It is a place where you can see fantastic live music shows, just because you’re waiting to ride the subway:

It’s a place where you will hear 10 different languages walking down a single block, and a place where you can eat any type of food you can possibly imagine, or buy any think your mind can make up (although it won’t always come cheap).  You can go into museums with hundreds of thousands of years of history or 4,000 years of art for free, and run into celebrities on the street (remind me to tell you the story of how I inadvertently insulted Maggie Gyllenhaal one day at my food co-op some other time), and watch movies being filmed on your block and get a slice of REALLY good pizza at 3am.

It’s also a place where everyone’s got an agenda, and people often feel like this:

compliments of http://fuckiminmy20s.tumblr.com

Maybe it’s because I didn’t grow up in the city, but I’ll admit it:  I don’t usually feel like a New Yorker.  My friend David always says I’m visiting from out of town when we hang out, and I guess he’s right; I know my way around the subway, and I know a good slice of pizza, but I don’t have the hardness that’s required to live in NY.  I don’t have the appetite to step on other people to get ahead, I don’t have the aggressiveness to demand that I be the center of attention, I don’t have the drive to work for 80 hour weeks, i don’t like living in a closet-sized apartment…

NYers have, for the most part, forgotten how to appreciate life.  Everyone’s caught up in this whirlwind to survive, to “make it”, whether it be on broadway or wall street or politics or… whatever.  People work their asses off with the idea that someday it’ll pay off and they’ll finally have time to do what they want to do.  They live in the “concrete jungle”, rarely going even an hour north to the vast national parks and historic landmarks of the Hudson Valley, only seeing the brightest of the stars in the sky, because the smog and light pollution blocks out any that are too far away.  New York is a city of uncomfortable truths, where people consistently look past the homeless begging on the street because there’s someone on every other corner, where the police are sometimes more foe than friend, where people are so disconnected from each other that someone can die on the subway and not have anyone notice for hours.  It is a city that is part of the pulse of the world, and unfortunately, what happens there has repercussions for everywhere else.  You have to have a thick skin to live in NY, to put up with the endless crowds and the lack of privacy and the fast pace and the inequality.

The Onion did a cutting-too-close-to-home article last year, and I honestly wish more people would realize how much they sacrifice to be in this city, how much energy they put into it, how much space and freedom they give up, and how many values they have to compromise to live in this place.  I didn’t realize how living in NY was changing me until I left.

I remember distinctly the first day I arrived in Australia, because I arrived in Cairns at 5am and had nowhere to be until noon.  I walked around the city aimlessly until the sun rose and I found a tiny cafe that was open, plunked my bag down, and ordered an omelette.  There was a lone man at a table inside, so I went outside to sit and watch the city start up during the day.  A minute later, the guy comes out, sits down next to me, and strikes up a conversation about my massive backpack.  I was initially wary; if this had been NY, he would have either been trying to hit on me or sell me on some tour package, but it turned out he was just making conversation for the sake of getting to know someone new (dropped information about his wife and children into the conversation in the first 10 minutes, and never once told me what to buy).  I found this to be true of almost everyone I met in Australia, people were out to enjoy themselves, not to get something out of someone.  There wasn’t this fierce sense of competition, of having to keep up with the joneses and have the most expensive shoes or fanciest watch.  People would take a day off of work because they felt like going surfing, and the economy hasn’t collapsed yet!

Coming back to NY for the past three months has been a really interesting experience for me.  I’ve seen friends who have been dealing with trying to keep their businesses afloat in a bad economy, friends who are living with their parents because the economy is bad, friends who are in jobs they hate but they keep them because they need the money, and friends who are genuinely happy and doing good things.  NY doesn’t kill everyone’s soul, but it’s definitely not a nurturer.

As I leave now, Occupy Wall Street is gaining traction, which is exciting… it seems that more people are starting to realize they’ve been dealt a crap deal, with the economy still not recovering and unemployment in the city at a high… you try paying for a $2000 dollar a month apartment when you’re not bringing any money in, and then worry about paying for the subway, food, clothing, etc.  NY is a microcosm of all the disenchantment people are feeling all over America.  It will be interesting to see where this heads, if it turns into something that actually powerfully affects social change, or just diffuses out into a non-issue.  It has to be here, in the place where things started to break down in the first place, where America can start to change what happens next, but I don’t want to be around to see it firsthand.

You see, I’m in love with Australia.  And I’m in love with a boy. And now, I get to go home (hopefully permanently), and be with both boy and country for the rest of my time on earth.

NY, we had a good run, but I’m tired of being abused and disappointed by you.  I wish you all the best, but we’re done, I’m tired of putting so much energy into you and getting so little back.  I’ve found someone new.  Please be happy for me, and know, if you ever decide you need help, I’m perfectly willing to show you how to be happy… you just gotta learn to cut down on the work and not wear so much black

Au Revoir!

