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FALLING

“You expect to be sad in the fall. Part of you dies each year when the leaves fall from the trees and their branches are beare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you know there will always be the spring as you know the river will flow again after it is frozen.”          Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

photo//Ansel Adams

BONNAROO’S SERENDIPITOUS REUNION

Cancer survivor shares his story with a packed Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros crowd in one of Bonnaroo’s most emotive moments

With 13 members dancing onto Bonnaroo’s Which Stage, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros were a vision of bohemian musicians. Having an energy that demands attention, this band is vast and impressive, overflowing with charm and charisma. Spreading contagious vibrance, they offer unrestrained vivacity during live shows.

Opening the set with ‘Man on Fire’ from their latest release, the band took turns shaking tambourines, beating bongos, picking up harmonicas, maracas and various eclectic instruments. Playing crowd favorites like ‘I Don’t Wanna Pray’ and ‘Desert Song,’ singers Jade Castrinos and Alex Ebert spun and danced across Which Stage. Frontman Ebert often abandoned the platform, taking his microphone and instruments into the audience. He sang much of the set mixed in with the crowd, serenading lucky bystanders and culminating constant smiles, screams and professions of love.

The crowd began a communal roar as Ebert stood on the metal barriers, saying “You guys are beautiful. Hold me up. I know you’ve got strength.” He held onto outstretched hands for balance, as people suspended him in the air and he wailed lyrics of ‘Carries On.’

Holding up tambourines, he asked “Who wants to play?” Ebert and Castrinos commenced in their endless grooving, as he addressed the crowd again: “What do you want to hear?” he asked, confessing the lack of a set-list. A voice cried out “Home!” enthusiastically, and Ebert nodded in approval.

Singing with passion and towering high above the crowd, Ebert closed his eyes to sing from the depths of his soul. Swaying his cream linen-clothed body in rhythm, his wildly unkempt hair flowed with the breeze.

Climbing over the barrier and into the crowd, he asked: “Who has a story? Where is it?” Walking aimlessly, Ebert stumbles upon a bald 20-something named Haden DeRoberts waving his hands frantically in the air. As Ebert passes the microphone, DeRoberts begins: “About a year ago, you guys came to visit me in the hospital. Do you remember that?” Ebert’s face says it all, as he displays the most sincere grin. “Yes! That’s you?” Picking DeRoberts up and hoisting him across the metal gates, Ebert invites him onstage.

“I was diagnosed with cancer, and you guys were coming through town. You heard about me and came to the hospital to visit me. That same day, I got a transplant from an anonymous donar that saved my life,” DeRoberts professed to a vast Bonnaroo crowd spreading far into the horizon. “Play the tambourine,” said Ebert, dancing and celebrating with DeRoberts.

The rendition of ‘Home’ turned into a music-infused party, with DeRoberts flailing the tambourine and dancing joyously with the band. As the time limit came to an end and microphones are turned off by security, the entire stage and crowd continued to dance. The sun began to setting, the instruments were taken down but still no one wanted to leave.

Ebert urged the crowd to follow him to Bonnaroo’s intimate Sonic Stage, a small wooden platform dedicated for smaller bands. With DeRoberts in tow, the band commenced in a musical parade through the grounds of Bonnaroo, picking up patrons along the way.

As the band arrived, a crowd swarmed the stage. Ebert asked for a harmonica player, as someone in the audience replied “I’ll give it a try.” Ebert hands him the instrument, asking: “Can you handle E flat? We’ll try some shit!” Ebert sits in front of the thickly dreadlocked musician, swaying and smiling – realizing it’s definitely not his first time playing – and begins to sing ‘All Wash Out’ soulfully. With DeRoberts still mixed with the band, the whole stage breaks out in a passionate jam session.

It’s the unexpected moments that create memories, and for thousands of Bonnaroo attendees, this is one concert will not soon be forgotten.

photo//Sarah Rowland

“Don’t lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don’t have a career – you have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true. You are a writer because you write. So just keep writing.”  – Cheryl Strayed 

***

I was in high school when I first added ‘write a book’ to my life’s to-do-list. While I didn’t know at the time if I’d one day be a writer, a doctor, a coffee-shop owner, or a teacher – I recognized the passion I had for filling pages endlessly and tirelessly with my thoughts, ambitions, faults, dreams, shortcomings and secrets.

We often begin by writing words that cannot be spoken, sharing stories we cannot speak, filling pages with realizations of the soul. Writers share  this unquenchable thirst, feeling as natural as drinking water and breathing air. It’s a necessary desire.

The path is not often straight ahead and pure, though. It’s windy and bumpy with trials and tribulations, weathered with insecurities and sorrows. But it’s also full of joy and beauty, self-actualizations and moments of pure confidence and truth. In the end, it’s the purity of human emotion and experience that create stories – your story, my story, everyone’s individual and unique story.

