Community Ritual: what is found there

The United States is really wonderful in many ways. But much of that wonder is based in practices that have also gutted our sense of community, our system of ethics and values. I'm not complaining, I'm saddened. From the moment someone seized upon more/better/faster as the mechanism behind success (which was how to compete in a capitalist system), we began to lose touch with one another. We stopped gathering at the water holes, coming together in seasonal festivals; we stopped negotiating difference, and lost the ability to accept, adapt to and understand each other. I've got my own washing machine now, so I really don't care what you wear or say, how you act or what you believe in. I can ignore you. We began to think in terms of populations, not individuals, which is ironic, considering we spent most of our energy celebrating individuality. But only within ourselves our our loved ones.

Our needs, our challenges, our deprivation even, our solutions for those pre-industrial/pre-rampant-capitalist issues made us work together. Similar to received forms in poetry, sometimes stricture can be beneficial to expression. Sometimes.

And there lies another problem: we love pithy phrases and simply stated truths to distraction. We don't want to think things work only sometimes, we want things to work all the time, and preferably in black & white. Our capacity for the unknown or paradoxical or complex has withered. And with it, our capacity for play and intimacy and joy. The comfort and complacence we sought in the last century only exacerbated the trend towards separation. I've got my own washing machine now, so I don't have to deal with things and people who don't fit easily into my world view. I am protected from them.

And yes, we were still new (as a nation) and all about innovation and growth, and our land was big enough to accommodate that..., till our brilliance spun out of control. Our inventions, without a common sense of ethics--personal accountability being an important one--began to have startling, disturbing results. We could discount entire populations as not worthy of our concern and care. We began to use the differences we could no longer bridge as a way of passing sentence. Everyone should have their own washing machine. People who use coin laundries are less than I am, and possibly dangerous. They should be removed to a place where I don't have to see them and they can't harm me or mine.

We have become an extremely hypocritical nation: lauding diversity, but doing everything we can to avoid encountering it face to face, unless under controlled circumstances. Diversity plus separation is not a good combination; it's a good way to instill fear. And our market-driven society is more than willing to fuel that fear and sell new product. I need special detergent to ensure that my washing machine is keeping me and mine safe from new, resistant forms of bacteria. Better yet, there's this new machine with a sterilizing cycle....

I'll stop describing why we're rather a mess, and talk about the subject: Community Ritual. This idea has been growing in my mind for a few years. It's why I have founded all the groups I've founded, and why I practically give away time in our building to groups like tai chi and ecstatic dance. It's why I've love certain aspects of Japanese culture, which have helped me identify analogous features in my own cultures (U.S., Korean, Norwegian), and inspired me to attend/participate in/create vehicles for local community ritual.

For 17 years I have attended Yaqui (Yoeme) Easter Ceremonies, not fully knowing why I was so drawn to them. It's not like I'm Yaqui or Catholic (or a practicing Christian, for that matter). It's not like I belong to that community or feel in any way that I participate in it except as an outsider and observer. I speculated that being raised with Koreans, and coming from the east coast, where the populations are more diverse, I just liked hanging out around a bunch of dark-haired people for a time. That was my somewhat snide, self-deprecating explanation. In the last few years, I've come to understand that what draws me is how the community members not only create the ritual, but become wholly absorbed into it themselves. The participants enter the zone, features of their daily life and their own sense of self fade into the tapestry of the event, and the values and ethics and belief that bind the community together come forward boldly, living and breathing, full of life and color. I am drawn to that kind of full-being engagement, that dissolution of ego, that communal purpose. It's why I love taiko.

I acknowledge these are sacred times/spaces, and I wouldn't want that kind of engagement all the time..., as if anyone could survive such a thing. By their very nature as sacred, the ceremonies are transitory, a time-out-of-time from which you must return to the mundane. 

I am content to attend the Yaqui Easter, and watch. It's not my community, not my religion, not my ritual. Instead I focus on arts community happenings, and creating opportunities for communion there.  And events that are open to participation by non-community members, such as the Waila Fest and obon festivals. Lately, more and more, I feel the All Souls Procession is where I want to put great energy, and the creation of seasonal celebration/ceremonies led by arts groups, because what ritual does not have its song and dance and story?