…I thought, around 6am, “hey, I should go for a run to through the woods before it gets bullshit hot out and take a swim in the pool”, and I’m just jetlagged enough that that’s exactly what I did, starting with a run which felt like a semi-out of body experience because my system being out of whack is making me feel a bit high, and followed by a dip in the pool which woke me up a bit, after which i meditated/dozed on my towel and walked back home.  The woods (definitely not bushland here) were the most brilliant green, with that early morning light that turns the leaves to strung gold when it hits them just right.  Everything is blooming, and the humidity was already so thick that you could taste the air in your throat, almost slurp it into your lungs, with mosquitoes buzzing and birds chirping and crickets vibrating… There is something so special about early morning light, about the silence before people start moving, when the world belongs to you alone because you’re the only one aware of it.
Of course, with the transition to the other side of the world, I have to reshape my “warning– Deadly” priorities again… the spiders are smaller and far less dangerous (but no less creepy), but we might have seen a copperhead snake by the door last night– small, and so probably not terrible if it bit one of us, but they’re still poisonous and not fun to deal with (we’re hoping it was just a garden snake, which are completely harmless).  Deer ticks are probably out en force, which means that I have to worry about tick bites and possible lyme disease if I do get bitten.  FUN FUN FUN! and of course, I need to remember to look the other way when crossing the road…”  And there’s the poison ivy and the toilets all flush really slowly with huge amounts of water, and it’s about 40ºC, but to balance it out, there are waxberries bursting from bushes (they taste a bit like sour raspberries) and I saw cardinals flitting about, and the world is alive and bursting with energy and I can never stay too upset for long when it’s a gorgeous day out.

If you can’t tell from the letter, I’m back in NY, waiting for the Australian government to get their act together and recognize my boyfriend and I as a legitimate long term couple so I can move to Australia permanently… They’re telling me it could be another 2-3 months for them to finish processing it, but there’s nothing I can do to expedite the process.  I got back two days ago, and have been adjusting to the first time we’ve been apart for more than 16 hours in the past 10 months.  It helps that I left behind winter and arrived to a beautiful (if rancid hot) summer.  I’ve bought a ticket to Burning Man, and now just figure out how to get there and how I’m going to make money while I’m here (with the unemployment rate being up to 16%, i’m not holding my breath).

The Rhythm Hunters performed at the Mullum Music Festival over the weekend, with four separate shows and a workshop.  Most of our shows went pretty well, but the highlight for me was definitely getting to perform with Greg Sheehan in the Global Rhythm Nation improvised rhythm extravaganza… I was on stage with Greg, Nano Stern, Harry Angus (from Cat Empire), and so many other fantastic musicians.  I think this needs to be said:  I’ve only been drumming for a year an a half now.  That’s enough to separate me from any old person on the street, and I’ve got simple enough rhythms in the Rhythm Hunters that I don’t make a complete ass of myself onstage, but I’m nowhere near drumgoddess status yet.   However, I was welcome onstage, and I even soloed a funky little hip hop beat on an Indonesian instrument (called a Gangsa, it’s a bit like a xylophone with different tuning) for the last song that we all performed.  The whole performance was a REALLY BIG DEAL to me.  I also got to see some truly fabulous performances by Loren Kate, Mama Kin, Juzzie Smith, Kaki King, Nano Stern, Flap!, and Oka… I got to invite them all back to the Hut to perform at some point, and the ability to be able to go up to an artist that you appreciate and invite them to your venue feels pretty invigorating.

On the 9 hour drive home on Monday, I was looking at the sky as the sun set, and it just hit me:  My life is awesome, and I am so grateful for every second of it these days.  I always felt so average in high school.  I went to a rich prep school where kids got BMW’s for their 16th birthdays, a girl wore $900 shoes to our senior prom (i skipped it, since I had no date and didn’t feel like paying $240 to go be miserable at the Waldorf Astoria), and most people went on to ivy league educations and are now getting some extension to their name in masters and doctorate programs and will be fabulously wealthy and have 2.5 kids and start the cycle over again.  I transferred to that school in 9th grade from a public school with security guards and metal detectors, and I think I was the popular new girl for 2 weeks or so, until I did something and got relegated to outsider status.  I was the art & theater geeky girl for the rest of my time there, and had a couple of friends who I cared a lot about, but I felt like no one ever saw me, much less understood me.  I wasn’t the best artist, and I wasn’t the best actress, and I wasn’t the best student, and I DEFINITELY wasn’t the best athlete (I showed up to my first field hockey practice in capris and sandals), and so I thought I was just average.  The boys I had crushes on liked other people.  I didn’t get invited to all the parties (although I was straight edge and didn’t smoke or drink, so I probably would have felt pretty out of my element if I had gone to most of them).  As I said, I skipped my senior prom.  There were girls that wore a different pastel Abercrombie shirt every day of the week, and you were expected to own at least one necklace from Tiffany’s… It wasn’t quite Mean Girls or Gossip Girl, but it wasn’t as far off as any parent would hope.  There were coke addictions, alcoholics, and general debauchery, and I just never felt like I belonged there.  The biggest problem that I noticed was that with all the money in the world, most kids had no idea what made them passionate, they just knew what they were supposed to grow up to be.  A few are now millionaires in their own right, or on that path through their career choice.  A few are even happy, and love their jobs, their friends, and their lives.  Anyways, my point, before I veered off into Tangent Land, was that I was a completely average kid and wanted really badly to be somebody special and never felt like it would happen.   And then somehow, I realized while driving home, when I wasn’t paying attention to trying to be someone interesting and special, it happened.  That’s how it works, right?  You become the person you want to be when you’re not trying so hard to be that person.  It’s another small step of self realization, I guess, and learning to respect myself for who I am.   I have always felt like other people’s opinions of me mattered to me far more than my own opinions of myself mattered… I would agonize over other peoples’ comments, and try so hard to get everyone to like me.  I would tell myself that I needed to not care so much, but worrying about whether I was worrying about what someone was saying would just make it worse…

So this is what self esteem feels like!  I’m so very thankful for it, and for all the choices I’ve made to lead me to where I am, and for the people I’ve surrounded myself with and the music I’m creating.

