I’m just home. There’s a concert over the road in Battersea Park. Showtunes. It’s coming loud through my window. There’s a chicken in the oven. Ratatouille and roast potatoes. Gonna chuck in some broccoli and contemplating how to achieve decent gravy without opening a bottle of red wine.
After we closed the ceremony this morning I persuaded Natalya to blow some tobacco up my nose to just ground me enough to drive home. Now I’m home, starving and drawn out, happy and knackered, glad there’s a day before rehearsal starts to just reintegrate with the world I can hear coming in through my window.
An incredible night last night. A night that lasted a thousand years but held lightly and safely. Stumbling through revelations in the darkness. A thousand years gives time to contemplate so much, to reorganise and re-examine long held notions. This is a strong medicine but a good one, and one that promotes life. Not like booze that just numbs into a circular blindness and demotivates. Action is needed in many aspects of my existence. Stopping this weekend has helped wind back the spring.
It is not of our soil, this grandmother vine, but it is of this earth, and for this earth and fit for purpose. The dense thick taste of it, essence of tree. The community of it, essence of humanity. Beautiful music and soundscapes all night, gongs and more portable instruments, at one point two literal actual Royal Pythons, carefully stewarded, curious like Hex. I had one on my face awhile. That was just sensation. Part of the journey but not part of the shift. Much discussed in darkness, much exposed to light. There are no words for this, and to confine such things in writing is to put water in a jar and say it’s the ocean. I could express a remembered snippet, describe an interaction there in the dark with my eyes in a mask so I could see. But as with so much that draws me, it is a fleeting experience, written on the wind, what will stay will stay, with us. And it is a personal journey that we all undertook last night, together. Made better by the fact we were sharing it. But different for us all.
Just inches between our sleeping mats, our journeys overlapping, our energies spilling over and back inevitably. Live music playing as people weep and people laugh and people purge. The purge is noisy by nature, the brew it brings up is far more toxic than the one you drink, it calls a shout as it comes, hard to resist, part triumph part disgust as it surges up the spine into the bucket. Momentarily unpleasant, but just … part of the weird process. All these brave humans looking for a shift, hoping to go deeper, trying to turn corners, comprehend griefs, settle into themselves. I was proud to momentarily be in that strange and sparky tribe. This is a thing that makes no sense, but it is a thing of great beauty. And now I’m going to sleep in my own bed. I ate my dinner half way through this, washed it all up, now it’s dreams and a calm tomorrow.
AlBarclay 