Even without the spiritual aspect, community events serve us. When people encounter each other in a safe environment, they will (because we are social creatures) interact, learn about each other, discover differences and negotiate those differences in order to maintain the safe social setting. In that, they increase tolerance, acceptance and understanding. It's hard to hate a person if you're standing in the snow cone line with them. They might believe in things you find distasteful or ridiculous, they might have practices that turn your stomach, but in the setting of community gathering and ritual, you have more in common in that moment than you have to feel conflict over. You both found this particular event meaningful enough to have taken the time and effort to come, you both like snow cones (or have loved ones who love snow cones and you're buying them one) and you are both willing to forego whatever else is happening to stand in line and wait, money in hand. A hundred decisions brought you together, you have that much in common, and so, that much you can trust about each other.

Gently revealed, we can accept most things about each other as individuals. Most of us are not naturally inclined to want to harm others. The vast majority of us wish each other well (in principle at least), are non-violent and prefer harmony to discord. You'd think that would be a recipe for understanding, but it's not. Mainly, I think, because we so avoid discord that we end up not being particularly honest. And that's just another kind of separation.

But if you remove most kinds of interaction, and focus on a central purpose or action, discord becomes a moot point. The possibility of conflict decreases astronomically if people stop talking and start dancing. it decreases even more if everyone is doing the same dance, allowing the myth of individuality to take back seat. If the goal is to all do it the same way, what's there to fight about? As with received forms in poetry, as we adapt our unique personal expression into a general, accepted format, we are no longer burdened with having to distinguish ourselves. Our egos fade away and we are simply moving. Ironically, we often learn an incredible amount about ourselves in those moments, just as otherwise inexpressible ideas may begin to emerge from between the regimented lines of a villanelle or sonnet. But what we learn are not the kinds of things that we'd get annoyed at each other for. We learn about common, human traits; we learn compassion.

So, this is my focus now. As much as I'll work to be a better person, always, and a better taiko player; to run the group more successfully, to reduce hardship and make meaning, I want to be part of creating sacred spaces/times for people to commune without agendas and egos, where the goal is so simple anyone can attain it. That's what things like obon, All Souls Procession, the Asian Pacific Heritage Festival are to me. And Rhythm Industry, the space where the architects of these moments can thrive.

I was thinking about need vs, service, and how, for someone like me, they are more like points on a gradient. It's the Mars in Leo in the House of Servants thing. And I don't see much difference between the giver and receiver. But this is possibly another blog entry.

Camera Mountain Transmission
Really, all work and no play is a very dangerous trap; very easy to fall into when work is play. So October and most of November have slipped by in a fever of doing and being and making, with little time for, well, just sitting with my mouth slack and my eyes slightly closed, lidded. It may not sound like the most attractive way to be, but, frankly, at this point, I could us a few vegetable-like moments.

Yesterday, though, Rome and Bugsy I drove up Mt. Lemmon and hiked Marshall's Gulch to the Aspen Loop Trail. It wasn't a long hike, but a good one. Good ups and downs, a diversity of scapes: rocky creeks beds and rooted inclines, pine trees, ferns, aspen saplings regrowing after the fires, a deep bed of browning needles. We saw a coatamundi crossing the road just before Palisades Ranger Station, and I nearly bought a baseball cap with Smokey the Bear's face embroidered on it, and the words "Only You."

It felt rejuvenating, yet today I was headachy and tired, like a mild case of what I felt when I tore the ligaments in my right arm, except all over the top half of my body. And we discovered that my camera was left behind, which was a weirdly unhappy event. I had given it up for dead a month ago, then it suddenly started working again... just long enough for me to get really fond of having a camera... and now it's gone. I just don't know how I'm supposed to feel since I've slapped myself back and forth about how much I liked it, how great a little camera it was, how it's just a THING, how it must be meant to be that I don't have this camera (since it obviously doesn't like being with me), how I can easily find another on ebay, but how we are broke, and who really needs a digital camera, and it's just all a lesson in letting go.... I think Ron was right in Harry Potter: how can anyone possibly feel so many things at one time? And really, it so doesn't matter.

It's just annoying. I'm annoyed easily these days, because I'm stressed.

I have better thoughts... while I'm driving or showering, or sitting waiting for the light to change... but I seem to forget them before I get to a keyboard. Important thoughts about art and creativity, and life and love and integrity and hope and truth and justice and so on. I get here, and all I can remember is the dang camera.