Your moment of Zen today is a song by Gotye:

Gotye- Eyes Wide Open from Gotye on Vimeo.

Much Love!

On a more positive note, The Hunters performed at an incredible festival called Island Vibe three weeks ago, and I gotta say, I’ve performed at a few festivals now (Woodford, Cygnet, ReGen, Winter Solstice, Wollombi, to name a few), and it was the most welcoming festival I’ve ever attended…. I think this was one of the first times we’ve been a big deal at a festival (the website had our photo on the front page, which means some people were probably coming to the Festival just for a chance to see us!), so it may be that the big artists at festivals always get treated this way and this is just our first opportunity to experience it, but they definitely gave us the first class treatment, and I felt so much love and support that I want to perform there every year! (although I’m sure they’d get tired of us pretty quickly if we were there every time).  Festival planners, take note:  having two masseuses in the Green Room giving free massages to artists is an incredibly wonderful idea, and helps us prepare for our show, recover from our show, or just relax.  We also got picked up at the airport by an awesome driver who was super friendly and cool, put up in A HOUSE, and everyone was wonderfully kind and helpful.  We were surrounded by SO many talented people too… Island Vibe is considered to be more of a reggae festival than anything else, and we got to see some amazing shows… Ladi 6, Cheap Fakes, Groundation, there was definitely some INCREDIBLE music going down… There was also an extraordinarily sensuous cabaret show, with some GORGEOUS burlesque dancers, and some pretty awesome balancing acrobatics.  Finish it all off with an excellent beach party after the festival ended, with DJs, firetwirlers, and lots of drumming and dancing, and it’s definitely the best festival I’ve been to so far!  I’d definitely recommend it to anyone who loves groovy beats, dancing, and kick-ass stalls with gorgeous clothes!

We’re off to the Mullum Festival this coming weekend, and will be performing on all four days of the festival (we’re actually part of the opening night), along with formidably excellent musicians like Kaki King, Mama Kin, Mary Gauthier, and so many more!  I will update when we return, as I’m sure we’ll have lots of sights and sounds from the show (and knowing me, I’ll take massive amounts of videos and whatnot to try and share what it feels like to be there).

If you’re monetarily rich, you love my writing, but for some reason you REALLY want to see better photos out of my blog, i’ve got a wishlist for the holidays:  I’ve wanted these two lenses since I started taking photography… No pressure, as I’ve wanted them for the past 5 years or so, so I can wait till I can afford them myself, but still, I thought I’d mention it as the holiday season’s rolling around

Your moment of Zen:  A photo I took on the beach late at night, while listening to the drummers and watching the firetwirling.

Much love!

This trip was far lazier than my last trip to NZ.  Left to my own devices, I travel in a very roundabout lazy way compared to the frenetic, scheduled, MUST-SEE-EVERYTHING-OR-ITS-NOT-A-VACATION trips my parents take (many of you may may already realize this due to the fact that i’ve been “traveling” for almost 2 years now).   Literally, for 5 days, I stayed in my friends house and read books, taking time to breathe, relax, and ground myself. “But Jenna, you’re in a foreign country! you have to see it to appreciate it!” you may say, and you’d be right… I did see parts of it, and the things I saw expanded my experience and perception, and gave me lots to ponder. I’m just saying that relaxing for a few days before throwing yourself into tourism has its perks; it was only two weeks I was gone from Australia, but it felt like I’d been away for a year.

I was lucky enough to be able to spend the first night in New Zealand with a friend of mine from NY. Rachel has been working with the Peace Corps for the last 10 months in Samoa, and was in New Zealand on their orders over the weekend. We only had about 10 hours with each other, but it was wonderful to be able to catch up with a dear friend, and compare our notes of life away from America.  The rest of my trip was mostly spent with my friend Zaid, who was my 5-day-neighbor at the Woodford Folk Festival back in January.  He was kind enough to let me stay with him and show me around the island a bit, which was extraordinarily kind for someone who’d ostensibly known me for all of a week of cumulative time.  We got along really well though, and had massive debates about the nature of consciousness and reality, how to attain enlightenment, and what truth really is.  And we went on a roadtrip to the two most intensely spiritual places i’ve ever experienced, Waipoua Forest, one of the only remaining old growth Kaori forests, and Cape Reinga, the northernmost tip of New Zealand.

We didn’t have too many days for our roadtrip due to Zaid having to work, so we got up at 5am on day 1 to drive north, and ended up getting stuck in Auckland traffic in the rain.  However, after we cleared the traffic, the trip got off to a most auspicious start:  We were followed for 4 hours by a rainbow on our left (at points, it was even a double rainbow, though not as… intense as this one), as storms passed overhead.  We took a small detour to a waterfall, and then another to a remote gorgeous beach, where we nearly had to push the car off a cliff to jump start it after I accidentally left the lights on and the battery died.  I swear, Dr Seuss must have come to New Zealand before he illustrated The Lorax, because we saw what can really only be described as truffala trees while driving back to the main road.

Though detours are often the most fun parts of a trip, as the spontaneousness adds an extra thrill to what you’re seeing, my heart beat harder when we got to the Kaori forest. The first tree we saw, Tane Ma Huta, is known as the lord of the forest, and he was magnificent. We were all stunned into silence as we took in his 13 meter girth… You just kept on craning your neck upwards, and he was still in your line of sight.

