Gamelan, the traditional percussive orchestras of Java and Bali, has many contemporary ensembles in America. Why don't you take a seat and play along?


P.S. No thread on Gamelan would be complete without reference to the Ramayana Monkey Chant and the story behind it!

Crossposted to MeFi

“Creekside… Sunday, 31 Aug. ‘03”

“The flux of eternity carries improbable flotsam in it’s briny tide.”~Isador M. Upinsky in Gaseous Nomenclature and Transparent Numerals.

Encamped creekside in a valley beset with low clouds and blueberries, I lit a fire with my cast-off regrets for kindling and sipped sangria as a soft crescent took the western arc of sky, glowing like a newborn’s cheek. The occasional fish spirited from this murmuring creek, older than so-called civilization, whispering more romantic than any human sweet talking. The breath of Titans blew the mist, blurring exactitudes and worries, the curve of mountains softening into an aspect of body.

Time, politely damned to the stately buildings from whence it came, shall mean nothing here. The color of twilight, the syncopation of crickets, and the tending of coals the only rhythm that matters. Before arriving here, bumbling down the mud-thick path toward the site, some folk were reclining in the shade of a pine. “Excuse me,” I said, “is this site taken?”

“No man, not now. We were thinking about it but you go on.”

“Thanks guys… I wind up with this spot every year I come here.”

“It’s cool dude, gotta keep tradition alive.”

Thus begins a night of repose and joyous solitude from the commonplace rigors and pleasures of routine. Thus begins a grinding down of obstacle, a loosening of stones to become silt, sand and salt. A momentary return to the primal, the fundamental, while watching water pass by and the landscape surrender, shadow by shadow, to obscuration and the magic dark.

Of course, it’s just me and my little book and parka, a campfire and sweet wine. A night spent in the company of trees and the mystery that rustles in the underbrush. No more, no less than this.

A distant crow, blueberry juice running down my throat, a chill warded away by the hissing glow of fire. Like the berry, we are simply buds on a twig; flower, fruit, seed, in flow according to a pattern drawn in invisible, mythic ink. We will give sustenance and be sustained, more in tune with the cyclic than we can imagine… maybe it’s you that bears pollen, cupping perpetuity in your tender hands? Maybe it’s you that I will sustain. I may whither, and the branch will grow beyond my place of emergence. Yet within all, season no matter, there is found a divine code for persistence, the tenacious budding of future branches. This code is not found in biology, but you might find it in your dreams. We are, right now and everywhere, the apex and the genesis of eventuality. We are continuations edging toward fractality.

To say ‘we’ may imply you and me, or our nation, or our planet. Let it mean instead the vast and silent ‘yes’ that causes presence. The ‘yes’ that makes live, makes love, makes lore. We are, after all, a sudden blur of shape with only a further changing of form known to be true. This knowledge we share, in our delightful bumble through being, with the Universe itself, mostly stored on the tips of tongues and the very ends of beaks.

It is near the end of summer, I am ripening, as is each soul or conscious atom. The goldenrod flower, heavy with yellow, is leaning ever closer to the stream, which will answer it’s dwindling brightness with dissolution and free passage to reclamation.

There is my burnt offering, fallen wood crackling as it turns to light. It warms me before sleep, and dries my socks, steaming on the stone ring. I smell of woodsmoke, my skin is rough with nature’s grit mingling with my own. I absorb the blueberry and I it, as the sleeping bag does it’s duty.

“Creekside, Monday 1 Sept. 2003”

A night of pouring rain that drummed on the tent like so many cloggers on the roof of heaven. The morning reveals a tent with a half-inch of standing water and the wringing out of that which did not escape the great sogging. The firepit is a wash of defeated ashes, the creek runs heavy with the condensate of clouds. Every sound is saturated, dim; so still you can almost hear the sun rise, parting the clouds with a kiss of gold.

I’m wandering through the hush of dawn… drinking the dew from rhododendron leaves, tickling the bellies of passing clouds, tending a makeshift pot of camp coffee. It may as well be my first day on Earth. The ground is full of drenched sighs. There’s much to see.

A small patch of yellow daisies… There, clinging in sanctuary are two tempest tossed honeybees, one still with pollen on his legs. They are motionless; the daisies bounce on the breeze in solar imitation and they remain; locked, steadfast, dazed or perhaps dead. I won’t disturb them. Utterly mussed from the deluge, I think of two monks who’ve traveled a long helpless night, collapsed against the chapel door. They have beheld their prize, and now wait for fulfillment or surrender. Not alone in their grasping, there are punch drunk dervishes mad from the kiss of God, there are the mystics who choose death over human law, the moth consumed by the flame of attraction, and my heart flailing wildly at the sight of ineffable beauty.

They may revive and carry out their natural duty. They may, like the daisy, return to dust. They yellow burst of flora to which they attach in apparent desperation is one of millions, the pair of bees one of billions, and it is I that project metaphor. Nature is capable of teaching many lessons at once, and in this I am to study my own longing for passionate refuge… I should pray sunwards, be awakened from my weariness, and make honey for the love of being.

I work my way to the waterfall, and lay out on the rock as a torrent falls by my side. The lines in this rock are the calligraphy of millennia. I rest on a document writ by Earth herself, a contract, a holy decree. The sun brightens and the planet spins, as the roar of water quiets the invisible words that dart through the canyons of my brain… a sight I’ll never see. For a moment, watching the vortices of water dance in the pools below, I’m suddenly aware of movement, the movement, the amble down the path we’re all on, totality. It feels good, even to be a little out of breath. To be a little thirsty, a little dirty, a little hungry... these are all evidence that I remain alive, in a state of movement. My heart beats and I trace a drop of water as it disappears into the pools below.

What is essential is right now. There is no more, no less than this. There is this man, awkward and whistling, standing atop the waterfall, getting all googly-eyed over miracles. He is I. There are birds, and passerby. We're all doing just what we ought to be doing. There are no loud truths to proclaim from the mountaintops, but the mountaintops. Even they become hard to discern in the morning fog. Together we ramble for clarity, goofy or divine or both, and we become what we're searching for. There will be epiphanies, but also thoughtless acknowledgement. There will be waterfalls, there will be rain, there will be mist, there will be puddles to wet your toes, and when you're not looking a bird will bathe there.

As I get up to leave, I see a blueberry tumbling along a slow trickle of water, a tributary to the edge. I reach for it, and take communion in this before I head for home.