Penultimate

Tomorrow is our last full day here, and I cannot believe how quickly the time has passed. In just one short week, I have grown to love the spirit of this place and all the wonderful people I've met here. We just got back from our second-to-last marshmallow-roasting, smore-making, song-singing, silly-exploding campfire sessions. It is a well established tradition now, and it's only appropriate that our last full day here will be concluded with one more campfire extravaganza. I plan to stay up late.

Today was another challenging, stimulating, and rich day. Our group compositions are coming along slowly but surely, and we will present them tomorrow evening. I am seeing more and more how unbridled joy, spontaneity, imagination, and creativity can be modes of activism, and incredibly powerful ones at that. People always talk about the power of laughter, so much so that it has become a cliche of sorts. But I am seeing, living, tasting, feeling, touching, smelling how laughter and joy are some of the most powerful weapons known to the human species. They are potentially radical tools that can be used in radical ways. At the heart of laughter and joy is a profound and penetrating openness, a total disarmament of the mechanisms we silly humans employ in an effort to keep our lives safe and predictable. When we laugh with one another, we invite life, real life, to come in and take up residence within us. When we practice radical joy, we make ourselves vulnerable, open ourselves up to possibility and potential. It is so inspiring to be in a place rooted so firmly in the celebration of life.

I am giving serious consideration to going on a clowning trip in the near future, especially since I didn't get to meet Patch this time around. Gesundheit hosts many clown trips, but I'm told that Patch and several others I've met here will be going on one to, I believe, Peru in a few months. We did a clowning workshop the other night where we all got dressed up in crazy clown costumes and red noses and all. One of our exercises was to take an ordinary object that we have with us all the time and act out 5 completely new "uses" of that object. I used my belt (it was literally the only thing I had on me at the time besides clothes), and treated it as a fishing line, a "gut-bucket" style bass, a razor blade sharpener, a snake, and a whip. Each person performed these imaginings in front of the whole group. I was so surprised how many people came up to me afterwards and said something to the effect of, "I really enjoyed your clowning tonight." I really enjoyed it too, as a matter of fact, and I feel strongly inclined to go on a clown trip. I am seeing that clowning is a medium with incredible potential for human transformation, and I want to be a part of it. Until tomorrow...