Being the godless atheist I am, it’s hard to admit, but it felt like I was standing in the presence of divinity. So much power and strength and calm radiated from this tree, and from the rest of the Kaori trees that we went to see.

The video doesn’t do the forest justice, but it gives you some idea of what I was looking at. At some point while walking along I just started talking to the trees, acknowledging their immense age (some are over 2000 years old, which makes any person’s visit nothing more weighty than the time you pay to any one mosquito you brush away during your lifetime) and majesty and my gratefulness for being there. Honestly, I couldn’t help myself: being there energized me, made me feel like I had points of light under my skin.  I brushed my lips against the bark of a few of them (yeah, I’m not just a tree hugger, i’m a tree kisser too), and for the rest of the day, my lips tingled, and I was unsure whether I’d accidentally poisoned myself.  Still, it was a singularly wonderful place, and my only regret was that I hadn’t existed back in the days when they were everywhere on the island, before the settlers came and hacked so many down.

The next day we went to Cape Reinga, where the Maori stories say all the souls of the dead depart. It’s the northern tip of New Zealand, where the waters rage as the currents  of the Pacific and the Tasman Sea clash, and it was another place I felt godstruck.  At the end of the island lies a stretch of land that curls it’s way slowly down to the seething ocean, with stumped trees and grasses that have no choice but to yield to the raging wind that whips back and forth across, stirred up by the turmoil of the water beneath.  At the end of the rock, defying wind resistance, poor soil nutrition, and other science, there’s a lone 900 year old tree curving up and growing where nothing should, where  the Maori believe that the dead sink into the roots to the underworld. 

It’s hard to explain how it feels to be there… I was with friends, but I felt alone, but not in a lonely way… it felt like my soul had to come to terms with the length of its existence, but in the best possible way.  It was comforting, and somehow a calm was created by all the chaos of the elements.  You have to be there to really get it, I think.

The rest of the trip was eventful only in the way that spending time with people you don’t know too well can be… Nevertheless, we got along pretty well (although I’m still shocked that there’s anyone on the planet who thinks the Princess Bride is a bad movie), and it was overall a very relaxing trip home.  We stopped at a brilliant café on the way home called Eutopia, which must have stepped directly out of a movie.  The outside was shaped like a ship, and the inside was set with crystals and light, with curved surfaces and hidden nooks.  I would highly recommend stopping there to take a photo, if not to try their coffee and food. 

New Zealand ties with Australia as my favorite place in the world in terms of spectacular beauty.  It is the only country I know of where you can go from frosty glacier to ocean in an hour, where a drive can quickly change from lush green pastures to barren red dirt to stunning white sand dunes and crystal blue water.  It turns my sense of space upside down, and I am left just feeling like I’ve experienced some sort of wonderful magic trick.  In short:  definitely a good vacation, and a place worth returning to in my future.

Next time I go:  definitely a trip to Hot Water beach, where you dig holes in the sand and they turn into natural spas as they fill with water.   where else but NZ?

Your moment of Zen:  An artist I’ve been listening to nonstop recently

Much love!

Sometimes the answer is hidden under layers:  “oh, I just wanted to see the world”  “why now?” “I had a bit of money to spend”  “that’s exciting, you saved it up for a while?” “my dad died and left me a small fortune, so I figured why not?”

Sometimes it’s more clear cut:  “My boyfriend just broke up with me, and I didn’t want to be in the same state as him, much less the same country”

Sometimes it’s even clearer:  “I wanted to not be boring”

But there’s always an underlying reason, a dissatisfaction within their lives, that makes people want to travel.  It’s a fear of mediocrity, of becoming your parents, of settling down.  It’s a heartbreak, or relationship issue, or a problem with your job, or a loss you don’t want to deal with.  It makes sense… Happy people have no reason to change anything.

And guess what?  That’s ok!  There’s nothing wrong with you.  Congratulations on making a really big change in your life, of grabbing your destiny by the face and steering that sucker where you want it to go.

The wonderful part about traveling is that you’re in one place for such a small amount of time that it’s easy to be the person you want to be.  Are you usually a recluse?  Congratulations, you’re in Brazil and you’re on your own.  Go out to a club for a night, tell people anything they want to hear, dance on the table a bit, and let go.  These guys think you’re the life of the party!  Everyone’s buying you drinks and you wind up in bed with three prostitutes.  Not only are you not a recluse, but you’ve got a great story to tell your two friends back at home, and you’ve learned something new about yourself:  you don’t like tequila (oh, and it’s easy to make friends if you’re not afraid of rejection).

I had a conversation with a friend who was couchsurfing with me, and he said that he didn’t like to stay in one place for more than 3 weeks, because that’s when people got to know him and expect him to act how they knew him, and it was a lot of pressure.  We talked about how he was really negative back in his home country, and how he was able to be positive when he was traveling because he wasn’t going to see any of these people for too long.  He didn’t understand that he wasn’t confronting his negativity, he was just delaying it, and when he ended up staying in one place for 2 months, he ended up losing a lot of friends he’d made initially because he was so negative all the time.

