my yin and i visited Asheville this weekend, ostensibly to see the Cowboy Junkies, but ultimately partaking in all manners of mischief that accompany the annual Bele Chere festival. since all the streets were shut down, we spent three days and two lovely nights roaming downtown by foot and watching (as my word choice implies) Wheel of Fortune.
but this is beside the point.
the point is that there are innumerable things to be said about the experience, some things better left unsaid, and one which warrants immediate confession. last night i went to my first ever drum Circle, a fact that makes it all the more difficult to convincingly deny the increasingly frequent accusations regarding my relationship to the (sub)species of humans known as hippies.
in spite of this fact, i still ardently deny my connection to this dangerous, smelly, unshaven subculture. (as an aside, have you seen my yin's legs lately?) i will, however, make public my observations regarding last night's activity and allow the reader to draw her own conclusion:
hippiedom, drum Circles and denial
at the center of the Circle was the one who could move, the Priestess, a short-haired girl with a black hat and ample stomach. she undulates with the rhythm and i attempt to watch from the corner of my eye but it doesn't work. i find my gaze drawn to her again and again. she dances with her belly out, making thin ugly again as it was in the beginning, during the first days of famine when the belly was not a source of shame but of pride – a symbol of abundance, prosperity and healthy offspring.
her face, still, eludes me.
the Priestess sometimes dances for the men, sometimes for the women, but always for herself. here, as in the "real" world, women are the bearers of the look while the men sit like churchgoers and stare and beat their drums. the women stand above them like christ on the Cross. i do not know which world, ours or that of the Circle, mimics the other.
somewhere on the outskirts a heavy-set woman plays her bell and watches over the safety of the crowd like some mythical African Godmother.
there is a young girl, perhaps 14, just learning to move. the sex instinct is just beginning to rise in the Apprentice, slightly ahead of her young breasts, and it spasms to the surface at times, finding root in her hips, muladhara chakra, seeping into the earth and guaranteeing more lust and sweat and sticky spasms that insure the wheel of karma keeps turning.
she is under the unspoken tutelage of the short-haired Priestess, whose stomach reminds me of former lovers.
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there is a 90 year old Chinese Grandmother sitting near the center, barely moving, tapping her drum inaudibly amidst the din of revelers. her 60 year old obedient son brings her water from time to time, and his very presence implies somehow that she should not be in this place.
she pays him no mind.
she was playing in the days before he was born, before the Great Leap and the Nanking Rape and the thirty years that teetered between a generation's definition and decimation. she has seen it all before; hers was the echo ringing in the ears of the soldiers during that Long March, promising a better day.
the Shaman leading the Circle is an ageless dreadlocked black man wearing a straw hat and Confederate t-shirt with four black soldiers on it. he is wild-eyed and holds a djembe between his legs, beating it like a phallus as he invokes both the Circle and the crowd, leads them through trough the changes as they ripple out of his soul and travel from one side of the street to the other.
i am outside of it all, taking notes, my body moving without me. the actual tribe collides with the imagined tribe, the force of instinct crashing into the fetish and dream of an unalienated body. the Body Universal pulsates thoughtlessly in the shadow of the bank building towering twenty stories above us, and the full moon rises in the east.
i see them all: the Grandmother impassive, ancient and wise; the Apprentice beginning her initiation; the Godmother who defies description; and the Priestess offering up her body not just to the Circle but to the voyeurs, the stiff-legged passers-by who bought two dollar tacos from a street vendor and drank cheap beer from plastic cups, rueing the fact that church came early in the morning.
most of all i see their Shaman. i see him seeing me, smiling at the site of my sight and challenging me with his gaze. he saw more in a glance than i have in 33 years, and i wonder if he is always so brave.
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