No SHIFT on 5-19-07; Martín Prechtel instead!
This Saturday, instead of SHIFTing at Irving Park, you’ll find me at Martín Prechtel‘s Portland workshop.
His description of the experience:
Making the Sound of the Jeweled Toad
What do you do after discovering that your Heart is actually a shiny jeweled Toad trying to dig her way out of the deep hibernating ground of who your think you are? A toad whose wild noise can startle the world into life again, back from this frowning, know-it-all, self-destructive drift toward a synthetic, machine-dependent, free-fall existence in the bottomless abyss of cynicism’s insatiable hunger. What happens when each of us in our own way making our indigenous sounds together finds out that being human does not mean what we have been taught, but that we on the other hand could become a grove of never-before-seen trees whose flowers of deep and unstoppable life-giving sounds make symphonies of natural jazz that cause the real world to sing again, dream again, swim again, jump-up-doing-mysterious-things again, armed only with the unarmed courage that comes from a vision of our diverse collective natural beauty: the sounds of each of our hearts in love with life, a sound of such an irresistible character as to cause the endangered spiritual DNA of all things to jump back out of their hiding place into their normal ecstatic, semi-random exuberant enormity whose staggered flowering, fruiting, reseeding and scattering is the face of the Holy in Nature?
Please come, help me, Martín Prechtel, not only to sing, but to try to ritually reseed in the ground of grief’s remembrance, the possibility of a time of hope beyond our own with the flowering of our hands and voices, driven by the magnificent spiritual pump of our dreaming hearts.
All Blessings- Martín Prechtel
May 19th, 2007 at 1:03 pm
Martín is the best.
I have one minor bone of contention to toss into the mix of all those things he said the other night. He spoke so warmly of the importance of diversity, then Martín insulted the lady cannibas – saying that the plant impeded conciousness and advising the audience to stay away.
What of the Sikhs? The Hashishians? What of all the various artists and all the beautiful things they’ve created while lifted by the warm embrace of “dope”? Personally I feel, at times, lost and dejected without it’s presence in my bloodstream, as if I have some sort of compact with the plant and it provides the fuel for my ‘insparkedness’.
Is Cannibas Sativa any less a shard of the divine than Corn?
Like I said, a minor point. Not really worth vocalizing.
&, He’s the best.
May 23rd, 2007 at 10:17 pm
Well. I understand his point though, which I think stemmed more from a concern for the abuse of any consciousness-affecting plant medicine, rather than mary jane in particular.
He of course comes from a culture where they consumed gallons of “canyon water” moonshine in their village rituals, but coming here has rendered that impossible, because our culture has an insane relationship with alcohol and any other intoxicating plant medicine.
And I agree. I love Martín.
May 24th, 2007 at 2:51 pm
Yeah, “our” culture seems to have an insane relationship to everything, don’t it? In general. Individual exceptions exist.
It seems to me that should the ingestor use and abuse the reefer rather than woo and serenade the reefer they might find themselves caught in an icky and subtle trap.
I’ve seen the stuff turn fizzling halfwits into dribbling nowits, as well as average cats into crazy amazing ninja cats.
July 14th, 2007 at 4:02 pm
Y’know, I chewed (smoking is detrimental to the lungs – something I learned in utero) summa that stuph like a few days go for the first time in like… half a year… and I felt so… um… what the word is?
No more potty for me. I do not have the hashylovin Marley-esque mystique anymore. & all the better to remember you with, my deary.
July 14th, 2007 at 4:11 pm
I used to call it the Yoga Flame, when it was the impetus to ‘jump-up-doing-mysterious-things’ – or sit on the couch and watch cartoons with crumbs sprawled all over my shirt. I don’t know what this has to do with anything. I wanted to reach out and babble at someone.