I left New York for two reasons:  I got downsized from my job and got offered a job in Japan working for my cousin (Nepotism at its best!),  and I was head over heels in love with a guy who had a girlfriend (one of those real head case lost boys that I tended to fall for so hard then) and I was going to get myself in a lot of trouble if I kept pining away for him.  The downsizing shouldn’t be disregarded:  I know the economy tanked, I know that I hadn’t done anything wrong, but I really liked my job, and I was crushed that I couldn’t do it anymore.  I had felt like a superhero every day, off to save the world (working at an environmental consulting company), and now I was just another unemployment statistic frantically trying to stay away from mediocrity, of taking a job I would hate just to pay rent.   I didn’t want to move in with my parents again.  So, when my cousin offered me a job in Japan, and all I had to do was get there, I jumped on it.  I could have gone home afterward, with a few exotic stories and a nice new job on my resume, but I decided to use the money I made there to keep going.  I wasn’t ready to go home and deal with the fact that the boy still had a girlfriend and I was still not over him.  More importantly, I realized I didn’t really like myself much as a person, and I never really had.

So I went to Australia, and poked around a bit, traveled from place to place, meeting amazing people, seeing wonderful things (See:  rest of my blog), all the while slowly trying to figure out what I wanted from the world.  I was boisterous in one place, I was shy in the next, I was arrogant and stupid and easy and chaste and silly and abrasive and ambitious and flirty and ridiculous and helpful and merry and at some point I realized that I’m mostly comfortable being the responsible one who makes dark jokes and laughs at the absurdity of the moment (even when no one else is laughing), and I love reading and learning and getting lost in the enormity and exquisiteness of nature and I’m fiercely competitive and usually more of a loner and I’ve got a lot to share with people and I’ve got a lot to offer myself.   And when my parents came and visited, ostensibly bringing my past with them (you try and hang out with your parents and not feel like you’re 15 again… it’s pretty hard not to slip back into old patterns), I was able to look at them with perspective, and see where I’d gotten a lot of my personality traits from.  And then I looked around and realized I wasn’t traveling anymore, I’d settled down in one spot which had become my new home.  But I found what made me happy, and I fell in love with myself (and I’m even in a healthy relationship with a guy now!), and things are going really well.

Oh yeah, and America?  Really scary place, at least from the outside.  It’s constantly looking like it’s gonna collapse.  I mean, this oil spill?  Pardon my french, but … fuuuuuuuuck. Don’t want to go back there any time soon, thankyouverymuch.

What was the point of my story?  I have forgotten.  Oh.  Got a problem?  See the world.  It’ll fix it.  Or something.

oh yeah, and if you’re a traveler and you vehemently disagree?  let me know.

Your moment of Zen:  a photo I took yesterday

As I mentioned in my last blog post, my parents recently came to visit me in Australia on their trip around the world.  It was a little difficult for them to see my residence (I live in what can best be described as a commune) and my work (which can best be described as running a small community centre in the middle of a dead town).   It’s a lifestyle that differs from the their ideal, as it’s not exactly the career path that you’d expect after graduating from a prestigious liberal arts college (but who actually uses their liberal arts degree exactly how they thought they would?).  However, they better understood why i’ve chosen the life that i’m currently leading after they saw me perform with the Rhythm Hunters at Chapel by the Sea, in Bondi.  The naked enthusiasm and joy that I get from drumming has not been matched by any other thing I have ever attempted.  I do art:  I draw, and paint, and sculpt, and weld, and I enjoy the general act of creation.  I sing, and dance, and read about a hundred books a year (I’m a rather fast reader), go out hiking relatively often, spend two or three mornings a week at the beach, but nothing pumps me up and makes me feel powerful, aware, and focused like drumming.  Therefore, in an attempt to make everyone get up and try something new, I’m going to give you a few reasons why you should try it as well:

A student performance at Drumfest - I'm in the middle in green (photo credit Lisa Haymes)

