Hacking At The Roots

(Alterati intro feature on Gaian Mind.)

I’ve come back out of the woods, and I’m not entirely sure I’m happy about it. Once again I’ve replaced cathode rays for sunlight, and instant messages and teleconferences for conversations. Plugged into The Internets I’m in a thousand places at once, but not here. Never here.

I went to the Gaian Mind Summer Festival for a variety of reasons: for the experience, of course, to bring back some media from Daniel Pinchbeck‘s discussion session, to rub shoulders with an assortment of talented artists, scientists, and complete lunatics, to hear an assortment of trance music, from intricately layered, ethnic-tinged chill out to mind-shredding full on. There were yoga, drumming, and partner massage workshops, (which I missed by five minutes, damn!), sustainable community discussions… in other words, a hell of a lot more than anyone could probably fit into four nights and three days. Well, I got what I came for, but I also got something else. What exactly?

I’m not sure I’m any longer qualified to say.

I’m sorting through the media I gathered during those four long days, days that blended together into a single long experience that was only briefly chopped apart by dreamless sleep. It reminds me of the scene in Gilliam’s movie adaptation of Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas: Hunter S. Thompson (played by Depp) is skulking about an apartment that looks like a 747 took a pit-stop in it at 500 miles per hour, with a snorkel and a rubber lizard tail strapped to his back wondering what the fuck just happened…

Yeah, it’s a lot like that. I have 2 gigs of video, nearly three hours of audio captured wandering through the woods at night, making my way entirely on sound and black light casting patterns through the trees, and I realize all I can do is see what you make of it, and provide what insight I may have gathered from this beautifully tangled mess that happens when ideas, people, and neurotransmitters collide.

The final day and night of the event, which for me ran about thirty hours, peaked in the early hours of the morning, when the sky was just starting to glow electric blue. I had been drumming for countless hours, surrounded by fellow drummers, playing to incite the frenzy of the dancers stomping in the sandpit around the fire. The setup I was playing included a large goat-skin bass drum and various toms and woodblocks, tethered to a mobile cart. They are played with wooden mallets, essentially like normal drum sticks, supposing you’re ten feet tall. (Offered for us to play on by  Earth Rhythm drums. My own dumbek and djembe were temporarily passed on to the circle for others to use.)

I was pushed far beyond exhaustion. My hands were slick with blood and the skin was sloughing off like a snakes, I was pouring sweat – and I felt healed. Maybe it was all in my head, but it felt like the circle there actually needed me to keep going. Whenever I would stop, or drop my energy, the other drummers and the dancers would all respond. In the grand scheme of things I’m a mediocre drummer,
so this wasn’t the result of any blinding skill on my part. We were simply all tied into each other energetically and a pretty profound way, and for whatever reason, it felt like I had been appointed as the leader
of the circle for that short period of time. Maybe I’ll never see any of those strangers again, maybe if we met on the street somewhere in a couple years we wouldn’t even recognize each other, but
for that night, we were family, and we had come home.

It’s a rare occasion where you really test your boundaries and see just how far you can go. Or where you find the drive and energy inside yourself to become the backbone of something and help nurture a vibe that goes far beyond your petty concerns, your feelings of superiority or inadequacy. I did just that, along with I’m sure many hundreds of the people who took that trip. Now, a week later, my shredded hands are still in the process of healing. On some level I almost hope it leaves a scar, a small reminder of that magical night.

In itself, on the surface, there’s nothing incredibly unordinary about that evening, or any of the other evenings I spent at the Gaian Mind Summer Festival. We mingled, we talked, we danced, we drummed, many of us got naked and I’m sure quite a few of us got laid. You can spend a hundred nights idly drumming around a campfire or dancing to psytrance, and get nothing of lasting value out of it. Maybe while you’re dancing you’re thinking about what other people might think you look like, oh that girl over there is hot, damn my leg hurts. Thinking and stuck on the surface level. But a single night where you open yourself up and take the risk to see what you’re made of can change the playing field. Granted, it won’t last forever if you allow that one peak experience to become a glorified memory, and if you don’t replace it again and again with new ones.

Like Burning Man, indeed like any event that tries to provide the opportunity for transformation, you get out of it what you put in. If you came to the Gaian Mind Summer Festival for a blowout party, you’re going to get it. If you came to chill out in the woods, and talk to random lunatics as they rove through your ever-shrinking campsite, chances are you will get that as well. But if you came with a completely open mind and the drive to push your boundaries, you might just come back slightly changed. Despite my cynicism, despite my “hard head” and the detached anthropological attitude that I seem to carry with me everywhere, I know I did. So I see no reason why anyone else couldn’t as well.

Look for the video from this event in a future episode of the G-spot, including Daniel Pinchbeck’s Daemonic Discourses and the Q&A that followed. For now, here’s a mashup of the audio I captured. I provide it straight, no chaser. I make no promises as to its coherence, or whether you’ll be able to walk straight afterwards…

(Music provided by 233project, various live drummers at the event, and from DJ Meghan‘s mix: Yab-Yum, Atriohm, and Parus.)

Mashup from Gaian Mind Summer Fest [ 1:01:59 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download