Dim lights and jazz music: 01 de abril de 2015

Dim lights and jazz music. Today I wanted to be a hippie, a reporter, Buddha; a person with perfect calm confidence and no doubt. You are a person of talent. You, you have got something special. I feel pressured to be a certain way, sexy or social, but I can’t be that way. I have to expel tomboy energy from my deepest center, finding lost cigarettes, clothes too big, no bra. Hair in a bun and glasses and the high hopes of future flowers. Contacts made and lost, made with the knowledge that they’d be lost.

Drum music, beats and rhythms are manifestations of the creator’s present inner moment. The creator of the music, the man with dreadlocks the color of black coffee, the little girl with a tanned, determined face, intent on learning from her elders. Short, curvy women in flowy skirts with swaying hips. Drum circles are people working together.

Now a wiggly cat squirms out of my arms in protest as I sit here giving her all my love. She snatches a moth out of the air and eats it. Recently returned from a starry-nighted venture into the unknown, my smoky shadow.

I realized today that I could be an almost carbon copy of my mother. My personality, that is. I can feel my relationship with Raúl leaning dangerously close to the younger version of my parents’ relationship. How I imagine their vibes, conversations I invent they had, a vague past life reflected in the expression of my own energy in relation to a lover.

Does any of that make sense? Like light refracted through a prism. Maybe the structure of my soul prism is genetically similar to my mother’s.

Tonight Raúl and I smoked a ton of paraguayo that we were lucky to come across. We finished selling burbujeros and walking back to the hostel we asked a couple artesanos if they knew where we could find faso. Just as they were telling us no, another one arrived and greeted us all, and turns out he had a giant compact brick to sell us for 100 pesos.

We went halfsies and smoked a ton before going to the candombe, this gathering of people in barrio Güemes that creates a drum circle. Energy streams from pounding hands, hot and sticky and melting, that attracts us humans like moths unable to resist a hot bulb of light.

I figured out the whole drum circle thing while we were there, why it feels so right. One person starts, a single soul solo en el universo. He is alone, but his energy is distinct, and if he is good at expressing his energy with this instrument, it shows so much about his personality, his temperament, his temperature, his mood. The colours of his soul spreading out in waves we cannot see. We sway and we dance to his creation, and it is as if we are accepting him fully. We accept his energy. We accept it for what it is without trying to change it. It is a chemical, emotional reaction. He starts the fire and we burn.

Then another person joins, adds a new rhythm, a new beat. He mixes in his own feelings, and they must work together to get it right. Another reaction, another creator. They have to cooperate in order to move us. That’s what the drum circle is all about for me: cooperation between strangers, between friends, between fellow members of the human species. It’s so intense! I feel so easily able to be possessed by something like this. Just losing thought and absorbing everyone else’s energy. It feels so weird in a good way.