1. It makes you a better listener:  In a drum circle, usually one person starts a beat, but it is the job of everyone else to build upon it.  If you don’t listen to what the people around you are doing, then your rhythm won’t sit well with the rest of the drumming, and the confluence of music that emerges won’t be as smooth or euphonic as it could be.  In the rest of the world, people consider listening to others to be a highly desirable trait.  However, this is not as extraordinary as reason 2:
2. You have to listen to yourself:  This sounds surprisingly easy.  After all, you’re the master of your body, you choose what words come out of your mouth every time you speak, you eat when you’re hungry, you sleep when you’re tired, right?  However, I’ve found that a surprising number of people (full disclosure:  I’m definitely one of these, hence the title of my blog) don’t really listen to themselves… you eat when it’s lunchtime at the office, and there’s food on your plate.  You sleep after your favorite TV show ends on television and you’ve gotta be up by 6am.  Someone tells you you’ve said something and you don’t remember it (ok, maybe you forgot that one on purpose).  Point is, we often ignore what we’re putting out into the world, and i’ve found that it just isn’t possible to do so when you’re in a drum circle.  If you’re on a cowbell, keeping time, or playing on the djun djuns you have to pay attention to what you’re doing and listen to yourself, or else you speed up or slow down and just confuse everyone else in the circle.  The rhythm can entirely fall apart, and it’s all on your head… However, if everyone else is wavering, and you stay strong, you can keep other people going and get back into the rhythm.   You’d be surprised how hard it is to hear yourself over everyone else, and to not get swayed by other peoples’ rhythms.  This is one that I’m constantly working on, and have yet to master.  Someday, my friends, someday…
3. It’s something no one else can take from you:  this is kind of a weird statement, but it’s one that’s really important to me.  If I am on top of a rhythm, and playing it the best I possibly can, then even if no one else likes the music that comes out of it, I know I played it right.  It’s such an intangible event, and so you have to savor the experience of it over having something to hold on to.  My art is satisfying, but I can always look at a picture I made next to a picture someone else did and like theirs more, or think they did it better.  There will always be better drummers than me out there, but if I play the part I’m supposed to, and I play it right, that’s something no one else can diminish.
4. It forces you to be in the moment: nothing you played before matters if you can’t hold it together right now.  It doesn’t matter how amazing your beat was 2 minutes ago, if you’re not paying attention to the present and your role in it (in most cases in drumming, being in time), the whole thing falls apart.  How often are we truly in the moment, enjoying what’s going on right now, not worrying about what could happen or what already has?
5. You must be patient:  Learning new things is difficult!  Learning new rhythms, particularly in Taiko, where you have to also learn which hand you’re supposed to be using on which beat, can be really frustrating, and you watch other people get it and you’re still making mistakes and it’s really easy to get really frustrated.  You can’t expect to be fantastic at it immediately, but if you’re patient and put in the time practicing, you’ll notice yourself getting better and better.  I started drumming 8 months ago, and have gotten heaps better since then; however, the occasional practice with the Rhythm Hunters has shown me that I still have a LOT to learn.
6. It works out both sides of your brain:  As i mentioned in number 5, in Taiko, when you’re learning the rhythm, your head (and, to be honest, sometimes your mouth as well) is screaming “Left, right, right, left, left, right :pause: right” over and over.   Once you get that down, try switching your hands, and immediately you have to basically learn the whole rhythm over again.  It’s amazing how frustrating it can be,  and then how rewarding when you finally get it… in one of the advanced classes, we were learning two different rhythms with either hand, and hearing how they interact with one another.  I could actually feel my brain straining when I switched my hands, and the sense of relief and accomplishment when I finally got the opposite pattern was palpable:  I beamed for a good 20 minutes after.
7. it’s a skill you can perform with:  Have you always been envious of the people who could rock up anywhere and just DO something that captured the attention of a lot of people? Maybe you’ve been envious of the busker who could contact juggle and make balls dance around her fingertips, or that guy who brings his guitar to a party and has everyone singing kumbayah instead of watching the game, or that firespinner who does the most amazing double staff tricks while balancing a hula hoopist on his shoulders while singing the alphabet backwards and drawing the mona lisa with his toes… If you learn how to drum, you’ve got something you can show people to draw a crowd.  If you’re new to it, I wouldn’t suggest setting up right next to that firespinner, but you should still be able to have fun and help that guitarist with a sick beat.
8. it’s a great community of people:  I have met the most amazingly awesome people through working at the Rhythm Hut.  They’re not all dreamy hippies either; They’re nurses and electricians and lawyers and doctors and school teachers and students and more… They’re all PASSIONATE people though, and it’s so wonderful to see people support each other and work through things together and hang out beyond just seeing each other in class.
9. It’s healthy:  this Huffington Post article even mentions drumming specifically as being good for your immune system.  You feel so much better after a good drum session, and it can even be a great workout

EDIT: (How could I forget this)  10.  IT’S SO MUCH FUN!

Despite the fact that I’m advocating for drumming in particular, I’m sure there are other things people can do that can make you feel as good about everything.  You just gotta go out and DO IT!  What makes you feel good?  What should I try?  Give me some advice below.

Your moment of Zen:

“To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived… This is to have succeeded”. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

that’s just some of the waterfalls we saw in 2 minutes, on a more dry than wet day, within one small mountain range.

On one day, we saw glaciers, rainforest, rivers, and the ocean.  My sense of space, of normalcy, of climate, was turned completely upside down.  How could a rainforest be nestled next to a deep blue glacier?  How could it feel like we were thousands of feet above sea level, up in the mountains near the clouds, and then turn a corner and see the ocean 20 metres away?  I do believe I left my heart there, lodged somewhere between the Franz Joseph glacier and Hokitika.  Given the redness of the water we kayaked in near Okarito, I think I’m not the first, as it was a rich and bloody hue the likes of which I have only seen previously attempted in Glacéau bottles.  New Zealand water ranges from diamond pure to pigeon grey to azure to garnet, with all the medley in between.  It was exquisite.  If I had any foresight, I would have brought tiny glass jars and captured bits of water for memory’s sake, but as I did nothing of the sort, I have only photos and words to remind me, which will have to be sufficient until I revisit the country.  I do plan on going back, and doing so soon… It was far too quick a trip for me to absorb anything fully.  Someday I will travel there for a year, exploring all that the woods have to offer, but for now, the brief trip will have to suffice.

Bruce Bay was a wonderful surprise…  While driving, we noticed a lot of rubble up ahead, but as we got closer, it sorted itself into a place where hundreds (if not thousands) of people had come and left cairns and sculptures and words for the sea to someday recapture.  The beach was a perfect fossiking location, having an extraordinary variety of sea smoothed rocks, from the purest white quartz to basalt grays with intricate lines drawn through, as well as driftwood and various shells. I scoured the ground for the right combination of rocks to describe & bind me to the land, and once I found them, stacked a cairn of my own.  I left my motto scribbled on a piece of milky white stone, written in green sharpie, permanent only in theory:  “Live Simply.  Love Generously.  Care Deeply.  Speak Kindly”.   It seemed appropriate.