Indeed, we’re all writers, in one capacity or another. Whether we craft verbose pages, fully fleshed out for all to see, or keep our thoughts safely in the deepest corners of our souls, there are words inside of us all.  The thoughts we have when we’re completely alone and allowed to be our truest selves – these are the thoughts and feelings and secrets creating stories waiting to be told.

Your words belong only to you. They’re pieces of you – of your grief, your love, your beauty and your tears. They’re yours to keep and yours to share.

Writing takes courage and brevity – the journey offers a long and winding road, often full of hardship , asking you to be vulnerable and asking you to often revisit pain and sorrow. But it return, waiting ahead is discovery of the soul; discovery of the truest parts of who you are – the fibers of your being.

So it’s absolutely necessary to simply look ahead and  keep going.

And those days spent thinking and wondering, dreaming and creating – the many hours spent writing other people’s quotes and crafting prose on pages of a journal; the time spent reading classic novels and books of poetry, simply looking for answers from others who feel the same –  these things are all small pieces of your becoming…so pick up the pen and write.

(photo: Ansel Adams)

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                             “She was like the moon- part of her was always hidden away.”

Writer George Saunders:  Advice to Graduates

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 Undoubtedly, endings can bring beautiful new beginnings – but endings also bring a sense of the unknown, many difficult goodbyes and crises of existentialism. Author George Saunders recently gave a commencement speech, giving life advice to a group of fresh graduates and sharing his deepest regrets. Read his wisdom.

“Now, one useful thing you can do with an old person, in addition to borrowing money from them, or asking them to do one of their old-time “dances,” so you can watch, while laughing, is ask: “Looking back, what do you regret?”  And they’ll tell you.  Sometimes, as you know, they’ll tell you even if you haven’t asked.  Sometimes, even when you’ve specifically requested they not tell you, they’ll tell you.

So: What do I regret?  Being poor from time to time?  Not really.  Working terrible jobs, like “knuckle-puller in a slaughterhouse?”  (And don’t even ASK what that entails.)  No.  I don’t regret that.  Skinny-dipping in a river in Sumatra, a little buzzed, and looking up and seeing like 300 monkeys sitting on a pipeline, pooping down into the river, the river in which I was swimming, with my mouth open, naked?  Not so much.

But here’s something I do regret: In seventh grade, this new kid joined our class.  She was small, shy.  She was mostly ignored, occasionally teased. I could see this hurt her.  I still remember the way she’d look after such an insult: eyes cast down, a little gut-kicked, she was trying, as much as possible, to disappear.  Sometimes I’d see her hanging around alone in her front yard, as if afraid to leave it. And then – they moved.  That was it.  No tragedy, no big final hazing. One day she was there, next day she wasn’t. End of story…Now, why do I regret that?  Why, forty-two years later, am I still thinking about it?   I never said an unkind word to her.  In fact, I sometimes even (mildly) defended her. But still.  It bothers me.

So here’s something I know to be true, although it’s a little corny, and I don’t quite know what to do with it: What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.  Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded…sensibly.  Reservedly.  Mildly.

Or, to look at it from the other end of the telescope:  Who, in your life, do you remember most fondly, with the most undeniable feelings of warmth? Those who were kindest to you, I bet.  Now, the million-dollar question:  What’s our problem?

Each of us is born with built-in confusions that are probably somehow Darwinian.   (1) we’re central to the universe (that is, our personal story is the most interesting story, the only story); (2) we’re separate from the universe (there’s US and them, – dogs and swing-sets, and the State of Nebraska and other people), and (3) we’re permanent (death is real. sure – for you, but not for me). We don’t really believe these things – intellectually we know better – but we believe them viscerally, and live by them, and they cause us to prioritize our needs over the needs of others, even though what we really want, in our hearts, is to be less selfish, more aware of what’s actually happening in the present moment, more open, and more loving.

So, the second million-dollar question:  How might we DO this?  How might we become more loving, more open, less selfish, more present, less delusional, etc., etc? Let me just say this – kindness, as it turns out, is hard .

But as we grow, we come to see how useless it is to be selfish – how illogical, really.  We come to love other people and are counter-instructed in our own centrality.  We get our butts kicked by real life, and people come to our defense, people help us, and we learn that we’re not separate, and don’t want to be.  The great Syracuse poet, Hayden Carruth, said, in a poem written near the end of his life, that he was “mostly Love, now.”

And so, a prediction, and my heartfelt wish for you: as you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love.  YOU will gradually be replaced by LOVE.  You have accomplished something difficult and tangible that enlarges you as a person and makes your life better, from here on in, forever.

