Love, Obedience, and Choice

One of our (extended-)family traditions is picking an angel card at the beginning of each year. If you aren't familiar with angel cards, each one has a positive quality written on it (e.g. "Happiness," "Freedom," etc.) and you just choose one at random. It's not meant to be predictive or anything, but more of a suggestion. It challenges you to consider how that quality manifests in your life, and to see if you can be more aware of it, or encourage it more for that day, or within whatever context you chose it for. Again, they're all positive, so you can't really get a "wrong" or "bad" one.

That said, there are definitely a few cards that tend to elicit more groans than others. The card I drew on New Year's Day for 2009 was "Obedience." That tends to get more of the "ha ha, now you have to do everything we say" sort of response from the people around you when you draw it. But given that it's my card for the year, I've been doing some thinking to see what else I can make of it.

First, I'll back up a bit. I also like to pick a "personal year" (as opposed to "calendar year") angel card on my birthdays, so at any given time I have two overlapping "themes" to be conscious of. For my current personal year, which I'm right in the middle of, I have "Love."

"Love" has the obvious emotional readings regarding romantic love, familial love, etc. and those are certainly all good. But another aspect to it is that of choice. Where does "following your heart" take you? What people, or activities, or paths -- out of all the world -- do you choose for yourself and your life? Older Tarot decks sometimes depicted the Lovers card with two women and one man, to illustrate this aspect. Sometimes one of the women would also be shown or interpreted as the man's mother, accentuating the difference between families of birth and families of choice.

(There is also the lesson here that truly loving someone is a deliberate choice, which implies a different relationship approach once you've passed the emotion/hormone-driven limerence stage of things. But I'll save the relationship discussions for another time, and stay closer to the general theme of choice for now.)

So let's come back to "Obedience." What I see happening here is that obedience brings choice into a different context. Whereas love is an internal choice (you can have unrequited love, for instance, where the object of your affection perhaps isn't even aware of it), obedience is more external, rooted in the world around you. Someone (a person, God, etc.) or something (a law, a moral principle, a street sign, etc.) requires something of you, and only then can you choose to obey. (If you were going to do it anyway, then it's just coincidence, not obedience.) That's why this angel card is illustrated with a street light, as an example of an external requirement. The angel could, of course, run the red light, but she chooses to stop.

This interpretation of obedience as choice has two important results. First, it puts the power back with you, not with other people or the world around you. Rather than just helplessly doing whatever everyone wants you to, you're consciously thinking, examining, and deciding.

That examination leads to the second point, which is that you can become aware of what you are obeying and why, and start making decisions between these sources and reasons. Do you obey your religious upbringing, or peer pressure? Your boss, or your spouse? Speed limits, or your impatience? Because it will make you happy? Because it will make someone else unhappy? Because it's better for the world at large? If you consider your obedience a currency, what causes will you invest in or support?

Listen to the difference, just in a simple case: "I'm driving the speed limit because that's the law and I have to do it." (Alternatively, "I'm speeding because I'm impatient and I feel like going fast.") VERSUS "I'm driving the speed limit as a way of keeping the streets safer, reducing accidents, and setting a good example for other drivers to do the same." Which would you rather have?

So how will this play out in my own life? I don't know yet. I'm definitely in an extended transition time these days, which means there are lots of choices to be made and I have no clue where it will all lead. This past year of being unemployed has given me some good opportunities to choose to do a number of things that I want and love to do. But this phase has also been less "obedient" to the structure of society at large, primarily in the areas of financial stability and employment. I've been feeling that tension for a while now, and it will have to be reconciled at some point. So I hope I'm able to make the right choices and find the right way to fit my life into the world.

Camp New Harmony

We got back from Camp Harmony yesterday afternoon, and camp was, in a word, fantastic. At the peak day we had twice as many people attending as last year, so there were lots of new friends to make as well as old ones to see again. And since everything is volunteer-run there, having that many more people just meant that much more great stuff to do. Camp has been needing to have a knock-it-out-of-the-park year for a while, I think, and this was it.

