WE ARE

Sway Coffee Shop, An inter-dimensional portal, in South Bend, IN

I thank the Hipster Gods that South Bend has gotten its coffee shop act together. A good coffee acts as inter-dimensional crossroads, and I need to exist in a transitional space right now. I keep joking that my last 2 weeks in Ireland were fully feral, but I’m not really kidding. My molecules happily flung out into the vast, thin, primal, open spaces of Ireland and now I feel like Captain Kirk, beamed back up, suddenly questioning if all of me will make it back to the Starship Enterprise. I can sense that pieces of me are resisting the reassembly: some are in the ether, some in memory, some are in Ireland, and the ones that are actually in my body are quite confused as to what time it actually is.

I need to call myself back, and so I put on Jon Batiste’s album, WE ARE.

As if on cue, my phone alerts me to a message from Donegal.

It is a text from my friend Níal. “How is it being home?” The music has opened the portal, and Níal picked up my signal. His message creates a thin fiber through time and space along which some of the missing parts of me can return.

In my ear John Batiste is singing to me: “All I wanna do is cry, cry, cry”

Jon is my witness.

*

Listening to WE ARE on this trip began as a rebellion. Trapped with 2 toxic people on a road trip to Ghaoth Dobhair, I hit a breaking point and used the music as a sonic wall to cover up the constant complaining, abuse, and toxicity coming from the front seat. The man had clearly become bored simply abusing the woman, and had started lobbing bait into the backseat at me. It was too much to listen to her abuse her, but I could feel my resources and strength starting to weaken as the muck was flung at me. I was not going to be able to tolerate much more, and was very close to taking the bait that would drag me into a battle of wits and internal strength. I find myself now simply sad for people who want to spend their time in this way. They must really hate themselves.

I put in my headphones and turned up the volume to take up all the space. I felt like a teenager throwing a tantrum, the equivalent of sticking my fingers in my ears and scream-singing LA LA LA. Politeness and good road trip etiquette be damned! I did not want to be part of the toxicity. It was dark, and vampiric.

I sat in the music, finally alone. But then I became aware of Jon with me.

“We're never alone, no, no”

I almost looked around because it seemed so….direct. I became aware that the music was creating a shield of witness around me. I had slipped into a protected space. The topography of the road, the beauty of the landscape, the expanse of the present was suddenly visible without distraction. I was like Glinda the Good Witch floating in a protected bubble. The rhythms and melodies of the music interacted with the textures of the landscape and the rise and fall of the car in motion.

“Joy/ She won't let it go /Oh no
Joy/ That she doesn't know/ What she doesn't know”

I was still in the car, but in an in-between space adjacent to the toxicity, and at the crossroads of the present and the eternal. The resonance created by the music created a sympathetic vibration in my body, my soul, and the landscape. The whole was now greater than the sum of it’s parts, and the joy exponential. The resonance created perceptible light, threads of creation between each molecule involved through time and space. Jon in the recording studio, the landscape, me. Everything that had transpired to create this moment vibrating together. Each point of initiation vibrating like a small sun, full of possibility, potential, and the infinite. My headphones were smaller than mustard seeds (well, maybe a little bigger, but you get my point). There was only presence and creativity, and light and love. Joy. Abundance. Possibility.

“When I move my body just like this I don’t know why but it feels like freeeeeeeeeeedom…”

The music was now giving instructions. Encoded in his personal account of his own human experience was a reminder for all of us how we return to ourselves. Freedom. Joy. Express yourself. Allow. Feel. Activate. Bring the freedom, the joy forth.

“Now it’s your time/you can shine (it’s alright)/ if you do, I’ma do too”

I was still sitting in the car, but now I was in a completely different dimension. I was in the car, but in the 4th dimension, in between the fabric of the matrix. The toxicity could no longer touch me because I was made of light.