When young, we’re anxious – understandably – to find out if we’ve got what it takes.  Can we succeed?  Can we build a viable life for ourselves?  And this is actually O.K.  If we’re going to become kinder, that process has to include taking ourselves seriously – as doers, as accomplishers, as dreamers.  We have to do that, to be our best selves. Still, accomplishment is unreliable.  “Succeeding,” whatever that might mean to you, is hard, and the need to do so constantly renews itself (success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it), and there’s the very real danger that “succeeding” will take up your whole life, while the big questions go untended.

So, quick, advice: Your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving:   Hurry up.  Speed it along.  Start right now.  There’s a confusion in each of us, a sickness, really: selfishness.  But there’s also a cure.  So be a good and proactive and even somewhat desperate on your own behalf – seek out the most efficacious anti-selfishness medicines, energetically, for the rest of your life.

An DO all the other things, the ambitious things – travel, get rich, get famous, innovate, lead, fall in love, make and lose fortunes, swim naked in wild jungle rivers  – but as you do, to the extent that you can,  in the direction of kindness.

Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that reduce you and make you trivial.  That luminous part of you that exists beyond personality – your soul – is as bright and shining as any that has ever been.  Bright as Shakespeare’s, bright as Gandhi’s, bright as Mother Theresa’s.  Clear away everything that keeps you separate from this secret luminous place.  Believe it exists, come to know it better, nurture it, share its fruits tirelessly.

And someday, in 80 years, when you’re 100, and I’m 134, and we’re both so kind and loving we’re nearly unbearable, drop me a line, let me know how your life has been.  I hope you will say: It has been so wonderful.”

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“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to fully open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what very little we can, in all of our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again — to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.”

(photo source//unknown)

                                              THUMBS UP:   Profile of a festival hitchhiker

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For the wild at heart like Charlie Thomas, hitchhiking has become a preferred method for traveling cross-country for summer music festivals.

Every June, eager music-lovers travel thousands of miles to gather on Bonnaroo’s 700 acre farm in the small town of Manchester, Tennessee. For Charlie Thomas, getting to Bonnaroo is simply part of the adventure.

Thomas is a frequent festival hitchhiker, often catching rides with complete strangers and spending hours on the road with them. “Traveling cross country with someone you don’t know is amazing. It’s about the unknown and the unexpected. You have no background, no preconceptions or preconceived notions. You just talk and drive.”

Attending Bonnaroo for his seventh time this year, Thomas has hitchhiked from his hometown of San Francisco, California to Manchester, Tennessee for the past three years. “I started doing it in an effort to save money. I couldn’t pay to rent a car and drive alone or fly. So I started looking for other options. It’s the best way to travel. You meet people you’d never otherwise meet and forge friendships with once strangers,” he says.

Thomas claims he has never struggled with getting a ride. “I just make a sign and put my thumb out. And if that doesn’t work, I start dancing. The lawnmower, the worm, the grocery cart – yeah, they’re all crowd favorites.”

When he is successful, Thomas enjoys asking the driver why he or she decided to pick him up. “I always like to ask, ‘Why would you pick up someone like me?’ And often, the answer is just because of the creative signs. Well, that and the dance moves, of course.”

For this year’s Bonnaroo, Thomas hitched a ride from California to Colorado, where he met Wells Richards – a wilderness photographer and what he calls a ‘kindred spirit’ who offered to take him all the way to Tennessee. “Wells saw me on the street with my ‘Road to Bonnaroo’ signs and picked me up. He brought more than 1,400 in an old-school green VW van from the 80s. It took us more than 30 hours, and the van only got up to about 67 mph when we were going downhill. But it was really incredible.”

While this year is his favorite journey, Thomas says 2012’s hitchhiking adventure was a very close second: “Last year, I got a ride from California with a hippie family in a hippie van. We talked about hippie stuff, ate hippy food, did hippie dances. Their daughters were named River and Willow. And get this – they taught me how to make homemade hulla hula hoops and dreamcatchers on the road. Yeah, I know – it sounds like I dreamed that, but I swear it’s true!”

Though many prefer other methods of travel, Thomas argues in favor of hitching a ride: “Be safe but don’t be afraid to get up and go. You have to travel. Just meet a stranger and get a ride. There’s really no better way to travel. Especially to Bonnaroo.”

(words: Sarah Rowland//photo: Catalonia)

 

Local Natives play an intimate in-store gig at London’s Rough Trade record store.

 

photos by: Sarah Rowland & Megan Bos (edited by: Megan Bos)

  

Mumford & Sons’ Gentleman of the Road Tour: London, UK

From Top: Bear’s Den, Haim, Ben Howard, Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros, Vampire Weekend, Mumford & Sons

Festival Review: Paste Magazine

(photos: Sarah Rowland)

Sounds of the Streets // Thessaloniki, Greece.

April, 2013