The new location (Camp Newman, in Santa Rosa) is quite lovely. It's still nice and woodsy, which I like, and it's decorated all over. There are murals on all the buildings, tile mosaics lining the pathways, etc. It's quite hilly, though, which is rough on people with bad knees, and dangerous when frosted over and slippery, so you have to be careful. There were a lot of good workshop and jamming spaces. I was worried about having to rent a portable dance floor, but that ended up working out quite well. There were a wide range of accommodations. At the top end they have a few buildings of what are basically two-bedroom, furnished apartments, complete with a small kitchen, living room, couches, and everything. At the other end they have the "youth dorm" that we stayed in: rickety metal bunks, saggy crinkly mattresses, cold tile floors, and a miniature space heater working day and night to try to keep the place warm. The cabins in between were probably the best places to stay, in terms of being more comfortable but still with lots of your friends.

I taught three dance classes. The first two were beginning East Coast Swing and beginning Lindy Hop, getting people ready for the swing dance evening. I was super lucky to have Sylvia Herold and a bunch of other great musicians playing music for the classes. It's hard to get used to interrupting fantastic live music just so you can teach another basic swing move, but it was really a privilege to have them there. And the lessons went really well, I think. I also taught a Cross-Step Waltz class, again with live music. Lacey and Rowyn very graciously helped out by being my lovely assistants.

Sylvia was also teaching a swing guitar class all week, so I went to all of those. Swing guitar has always seemed frightfully complicated compared to the folky stuff I'm used to, but she did a really good job of breaking it down and making it accessible. I'm going to have to see if I can keep that up and get better at it.

It was a very swingy camp for me all around, actually. The swing night was my favorite evening dance. There were a number of new campers this year who were good swing dancers that I got to dance with. And a lot of the younger kids are also starting to pick things up. I danced with several of the girls who don't have much in the way of basic steps or technique but who could still more or less follow all sorts of stuff, which is wonderful. In fact, I'm just getting more and more pleased with that next-younger generation overall, because more of them are getting to the point where they're really participating in the music and dance activities at camp. I was thrilled one evening when I saw Adam and Mary dancing an excellent cross-step waltz that they had just learned in my class that afternoon. They told me later that they were on a mission to become "superdancers" like me and Lacey. Talk about melting a Graham's heart.... I caught them practicing a few other times throughout camp and piled more moves on for them to learn.

I played tunes for the Irish dancing again, as usual, and also got in a couple nice late-night sessions. The new location had drawn in some more of the Lark in the Morning contingent, so there were some Irishing folks I haven't gotten to play with before. I also played some Quebecois tunes, though I only know a handful and they're hard to pick up on the fly. I mostly did fiddle the whole time. Never even took my mandolin out of its case, since I didn't figure my wimpy calluses could handle that after the guitar classes every day.

New Year's Eve was good, though strangely it felt smaller than usual. Probably because the dining hall there was bigger and because people were off in other places around camp as well, and not all congregating at the same place. The real heart of camp for me, though, wasn't so much the New Year celebration as Bob Reid's annual kids concert. He had an even bigger crowd with an even wider age range than usual this year, and it's amazing what an intense emotional experience gets created between everyone. We laugh like crazy, and some of us bigger kids go down the crying end of things, too. When it was all over we had a giant hug pile on Bob, and then just stayed there for a while, milling around the room, hugging people and playing with some of the littler kids. That's the time you really remember that everyone there is really just one huge family, and it's beautiful.

Other fun stuff:

• Shapenote singing. (Missed one session but scheduled a second to make up for it.)
• Calling my first contra dance. (On minimal preparation, but it went well enough.)
• Mask-making for New Year's Eve outfits. (And "leading" the workshop for Quena who was on a quest to retrieve her missing dance shoes from Davis.)
• Katie's surprise birthday party. (With 12 silly people crammed into a small, dark, stifling room for 20 minutes because she was late.)

Anyway, all around it was a very successful camp. I was glad to sleep in my own comfy bed last night, though. Now it's sort of sad, post-Harmony time, but there are also a lot of music and dance things that I'm inspired and excited about, so that's good. Happy New Year!

Modulation to the Relative Major(ity)

I just did a bit of counting and found that I've been attending Camp Harmony every winter since 1994, which makes it half my life now. I didn't stay for full camp the first year, but after this year, I'll have also spent half of all my New Year celebrations there. Wow.