The cleverness and curse of New Zealand is that it is a tourist country.  It relies wholeheartedly on tourism to exist in the level of affluence that it does.  This means that every time you would love to see what’s on the side of the road, there is a handy shoulder for you to pull off on, with a plaque telling you what you’re looking at, but it also means that everything is expensive and someone is always trying to sell you something.  It’s a hard thing to wrap your head around.

I may have to keep on traveling at some point… Rumor has it that New Zealanders vacation in Peru, as it is an even more stunning country… I shall have to go and settle that argument one day.

After coming back, I briefly introduced my parents to the Central Coast and the Rhythm Hut.   Interestingly enough, I didn’t get nearly as much slack about my commune-hippie-musician lifestyle as I thought I would (although my mother did mention “career path”, “Harvard Business School”, and “financial security” multiple times within the days we spent together), and I enjoyed getting to show them around my neck of the woods.  We even did all the touristy things in Sydney that I would never do on my own!  It was a real pleasure being able to share some time with them (they hadn’t seen me for 17 months), and I didn’t realize how much I missed them until they were gone again.

The last thing I will post about, because it was just such an incredible experience, is a festival I attended called Confest.  Located next to a muddy river 11 hours away in the middle of nowhere, it was the most amazing 5 days I have had since I left the USA.  Confest (which is an amalgamation of “conference” and “festival”) is an alternate living gathering, where people come to talk with each other and learn from one another.  If you have something you want to share, you put it up on the workshop board, and teach whoever shows up.  If you want to learn, you keep your eyes and ears open (or read the same board), and you’re bound to find something interesting.  I learned how to make pasta from scratch, and started learning some moves with a staff for Firespinning.  There was a gypsy kitchen which we camped near: a communal place where you’d donate some food and walk in and cook whatever you could with whatever was there for as many people as you could.  there was an art tent, with a bed in the middle, and you’d sit around and someone would come over and pose, and sit for you as you drew them.  there was a massage tent with people willing to massage you for hours, and a sauna, and a mud bath, and unlimited firewater at night for spinners, and a drum circle at any hour of the day, and so much love and acceptance and joy in the air.  Clothing was completely optional, along with the rest of societal expectations.  Unlike most of my friends, I was completely sober for the whole thing, but still had the most brilliant time.  If you ever go to Australia, I’d highly recommend it, and it happens twice a year, over New Years and Easter.

I met up with a friend of mine from Oberlin a few weeks ago, and she told me that I look younger and happier than I did when I started college in 2004.  I believe her.  I feel better than I ever remember feeling in my life.  So cliché, but when you follow your dreams, and just go with what feels right, it’s amazing what paths it can open and where your life can lead.  I just feel so FREE all the time, so happy, so wonderfully me.

your moment of Zen this month comes from a group I cannot stop listening to:

Love: it will not betray you, dismay or enslave you,
It will set you free
Be more like the man you were made to be.
There is a design,
An alignment to cry,
At my heart you see,
The beauty of love as it was made to be

Much love,
me

you know you’re in the destination of all destinations when the Hawaiian next to you (who is 16 years older than you judged her to be, because she apparently stopped aging when she got to Maui) tells you she’s moving here because “it’s just so pretty!”

I have a confession: for the first 4 days of my time here in NZ, I was unimpressed. Everything was too stark, the mountains were barren, for a day I didn’t see much but sheep farms & grass, and while everything was pretty, it didn’t impress me much. Aoraki was gorgeous, but I’ve seen snow-capped mountains before in Colorado, with just as sweeping views and valleys (granted, never a glacier of that size with a glacial lake, but it didn’t stun me to silence, merely made me happy I was there). If anything, my father’s previous visit to this country 38 years before gave me overly high expectations: I was disappointed when we hiked to a glacial lake that hadn’t existed when he’d been here last (the glacier had receded a full kilometer in the spanning years), only seeing the effects of global warming in front of me instead of appreciating the fact that I still had some glacier to see. The silica-laced waters flowing into the lakes in the region were more blue than any I’d ever seen before, like the sky borrowed its color from the lakes, but that wasn’t meritous enough to travel to New Zealand for. Maybe it’s because we’re traveling in a caravan from holiday park to holiday park, but I felt that I was missing something in everyone’s gushing over how gorgeous New Zealand was, how everyone should visit it at least once in their lifetime. Is everyone seeing something that I’m not? I wondered. Am I just biased because I’ve seen so much magnificence in Australia?

Now, having experienced the west coast from Te Anau up to Milford, I’m dumbstruck.

Granted, I did get to see everything on two of the most perfect days in the whole year. In the area, it rains 2 out of every 3 days, and yet somehow we managed to go out on two spectacularly sunny days with nary a cloud in the sky. It was the third to last day of summer, and just cold enough that the sand flies weren’t out to suck our blood, but I still went swimming in Anita Bay, jumping off the second floor of the overnight cruise ship we’d booked with Real Journeys, which was just high enough that you got to shout a few expletives at your stupidity for jumping off something so high before you hit the water. Going back to the anchor point that night, we raced with bottlenosed dolphins, who no doubt were quite amused at our meager attempts to follow their movements with cameras. After a competitive game of scrabble with two women who had just gotten off of six months of work on Antarctica, I looked out over the water at the moon’s faint glow behind one of the cliffs, and wondered over how lucky I was to be here and alive and intelligent enough to appreciate it all. Down past the hull of the ship blinked phosphorescent squid, and you could hear sea lions gently whuff out as they surfaced in the blackness.  In the morning, we saw sea lions and got close to a waterfall that I’ve only ever seen in movies and music videos.   It was, quite frankly, astonishing.  I was radiant for a good 15 hours flat.

