Sparks

It's only been a week since our trip to the northeast came to an end, but it already feels like it belongs to a much more distant past.



The hedge in front of my house went wild in my absence, bringing to mind a favorite children’s book called The Plant Sitter. The story is about a boy who looks after houseplants for vacationing neighbors. Over the summer he learns what it means to have a job - the responsibility, the new skills, the anxieties, the rewards - and the differences between ideas and direct experience.

Traveling musicians have many opportunities to explore the differences between ideas and direct experience. Each live performance, with all the changing variables, is an opportunity to learn more about the nature of communication.

Out third annual concert in the 1794 Meeting House at the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in New Gloucester, Maine, was a spiritually-charged experience for me, and I think for Mark too. During the past year, we've immersed ourselves more actively in the Shaker music tradition, learning songs, visiting Dan Patterson in Chapel Hill, NC, (the leading Shaker music scholar in the country and author of The Shaker Spiritual), and getting to know Diane Sasson, another fine Shaker scholar, who taught a course last spring on the Shakers at Vanderbilt Divinity School. Both Mark and I read "Shakerism: Its Meaning and Message," a history of the Shakers published in 1905, written by Anna White and Leila Taylor. It can be difficult to find in hard copy, but it's available to read online here. Also, anyone interested in the Shakers should visit Sabbathday Lake if they get a chance - it's a beautiful spot and the only remaining active Shaker community.



Performing our music, and especially Shaker tunes, at the Meeting House in New Gloucester seems to call forth the many voices that have resonated in those walls during the past 200 years. It’s and idea and a direct experience - and, though it’s difficult to say exactly how it shaped our performance, it’s clear that the space plays a significant part in the proceedings. Palpable is a sense that our role is but a small act in a sweeping continuum. It feels great just to be a part of the community, however, and it’s an honor to keep some of those beautiful Shaker melodies alive in the present day. Our thanks go out to all who made the trek to share the evening with us, and especially to Lenny Brooks, Brother Arnold, and everyone at SDL.
 

Kindling Stone made its first visit to Boston on this trip, where we got to play at the legendary Club Passim, another room with some fantastic history. Harvard Square still offers some of the best people-watching and it’s one of those rare places where you don’t feel like a freak for playing folk music. We had the great pleasure of my old Rust Farm band mate John McGann joining us on guitar for a few tunes – mighty and musical playing as always! John is on the faculty at the Berklee College of Music these days, a colleague of Matt Glaser and Mark Simos, two other acquaintances currently cooking in the genius music noodle kitchen. Also in the audience that night were my good friends Alan Williams and Darleen Wilson, who gave me a copy of their lovely new music, under the band name Birdsong at Morning. It has some flavors of Paul McCartney in contemplative mode, with toothsome sounds, nice images, and beautiful stringed arrangements. After the Passim show, we had a good time talking with friends and meeting some new folks, and we look forward to our next visit to the old Club 47.

After our day in Boston, (which included a spectacular lunch at Artu in the North End) we headed back to Portland. Our friend Jay York  (a true Mainer and a fixture for decades in Portland’s visual art and micro-brew consumption communities) opened up his house, which is a church, for an evening concert. Jay does this from time to time. Folks bring their own chairs to augment Jay’s collection, and it makes for a really nice, relaxed performance environment. And oh, how we love to play without a sound system! Folks began to arrive and sit down while Mark and I were still warming up, so we decided to forego all formality, stayed put, and played twenty minutes of fiddle tunes strung together as an overture. Our performance shirts stayed on their hangers for the evening. During our set, just outside the open window, a fat seagull sat for 30 minutes on top of a telephone pole – he actually appeared to be listening. It was a joy to see so many familiar faces that night, spanning 40 years of my connection to the Portland area. Thanks for being the conduit, Jay!

The next day, we headed west with a plan to visit Hancock Shaker Village in the Berkshire Mountains (MA), en route to our gig that night at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY. I had visited the village at Hancock once 25 years ago, but I didn’t remember much. I can now say that it needs to be right up there on the destination list for anyone interested in Shaker or early American culture.

Even though it’s formally a museum now, the natural setting and the physical structures are really not minimized or contained by the exhibit signs and rope barriers. One can really still feel the community there, settled between the lush green peaks - you can practically see the footsteps in the worn stone thresholds, sense the effort it took to locate, cut, and situate the massive rectangles of granite foundation. And the strength of vision and energy it took to build the structures and live that life above those foundations. Technical innovation and craftsmanship, albeit from a pre-industrial America, are everywhere you look – in the majestic round stone barn, the iron stoves in the large and sophisticated kitchen, the rocking butter churns in the dairy, the masterfully lathed and finely finished details in the woodwork, and in the visionary brush and pen strokes committed to the pages of the colorful spirit drawings. The Meeting House that stands today at Hancock is not the original – the current structure was moved from another Shaker site in Massachusetts – but, we were told, fit exactly on the existing foundation. We also observed how strikingly similar the structure is to the Meeting House at Sabbathday Lake. What a wonder it must have been to see that community in full action in the 19^th century!

Mountain thunderstorms and a heavy downpour accompanied our exit from Hancock village, apparently washing away any preconceptions I had about our first visit to the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies in Rhinebeck, NY. As we cruised down the pastoral Taconic Parkway, I really wasn’t quite sure what to expect. As it turned out, traveling from the site of one utopian community from a bygone era directly to a currently active one was, well, quite a trip.

Omega is a relaxed, yet bustling retreat for health seekers of the mind, body, and spirit. People in comfortable attire appeared genuinely blissful as they strolled from the Ram Dass Library to the impressive, all-vegetarian buffet-style dining hall for dinner. The Buddha image is displayed liberally around the campus, peacefully sitting in the summer flower gardens, welcoming you at building entrances, reclining next to pathways.

The main hall where we were scheduled to perform featured a low stage, with backjack chairs, each with a pillow and blanket, in semi-circle rows on the floor, and some rows of comfortable folding chairs behind them. Seemed like a dream I once had about the perfect Kindling Stone performance setup. When I unfolded the reed organ, the staff told me they were used to having harmoniums, but a reed organ was unusual. Used to having harmoniums? Now that’s my type of place!

The rain came down hard that evening, but we had a nice crowd for our concert. It seemed the right place to try an experiment in which we asked the listeners to hold their applause until the end of the show, allowing for some silent time between the pieces. Even now, we’re still not sure how that worked out, though we received some positive comments afterwards. We also may not try it again anytime soon.  Certainly nice to be in an environment that supports experimentation, at any rate. Following the set, several people mentioned that it was serendipitous for us to be performing during Past Life Therapy Training week, considering the messages and meanings in our songs. We were in full agreement, though we had to give all the credit to our actions in a previous lifetime. It’d be nice to make it back to Omega again some day.

As I drove Mark to the Hartford airport the next morning, we talked some about the range of experience we had enjoyed on the trip. Mark observed that it’s as if we create a spark that somebody can pick up and keep going, and he said it would be interesting if we could encourage people to take the spark and send it back in our direction. I’ve been thinking about that, and, in web terms, I think it might be time to start a discussion board here. It’s OK if we start small, but it’s our hope that some of the things that generate a spark in us (about music, performing, spirituality, history, philosophy, etc) might generate a spark in you.