Whispers of Communitas

It took me at least two years to climb the stairs into the loft at NeverMore Books.  It wasn't that the stairway was particularly steep nor were there guardians that I had to overcome.  Instead, it was the fact that time had been slowing down to an indolent expanse of leisurely happiness.  There was laughter and conversation in every corner of the cozy bookshop.  The minutes were so packed with pleasure and conversation and meaning that each tick of the clock contained something like a month of ideas.  At the end of one book aisle I had joined a cult then gone through deprogramming with all the attendant emotions.  In one tightly nestled nook, I had a conversation with a teacher and an actor, and like all the conversations, that one felt more like a month of friendship than a shared drink.  Over by the punch bowl I was dazzled by a wunderkind filmmaker at the festival with his first film - his father and cousin primary collaborators exulting in all of the experiences with the sort of wide eyed elan that many of us had forgotten and then remembered with just one genuine good-hearted question from this budding genius.  The unofficial after-party at Nevermore books packed a universe of meaning into a single night of happiness.

I do realize that it sounds like an inadvertent acid trip and it did feel that magical, but I think the energy had to do with how deep we were into the film festival, how much positive energy there was in each of the screenings.  I snapped this picture from the loft that drifts above the books.  Or maybe I imagined the loft and I had grown wings and flown to the top of the books.  And my prisma filters helped me express precisely how much happiness, goodwill and openness seemed to flow in the room that night.

In my twenties I attended a church where the holy spirit regularly appeared. These guest appearances included speaking in tongues, passing out, prophesying and plenty of dancing.

I had been good and warned about all the frauds who faked such things, but I'll readily admit that I *wanted* God to break through the silence and show up in any way that made sense for me - dancing or what-have-you included.

But I was not disposed to faking it.  If it was going to happen it would have to happen.

And I knew that these skeptical thoughts might just eliminate me from the possibility of experiencing this particular sort of divine transcendence but it does make sense to me that once I was far from the church (who cast a suspicious eye at films and art making in general) that I was much more able to experience the "communitas" that I was searching for.   

Anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner identified this term as a way of referring to a state of freedom, openness, radical democracy and inclusion within the context of a community's Rite of Passage.

Honestly I do believe that true communitas is reserved for communities that decide not to put their faith in legal briefs, rational discourse and post-industrial cynicism.   Places where magic still lives in the hearts and brains of the community. 

But that doesn't make me value it any less.  I haven't been to Burning Man or Songkran but I'll take even the smallest sense of communitas wherever I can find it. 

#50thingsofvalue