I am a big screaming hippie
written on July 7, 2000 @ 1:00pm

My brain tends to be highly (HIGHLY) analytical; one of the things I am having to do in my quest to be a happier person is to learn to slow it down, to hold on to thoughts long enough to savour them, enjoy them for a while before starting to make value judgments about them.

Another is learning to enjoy what my brain does when it gets going. Boy oh boy, did it ever get going last night.

We went to see Phish. The parking lot of the Molson Amphitheatre had metamorphosed into what Space Ghost would call a "hippie freak-out love jam." The amphitheatre itself, too, but it had a different feeling. The parking lot was for the nomads with the VW buses (I want a VW bus) and their nylon folding chairs and their dogs and their kind veggie burritos that they make and cook and sell right there so they can have enough money to get to the next show.

Before we went, ZZYZX described music as his religion. I thought about that, hard, as I watched him and the crowd and the music and light show. There is indeed a powerful spiritual element that brings all these travellers together into a society that's as close to what I envision as Utopia that I've ever seen.

Imagine: you're a musician. The music comes through you in mysterious ways, and you share it as much as you can. You find three other musicians, a sound guy, eventually a light guy, who are on exactly the same wavelength you are: they hear the same music you do, even before it happens, and make it with you. People start to notice. Then they start learning your stuff, and singing along. Whatever it is coming through you is so powerful that people start to follow you: the experience you tap into with your music is something that hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of people want to share. It's so peaceful that the wider society's ideas of what commodities are start to fall away. There's greed, sure -- there's always greed when people are involved -- but it doesn't run things. Peace and joy run things. The currencies are different: tokes on joints, food, tickets to see the show, tapes of other shows, T-shirts. Things that make people feel good and remind them of the power of shared experience.

ZZ told me that if we needed an extra ticket we could just stand in the parking lot with a single finger raised, and the extra ticket would arrive. I didn't understand what he meant. But he was right: I saw people pointing at the sky, and inevitably someone -- not a scalper, just someone who wanted to share this show even if he or she had to sell a ticket for $5 -- would be along to help. Everyone was dedicated to making everyone else happy. Ask and ye shall receive.

I thought about everything. Politics (there were some, but they were informed by carefully thought-out ethics), economy, group psychology, theology, sociology, everything. I realized that they are all different and needed perspectives, and insisting that any one of them is the only valid or necessary take on how a society works is misguided at best and, at worst, deeply dangerous. I thought about getting back into my body, feeling the rhythms, feeling my heart race when the music builds, closing my eyes and letting the sound and the lights just wash over me. I thought about how ZZ, with his obsessive timing of each song and his cryptic set list and his wild outfit, has found a tribe where he can be scribe and cleric and missionary.

I thought about my beloved grandmother and how much I miss her. She died two years ago, at 98, and a hundred people came to her funeral. The minister who conducted the service had known her for decades and told about what she had taught him. He talked about her name -- Lucy -- and about how much she loved to dance. "Lucy" means "light", he said. Lucy was a little light who danced.

As Phish played, as the crowd moved around me, I thought about the comfort I took from that ritual. I thought about how meaningful and moving a tribute to her life it was, how it taught me about the importance of ritual in people's lives, how it celebrated her. I understood that everyone around me was celebrating what's really important. And I let the music come through me and I danced.

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