After classes and practice today, I drove by myself back up the mountain. I had called the Community Ctr. and they had not had a camera turned in, so I decided to re-hike the trail, because I was pretty sure I had clipped it to my pocket after taking Rome's and Busgy's picture at that big, pudding shaped rock, and figured it must have fallen off and was lying on the trail somewhere after that point.

Yeah, a little crazy. To make it more interesting, I played with the cruise control on the way up, trying to see if I could control my speed entirely without using my feet, and what affect it would have on my gas mileage. Similarly, I tried coasting down in 3rd, and not using my brake at all, but that was not quite as successful and experiment.

I got up to Summerhaven again and it was quiet and cold. A few people were out, stragglers looking for a last good picture or a cup of coffee. I called Rome to let her know I was there, and then checked the message I'd recieved on the way up. It had gone directly to voicement and not rung, since it seems there is only enough reception to make and recieve calls in Summerhaven proper. The Community Ctr had called. They had had a camera turned in, but when I turned around and drove up from the Marshall's Gulch trailhead back into the town, the center was closed. I hung around a little, asked some folks how to reach the people who worked there (for, surely, they must live up there). No one could help me. I gazed sadly in the darkened glass of the center's lobby, thinking "my camera must be right there, in one of those drawers."

Very sad. I toyed with the idea of a $5.50 bowl of chili, but just headed back down the mountain, attempting, as I mentioned to coast in 3rd and brake as little as possible. I began really laying out the new song, for autumn. But I stopped at Windy Point to see the sunset, since my timing was unexpectedly perfect for that. I took a bad photo of it on my phone. Maybe just for the irony.

... sitting here, re-established sedentary position in the leather glider from my parents, at the end of a long walk with m'gal and the dog, discussing transgender issues (which, really neither of us is very well suited to talk about from a deeply informed place). We hit an impasse; there is defensiveness and frustration, and feeling unheard—and whoa, there I go, kinda tappin' out because I have an Pavlovian aversion to impasses—and I look up and finally, after all these years, see the design on her kitchen noren. I know I've walked through that split curtain a thousand times. I've seen the white, batik details, peripheral, brushing by my hand or a plate as I make my way through them. I've assumed the pattern is like the cranes on the noren going into my bedroom.

Tonight, from ten feet away, I finally look at it. It's so completely different than I... thought, believed, perceived... it was.

It is an almost abstract and somewhat random swirl of leaf and floral shapes, or snowflakes and frozen leaves in a pond....
I am astounded at the order and the universal, beloved, natural, smallness of the vision.

How could I have not seen the design for the details?

Go on... tell me about my life.

Ah, look: I found my blog after a year of inactivity! Not that I've been inactive. The job has been quite engaging, as has taiko. I just don't read or write anymore.

I went to see Cookin' tonight, kind of a heritage experience. Crazy Korean cutlery percussion. It was inspiring, the theater and the energy and the skill. It was kind of carbs on some level, but with more substance somehow.

Ah, so the big news is the Honda Passport is no more. Being rear-ended by 2 other SUVs took it's toll, if not so much on me, on the car at least. Today declared a total loss, market value to be assessed. Karen to shop for a minivan with the greatest taiko-toting capacity available. A sudden realization, after all these years, that Consumer Reports is really a great resource.

Don't seem to have much profundity in me tonight. Just happy to have found the blog and the user name and the password. And adding to my blog will, no doubt, inspire Rome to do likewise. And she's in New Zealand, which should be more interesting than anything I can write from my playroom.

I would like to say that life has been a challenge... no no, I would LIKE to say life has been smooth sailing. I must say, however, that I've been so busy I've lost touch. It's not like I don't notice things, such as the ungodly beautiful quilts in the Wilde Playhouse, or the way Beppie the Clown lady sculpts balloons into frighteningly accurate models of the Little Mermaid and Spider Man and such, it's just that my thrill seems a bit self-indulgent, ego-centric.... It's not like I'm sharing or communicating these epiphanies to anyone.

I'm not writing, I'm hardly having conversations in which I play myself. I have lots of conversations in which I play the person I represent. But that's somewhat fulfulling. I am at the sparking point of my own trajectory, I am able to live what I care about in many ways.

Tomorrow will be the first procession of the Yaqui Lenten Celebrations. I am going into the spring dreamtime. On Easter I will write a poem, as tradition dictates, and this year's will be titled, "The Year of Nameless Hills."

So, what I was thinking... I mean these are the questions we keep asking ourselves, right? In the middle of the night when we really need those beauty hours:

1) What am I doing that I love?
2) What am I NOT doing that I would love to do?

