The Left Hand Path

To get there, you turn left off the highway, then cross the little bridge over the river. Make another left on the backroad, go a bit further down the Cottonwood flanked lane, then, at the first drive, make another left. 

Left, Left, Left. 

The Left Hand Path... 

That’s the one you take down the little two track driveway, passed the old trailer and the farm equipment, down to the cabin with no electricity and the makeshift stage.  

Witches are everywhere. 

Not all of them wear black. 

Some are in white, others in wool or plaid. A few run around in hand made animal onesies, screen printed with neo-pagan motifs, renderings of nature spirits–the Corvidae and Cervidae, bumble bees and bears. 

Bones are strewn all over this place. 

Ribcages and skulls. 

Tanned hides from dead animals salvaged and skinned from the highway. 
Blue jeans soiled by Earth and bicycle grease getting dirtier. Girls with eyes painted like Blue Herons reminding me of the new wavers I used to see in the dying cities of my youth: 

LA, Detroit, Houston, Texas.

Candles flicker on the stage. 

Wax dribbles off the chandeliers. 

The fire in the pit crackles. 

Bottles clank. 

Chocolate is shared. 

Frog song mixing with human voices, 
The rhythm of a suitcase drum pounding.

Tin can percussion. 
Herbs and tobacco in the air, billowing up to the tarp above us. 

Notes are being fingered as the rain falls down, 

Swelling the river with this night and a little bit of each one of us, 
Making it even bigger, with every drop. 

Mexico City Meat Wheel

Is that the sound of crickets or millions of cockroaches?

That chirping...inside the walls like internal voices loud enough for the whole building to hear. Or maybe it’s coming up from the alley–a chorus of song to celebrate a vat of spent cooking lard left as an offering? Probably not. No handouts on these streets, but there is the sound of insects mixing with the sound of cars. Metal clanking in defiance of shock absorbers and rubber. Worn out disk breaks screeching like a Grey Whale that has just been harpooned. 

Sirens.

Alarms. 

Buzzers. 

Mexico City night. 

The smell of industry and automobiles. Effluent rising from kitchen pipes. Rats big enough to eat house cats slinking across antique floors painted grey as the sky.

Jet engines roar overhead. Shots ring out. The neighborhood's "Bohemian" hipsters can’t be bothered with looking up. Same goes for the business man–his gaze does not waver from his beautiful target. Never an opportunity missed. More drinks are ordered. The Mescal flows. Poorman’s Tequila now in fashion. Lines are sniffed. 

The aroma of meaninglessness as potent as a cinderblock wall stinking of beer colored urine. A city built upon a drained high-country lake, rimmed by mountains made invisible by pollution, sinking from aquifers that have been emptied, buildings leaning into one another for support, and cracking from an Earth periodically trying to shake them off. Six different locks had to be opened to get into this room. Burroughs, who took refuge here fifty or sixty years earlier, drifts in on the wind, animating the curtain hanging over the bar covered window like a ghost wearing a sheet. 

Kerouac too...

His Mexico City Blues, still as fluid as engine oil spilling onto cobblestone. This is where he first saw “The Meat Wheel” relentlessly turning. Where I saw the meat booths this afternoon–a butcher stuffing ground up bodies into intestines of another slaughtered animal.

Our eyes met for a moment.

He read my horror. 

I saw his ambivalence. 

It was just a quick moment, but one that stays with you like the image of a tire swing suspended over an arroyo that ran dry a long time ago. 
From the rooftop there is cement as far as the eye can see. Yes, in the “better” neighborhoods, there are some trees, sequestering carbon from the brown firmament, but ecologists say there's not enough of them to really make a difference. Still they produce pollen and seeds which are blown all over this city by the high mountain winds. As long as the pavement continues to heave and crack, as long as one little seam of bare Earth is exposed between slabs of cement, life may take hold and flourish again. This is what I try to remember between bouts of coughing. 

The Zocalo

Back in the Zocalo, the city square, I sit with thousands of others taking comfort beneath the green canopy of ancient Laurel trees. There is the sound of clarinets, the flash of pigeon wings, and soapy bubbles blown by the lips of an elderly woman drifting by. Ice cream and Americanos. Hair as black as Corvidae feathers. A marimba band doing a Pink Floyd cover as brown skinned children speak the language of Conquistadors into cell phones. The Zocalo-where indigenous Zapotecs gathered hundreds of years before (what did they call this place then?), and where they still gather today, selling chewing gum and lolly pops to tourists. With a kind of desperate indifference, they work us while they can, using whatever is available with Indio resourcefulness, until we finally go home.

