Mint tea and chocolate
The caravan started with a conversation over mint tea and chocolate in the salon-library-bazaar-book-store-tea-space of an old French farmhouse turned into an ashram.
For four days, a dozen of us in our twenties had been coming face-to-face with the depths and chaos of our humanness, our creativity, our shadows, and our souls, through workshops on writing, drawing, chanting and moving, with meals together, meditation in the morning, and music and poetry throughout. Intense, difficult, uncomfortable — life-affirming.
It was after midnight on the last night, and handful of us remained awake, building dreams.
The central idea: a traveling caravan, where we could live what we love while offering it to the world — playing music, reading poetry, performing theatre, dancing, selling books, cooking, sharing skills and knowledge, drinking tea and eating chocolate.
Create, create, commit
One of the speakers for the seminar, M., had shared with us the instruction her spiritual teacher gave her:
“Create, create, create! Show, show, show!”
Which is what she was doing: painting, writing, traveling, and continuously finding new ways to share what she was creating.
We were all engaging various degrees of creative work, but (at least for me) it was easier to “just create,” without the demand and friction of needing to show my work. Easier to stay hidden and stay comfortable.
As we talked, M. was working in the office next to us, listening. Then she stepped into the room with a question: what were we actually going to do? What concrete steps were we willing to take? Tonight, before we all left and the energy dissipated?
In our ecstatic dream building, visions walked before reality, and our own feet were barely on the ground. If someone had suggested we learn to fly, we would have believed it possible (and maybe it would have been). The energy and excitement had been building through hours of talking and chocolate. We could have left that space high on ideas, laid in our beds too excited to sleep.
Then we’d wake up the next morning and go back to our lives. The dream might still dwell in our minds, but the energy we’d collected would dissipate. It would go elsewhere, feed other projects. The dream would remain a dream, like most do.
So: what were we willing to do, that night, to bring our magnificent ideas down from the sky, to the earth, where we could get a foothold? (A woman sitting with us, an experienced and successful painter, sculptor and artist, joked, “After this, you can go outside and stare at the stars, just to come down a little bit.”)
On scraps of paper, we each wrote a sentence describing our dream project together. The vision was there, defined. The passion was there. But to become a project, not just an idea, it needed clear, physical, committed sustenance — that is, action.
So we decided to get together for a weekend and start creating. Play music, read poetry, perform theatre; cook, eat, talk, meditate, drink tea and break chocolate together. Enshrine time and space — three days, one house — fill it with six individuals with shared intention — and see what would happen. The vision of the caravan, in a house. I would be in France for another month and a half before returning to the United States. We narrowed it down to one weekend and agreed: “I’ll be there.”
Continue reading “Ecstasies and spontaneities of the street show: on the road in France”