I found out that I am not a tourbus person. The drives between Te Anau and Milford were far too exquisite for the brief moments the bus let us out to take photos. I wanted to explore the moss laden forest, to sweat in the crisp air and look around the river bend and absorb the area around me… in places, cliffs loomed austerely above us for thousands of feet, dwarfing us and the road below and making me wonder what kind of man sees a place like this and decides there needs to be a means for mankind to easily explore it. I am a nature freak, and going into the woods for me is often like visiting a cathedral; I settle into my self, feel more in touch with my core being, and aware of the things around me and my connection to life. These woods were the St Petersburg of forest, my mecca, my Jerusalem, my Borobudur, my Taj Mahal, my wonder of the world. The light streaming through the branches was more hallowed than any stained glass could ever hope to emulate; the sapphire river below was far more unsullied than any holy water.

Just when my life couldn’t get any more exciting and laden with adventure… I went skydiving this morning, 15,000 feet above the ground (actually 16,200 feet above sea level, which makes it the 2nd highest dive in the world) launched into the abyss of the sky coasting at terminal velocity for a full minute before gently gliding down to earth.  I had a dream about it three days prior, in which I went through the whole training, and jumped, full with an instructor telling me to “scream up!”.  the real deal wasn’t exactly like my dream, but it was pretty close… over just as i was getting comfortable with the whole affair, a stunning view of Queenstown and the surrounding mountains and rivers stretching out below.  We passed through clouds at speeds so quick my cheeks flapped in the wind like towels out on the line.  The scariest part was the jump itself; it was also the part least in my control, as I was harnessed to my jumpmaster, completely at his mercy on whether or not we’d go anywhere and when.  For those of you who will ever come to New Zealand, the NZone jump that I completed with my father is the second highest jump in the world (they do one at Everest as well, but that’s an additional 15,500 dollars).

Tasmania was inspiring.  We went on a canopy walk through woods owned by Forestry Tasmania… 45 meters up and there were still trees taller than us!  While parts were decidedly overgrown and were in obvious need of a controlled burn to stop a worse fire in the future, as a whole the experience and place felt slightly magical.  The river that ran through the woods was a deep red from the tannins that run into it from the peat in the area, and so the river looked bloody, and from a distance above the trees, like some scaled, pulsating sea creature was slowly undulating upstream.  There were ferns that were larger than Robert Wadlow’s armspan towering above us, and I fully expected a brontosaurus to poke its head around a frond and watch us travel through its territory.  Everything felt slightly surreal.

The next day, we went out on the Hume river, to try our hand at fishing and to see Tasmania from a different perspective.  It was a sparkling sunny day, and I took this video:

just to give you a feeling of what I was looking at.  That movie doesn’t capture the seals we saw enjoying themselves, swimming around with their flippers out of the water, watching us idly as we sailed by.  We fished, and once again, I was able to assert myself as hunter, although I wouldn’t have been able to support a family, as my two fish were rather small.  No salmon for us that night!

Leaving Tasmania the next day wasn’t something I wanted to do… We stayed the night in a Hostel, exploring the local flavor (my god, the Germans are EVERYWHERE!) wandered a bit around Hobart, and wound up at the Botanical Gardens, which were wonderfully peaceful and well labeled.

But enough about Paradise.  Melbourne was great, we had two nearly sold out shows, and then it was back home to Gosford!  I was rather excited about coming back, getting ready for a new term of drumming, getting my body and mind back into developing my technique (much better to practice than perform at this point, as I’m still learning so much!), and getting back into my routine.  A day after we got back, I turned 24.  For my birthday, I was told to show up in the middle of Sydney and wear something pretty.  I did, and my friends showed up and blindfolded me, then walked me down the street as I teetered around on my stilettos, laughing as they forgot to tell me when we were going downhill or uphill, and generally making mayhem.  I’m sure other people thought we were freaks, or that I was being kidnapped, but I was having a great time of trusting that everything was going to be brilliant and that they wouldn’t let me fall on my face.  After a while, we entered a building (I could hear the sounds change), and then suddenly, I hear an announcement about getting seated because the show was about to start, they whip off the blindfold, and… They’d taken me to see Warriors of Brazil, a Capoeria/Samba Spectacle!  We were actually sitting in the producer seats, best in the house, because the theatre had sold out of everything else, and it was a crazy wonderful performance, full of dance and movement and CAPOEIRA and music and drumming and story and song.  What a great surprise!  It was a thoroughly enjoyable night, even moreso because I could appreciate the effort that goes into a performing tour a bit more having just come off of one.  Following dinner, we had a discussion about future directions for the Rhythm Hunters to take, and whether or not we would want to do a similar style of performance (The decision was no, it was far too sexy for us).

Now I am looking forward to visiting my parents in NZ in less than 2 weeks!  I can only imagine what words will escape me there… we plan on hiking for most of the 3 weeks I’m spending there, which means I’ll mostly be out in the bush.  Expect tons of photos when I get back.

Your moment of Zen:

You can look to the stars in search of the answers
Look for God and life on distant planets
Have your faith in the ever after
While each of us holds inside the map to the labyrinth
And heaven’s here on earth