Camp is in a new location this time, up between Santa Rosa and Calistoga. I miss the old Boulder Creek location already, but I'm excited to see the new place, and to see all the people who are coming out of the woodwork to see it too. (Camp has sold out for the first time in years, which is great.) Lacey, Rowyn, and I are driving up first thing tomorrow morning to help with set-up and welcoming, along with many wonderful members of our Harmony family, whom I can't wait to see.

Happy New Year, everyone!

P.S. I almost titled this post "Picardy Third," which also involves going from minor(ity) to major(ity). But that implies a final cadence, which isn't quite what I want. As for relative major instead of parallel, that's because we've moved to a new location (tonic note) but we'll have all the same good people, music, and dancing to fill in the notes of the scale around it.

That Ringing in My Ears

A little while ago I realized that my cellphone ring was taking over my brain. It may be that I'm just overly sensitive to music, but I've come to the conclusion that the whole melodies-as-ringtones thing wasn't the greatest idea in the world. At least not for me and my phone.

First, I found myself occasionally noticing musical notes that matched the beginning of one of the melodies my phone uses. I don't have perfect pitch, but I apparently have enough pitch memory to set off associations sometimes. This resulted in periodic, split-second jolts of "oh-my-phone-is-ringing-oh-no-it's-not!" at the beginning of random songs, other people's cell phone rings, etc.

After that, I started being more aware of the part of my brain that's always scanning for my specific ring tone. If I left the TV on and go into another room, something was still picking up faint individual notes from the commercials and promoting them to brief moments of attention, in case they turned out to be from my phone. (Interestingly, though, regular music I was deliberately playing didn't have the same effect, perhaps because I was already consciously following a known melody.) Sometimes I would carry my phone with me from room to room, even though I knew I could hear it fine if it actually rang in another room, just to shut up that part of my mind that's out scouting for it.

Anyway, this all finally got annoying enough that I went and changed everything on my phone to real, honest-to-goodness ringing sounds, like a proper phone. And I must say it's been kind of a relief. My phone doesn't ring often enough to re-train me very quickly, but it doesn't have to. I know it won't be playing a melody at me when it does ring, so the musical part of my brain can relax and go back to it's normal job. Ahhhhh....

The Ghost in Love

The Ghost in Love, by Jonathan Carroll, is probably the most fun and fascinating magical fantasy novel I've read in a while. Cory Doctorow wrote a great review of it over on BoingBoing, which is how I found out about it, and I agree with everything he says there. There's something else that really colored the whole reading experience for me, though.

Normally when I read a fantasy or sci-fi book (or series), I expect to spend some extra time and effort in the beginning, just to get mentally situated. You have to get your bearings, figure out how this fictional world works, see what are the basic assumptions, structures, premises, etc. After that, you can coast a bit more, just absorbing the story as story.

That's not the case with this book. In terms of this particular quality, the entire book feels like a first chapter. You think you're okay once you've got the idea that a guy accidentally didn't die when he was supposed to, and then he coexists with his ghost, who can be seen by and communicate with dogs but not humans. But it just keeps going from there. You're constantly trying to figure out what's possible or not, and why on earth various things are happening. This could have been frustrating, but I found it more enthralling than anything else. It puts you in the same boat as the main characters, after all, who are also trying to figure out how their world is being rearranged. So it really sucks you in and makes you feel a part of it (similar to the way MirrorMask created such a good feeling of dreaming). I also like it just for the sheer flow of ideas. The author isn't going easy on us, or holding anything back, but just letting us drink from a fire hose of imagination. That's fun.

I'll mention one other interesting point, as long as I'm here. Carroll's writing style at times feels very simple, like very straightforward, fairy-tale storytelling. Overall, that's probably a good thing, since there's enough complexity in the content that you don't need more in the presentation. But every once in a while he'll come up with a real zinger of a line that just hits you right between the eyes, and is all the more powerful for the simplicity of its environment. Example: "Like any illness, when happiness has run its course, time is needed to recuperate from it -- sometimes an entire lifetime."

This was the first Jonathan Carroll novel I've read, but I'm thinking I should go find more. If anybody has any recommendations, let me know.