Timeless Current

by stephanie kellett

It was a cold full moon night in February. Outside a little village, at the bridge that crossed the river, they rendezvous. There were ten of them. They brought three canoes. 

She stood on the banks and watched as her people loaded up, piling blankets, food, tobacco, tea, and strong drinks–everything each would need to enhance their experience. In her pocket was the needle and thread she used to weave certain people into her family. 

by stephanie kellett

We shoved off into the current as the Moon ascended from behind the ridge with much laughter, joking, and foolery. But some nights are so sublime, so imbued with the tangible sense of Spirit, even the hooligans fall silent. This was the case on that night, even with our hooligans. The Moon beaming through the fog gave the impression of sky being frozen to mountain, the water dripping from paddles back to river was like tintabulous bells ringing, and our movement in the canoes was as slow as the hydrologic cycle itself–making its great circle from high-country meltwaters, down the small tributaries, into the rivers, back to the ocean, then being lifted like spray from the blowhole of a whale up into the sky again. Trumpeter Swans called out from their sanctuary. I hoped we wouldn’t be too much of a disturbance, wanting to believe they could sense that underneath our layers of polar fleece and plastic, we were as pure as them. 

by stephanie kellett

Our canoe was well behind the other two. We wanted to feel it a little more, linger as long as we could in that timeless current, that same river that had been flowing from times more enchanted all the way into the present–we being the Weaver, the Painter, and the Writer. I imagined what it was like before the “settlers” arrived: the unmechanized sonic richness, the wisdom contained within the cells of uncut forests, and the Sinixt camps and villages established to venerate and feed from power spots along the way. So much has been lost since those days. Both the old growth and Salmon are gone, Grizzlies in the bottom lands are almost non-existent, Wolves are just slightly more substantial than rumors, and, in this valley, only a handful of Sinixt remain. Still, floating down the river that night, though invisible, their energetic presence was as real as salmon signatures written into the isotopes of the oldest trees. You just needed to receive their collective broadcast and feel them.   

by stephanie kellett

by stephanie kellett

On an island covered in snow, we lit a fire within a circle of tall dead-standing Cottonwoods. Without branches, gray, and completely stripped of bark, the trees had given their last breath of oxygen long ago. Never to burst with the color of photosynthetic response again, they stood as massive organic monuments to a wild past. They formed a circle around us, we formed a circle around the fire, and watched as the flames liberated what remained of the downed wood’s essence as smoke and sparks back up to heaven. It felt symbolic–this little group, a tribe of sorts, a pocket of warmth amidst winter’s death gathering together in the February cold to celebrate the full Moon’s ascension. This is how it will be, I thought to myself, when civilization is but a memory and our relationships to each other and to the Earth mean more than anything.

Cake and Tequila

Last night we partied. It wasn't a giant one, no more than twenty of us. We set the Lodge up simply–some lights, two turntables and a mixer, a little sound system, the right people, and the right music: everything from the Velvet Underground, Le Tigre, Crystal Ark, Golden Teacher, to YACHT. It started at eight in the evening and just kept going. There was very little effort on anyone's part beyond creating a platform with all the right elements thrown on top of it, then just letting it grow into whatever it wanted to be. When it finally sprouted, the people screamed like Holy Ghost revivalists and danced like they do at secret warehouse parties in Berlin, Montreal and Brooklyn. From way out here in the woods, far from the nearest city (let alone a maintained highway), up an icy road deep in the mountains we could feel them–all the other people out there eating cake and drinking Tequila, liberating themselves through disco and falling in love with their own autonomy. Sometimes, when we're doing nothing more than allowing ourselves to create and experience collective joy and goodness, it feels like we are doing the most important work we can, that a new paradigm is being born just by the way we live in this one, and that it is possible to dance this mess of a world around. My friend E often says "A good house party is one of the only things we have left. They've taken everything else from us." I laughed the first time I heard him say this, but I think he's on to something. A good party is like a dose of freedom, one that is strong enough to make people believe that life never has to be anything less than wonderful ever again. 

photo: Whisky Rae

Toward Re-Enchantment

The snow finally came. The sun went away. In this valley, Deer walk with the silence of ghosts. A great white blanket covers the meadows before me, offsetting a little of this month's darkness. 

