
The carpet fitter came over in the morning. One step closer to the room being done. Oh joy.
Now I’m going to get back to connecting with all these lovely people as they share their lovely moments with us. Just in time for the woman in the Isle of Man to have fixed her microphone – a potential friend if I do move back there…
AlBarclay 