Question number one is easy, usually. I'm a hedonist, albeit a responsible one, after all. I follow my nose, etc.

Question number two beckons in weaker moments. Although I don't feel particularly weak at the moment.... I've figure out the parameters later.

What I know is I feel compelled to fly to Korea and trim the grass on my grandparents grave, or I will not be happy. I feel I need to do this relatively soon.

And I know that I need to enact the (intellectual) decision I made years ago that at least one day a month be given over completely to gratitude. It's such a chore to bring the intellect into the body, it takes such a long time.

I'm thinking Fridays. As in: every Friday I shut the door to my office and spend the entire 8 hours writing thank you notes to people. People who helped me that day, that week, that month, or at any unspecified time in my life. Just touching bases. Touching.

I wonder how certain of my co-workers would take it? That I shut my door on Friday morning and spend the day writing notes and emails and cards and making grateful phone calls... not really doing any "business" at all. It seems like a good, pro-active idea: spending one day a week thanking everyone who has helped you--one that might increase the level of happiness...

... and thus suspect. Hey, how much insurance are YOU paying for? We're a rather fear-based society, as much as that chaps my hinds.

I've been obsessed lately at how many of us there are doing so much--in ever increasing numbers and amounts--and feeling so little reward for all that effort. How, the more of us there are in America, the busier and unhappier we seem to be.

Seems we brilliants could have realized a four-day work week, decent health care, and secure futures for the elderly by this point, doesn't it? With such big brains and hearts as we have. Are we so far behind the Norwegians?!

Maybe devoting one day a week to the pure and simple practices of gratitude would help. Not dressing up and going to church to thank the white guy with a beard (followed up with poker and multitudinous rum & Cokes in the basement), but rather, an entire day of deeply meditative, deeply apprehended, pain-stakingly overt acts of gratitude: i.e., one handwritten letter to my 12th grade English teacher for introducing my 17 year-old self to existential angst (so that I could find a cure) and complimenting her on her recently ghost-written biography of the Soviet spy; one quickie note wiht smilie to the guy who saved me a brochure about the Seven Cities of Cibola mural at Wells Fargo Bank; an email to the lady who wrote to thank us for making sure the world is safe for art; one of my great-aunt's notecards to thank Tiffany, Megan and Robin for being such great hosts and enclosing a small donation to Sacramento Taiko-dan; one phone call to the research librarian who referred an old lady who needed help finding info about a Hank Bos oil she bought at a yard sale; a moment to consider ordering a singing telegram for the man who repaired our gutted computer network, an instant deciding not to order the telegram but rather to leave flowers on his doorstep; a postcard to an old college buddy who bothered to send me her new phone number....

And one day to sort through the hundreds of emails I get so that I could find the three or four that tell me my life is worth something: "I decided to splurge and buy my husband and myself the expensive tickets to your fundraiser."

I've fantasized that one day I would have the discipline to dedicate one day a month to this sort of activity... and yet have never managed to make it so.

I remain an optimistic.

So now there's this sense of Blog-bligation, because if you tell someone you have a blog and don't write something new for over a week, they notice. Not that I'm complaining, I love a readership.

My friend Joan is compiling dreams, or interviews... where the interviewees talk about their dreams, for her new radio/sound art project called "The Taboo Box." She says it can be about "anything you deem not quite right: sex, of course, is a big subject; but there's also taboo violence, words spoken, things seen or overheard, places you're not supposed to be in, people you're not supposed to be looking at, etc." I volunteered to be part of this, you know me: can't keep my hand down. But I'm wondering if I should write the stuff down first, or just let her turn the recorder on and try to remember.... There's the recurring dream in which I'm a spectator at some huge event, there are dreams towns and dream landscapes I keep returning to... but I'm not sure much of what I dream feels taboo. I'll pay more attention now.

I don't know. Guess you'll hear more about that later. Here's a list of things that jazz up my days lately: the possibility of taiko at the Tucson marathon; local arts activism; a particular redhead; the idea of rain, of cold, and large bodies of water; taiko on the UA mall, taiko at the Botanical Gardens, the possibility of taiko compositions, taiko taiko taiko, good beer, the forthcoming Two Towers DVD. I'm rather simple these days.

The question I'm plagued with lately is: why are there more and more of us, but we keep having to work harder and longer? It seem illogical and offends my sense of social justice.