December. 

Just before Solstice.  

We’re all going inward, like Bears to their dens, into the Earth that welcomes us back to her cradle. Within the Mountain’s belly, enveloped in black, we experience a little death, in order to be born again.

These days, within my tribe–a disparate band unrelated by blood (yet, still, we are family), tears fall for what we know we are but wont let ourselves fully own or become. Our effulgent selves–such Holy sweetness, painters of new paradigms and the Weavers whose blankets allow lambs and lions to lie down together. Within our DNA remain lingering memories from a Golden Age... what life was like and could be again once our beliefs engage in the practice of gracefully stepping back over.

stephanie kellett

During peak moments, in our ceremonies and rituals, we see each other and find love for ourselves. Our bodies, in circle, become like a courtyard through which we venerate the Cosmos and Wild Nature. In that space, there is no fear, no doubt, no judgement or self criticism, but just a willingness to let go and surrender, to dance with naked pleasure to rose petal music in front of open windows. In there we're vulnerable together. We voice our intentions and make public wishes, hoping that despite all the struggle and effort, the setbacks and shortcomings, our insecurities and failures, we'll still be able to achieve them. And in time, maybe we will–every single thing on the list, our dreams coming true when our arms open to receive what we ask for.

This is what we glimpse when the curtain is lifted–even if only for a moment–the experience of what life can be like when love is allowed to kiss away the vitriol and we help each other back to a place of enchantment.

Purifying Flames

With every particle of dust I gathered, paradoxically, I seemed to shed another layer of my past. There was a funny little interaction with Nikko, the Bliss Blend coffee man before I left. When I told him I was going to the Burn, he said I would be a new man when I came back. “So new,” he said, “two weeks from now, I won’t even recognize you.” He was being sarcastic.

I played it off. I’d been to Burning Man before. Even though Black Rock City had always been fun and sometimes it was even mind blowing, it had never been life changing. By Sunday night, waiting for the  Temple's ignition, I thought about my conversation with Nikko. I laughed at myself because he had called it. Sitting before the biggest Temple ever constructed on the playa, I thought about my own life and how, like the Temple itself, it stood as a monument to the most unlikely actualized dreams.

A friend who builds million dollar timber frame mansions told me his work was not only emblematic of his craftsmanship and skill, but it was also representative of his identity. It was the platform from which he gave his announcements, made his proclamations, and in a way, his homes conveyed some of his history. I felt the same way about the Temple of my own life. And yet it had become irrelevant to the one I was living right now–a life I fully needed to embrace, if I was really going to be alive in the present.

foto: Caleb Morton

When the Temple went up in flames, I heard no screams. There was no sound at all except the one made by the fire’s tongue lapping the girders and support beams. I stared transfixed as the conflagration turned the night from black to orange. Sparks went up into the sky. They were like tens of thousands of prayers–all the ones written upon the Temple’s walls, all the handwritten poems and love notes, the bits of animal fur collected from primeval forests, saved locks of hair, and other sacred objects too personal in their significance to describe–all of it now flying toward heaven as red hot burning embers. When the towers started to fall, I wept like a man who had to let go of a loved one that he had held onto for so long–and in fact I was…letting go of an entire way of being that I had loved.

The heat was more than what many of us expected. When the Temple’s fire began to feel like an Indian sunburn on their cheeks, dozens backed away. I felt it too. I wondered if I would get burned, but I wasn’t going to retreat. Bring it on–I thought to myself. Let me feel the sting; let my whiskers singe and curl; let my nostrils fill with the characteristic stink; let me know this fire directly in the flesh, for it had already burned so much, emotionally.

I remained there on the dry alkaline lake-bed, my legs hurting from sitting, my knees stiff from being bent for so long. My eyes were glassier than those that have been looking out at the world from a week’s worth of perception altered by LSD. The Temple became nothing more than a few giant piles emanating so much heat I had to take off my hat and leather coat. Deep in the center of where the Temple’s courtyard once was, I saw two figures moving behind a curtain of undulating heat waves. I put my index fingers to my eyes, wiped the tears then refocused. A pair of lovers came into view amidst the destruction, walking barefoot around the piles of burnt and glowing rubble. They were naked, smiling at one another, and they were holding hands.