Share a story about the furthest you’ve ever traveled from home.
Not physically the furthest away from home. But mentally and spiritually, this night I will remember here took me further away from home than I realized.
Not because the Medicine was particularly strong. I did not even have any exceptionally colorful visions. It was the music. The prayers of this guy they were so damn powerful. And they were the songs I had been listening to on Spotify, not knowing the name of the group or the performers or being able to tell you the name of the language or accent they were sung in. You know Spotify, they tell you nothing about the music you are listening to.
So the whole night I felt like I knew the words he was singing, before he was singing them. It was like a magic carpet ride attached to a Giant Condor soaring over the Andean Mountains into the Amazon Valley.
When the open sharing and play circle started where everybody that wants to play some ‘spiritual medicine prayer’ on whatever instrument they had brought, I was feeling brought down. Crashing into my own neediness, to keep playing. Those songs. Did not want to listen. Not to the lady with the handspan and that guy with his guitar and that chick singing to a sine wave drone that was way too loud and piercing. For my taste.
And I moved even further away from home and broke out of the circle to lie in the back and stretch and get away from it all.
From my own insecurities, my angst, my ambitions, my pettiness and all that pretentious, narcissistic crud I had started to pick at like the crust from an old wound.
When I came back down I was in a room full of happy people wishing each other a beautiful day as they sauntered off into the morning light of a crisp sunny Saturday in the End of April. Somewhere in Brooklyn.
And some of us had some breakfast in a Diner near the Subway and then it was all over.
But I kept working on those songs for the next two or three years, even though I still do not know what the words mean or if I will ever visit the people that sing them in their native tongue.
There is no Rosetta Stone that teaches you how to take a taxi or buy a beer in Que’chua. Forgive me that pun.
Soon, Some of those indigenous languages might have less people speaking them ‘in the field’ than they will have people studying them in Universities.
That might or might not be a good thing. To me it is about something else.
I do not have to know the words to go and rent a room or bargain for a nice necklace or find out where to buy those fancy cigars when I visit the people who sing these songs.
And I know that my way of singing their songs might not be what they want to hear.
But singing them is like leaving the time and place continuum I am in; and traveling to another dimension.
That is the furthest I have been away from home.
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