Coming Soon to the Lotus Festival: Little Cow

Coming up on the midnight hour. I'm busy prepping for the 21st annual Salsa Contest, at the Farmers Market tomorrow morning here in Bloomington, Indiana, and I ran up against the fatigue wall. Luckily, there's the Hungarian band, Little Cow. I found this over at the facebook page of LuAnne Holladay, Lotus Festival organizer extraordinaire: Little Cow is making a return visit to the Lotus World Music and Arts Festival on September 24th. Horns, accordions, a great little vid – now I'm just happy. The song is called "Cyber Boy": give it a listen and get your day goin' on.

In the Heart of the Beast MayDay Parade

Today is a high holy holiday for visionary activism in the Twin Cities: it's the festival day for the annual In the Heart of the Beast MayDay Parade and Ceremony. Every year since 1975 (2 weeks after the end of the Vietnam War) In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre has created a parade that travels down Bloomington Avenue (hey – I like that!) into Powderhorn Park in south Minneapolis. There, a ceremony takes place involving huge puppets, humans on stilts, and dramatic enactments on newsworthy and mythic themes. This year the metaphor is "Our Common Treasury," promising to say something about resources and economies of value.

Today is the 35th anniversary of this event, my favorite communal spiritual experience. The parade and festival are so extraordinary in sensory terms, with fantastic puppets, floats, costumes, music, messages and energy, that it is hard to convey their impact in words alone.

The brainchild of Sandy Spieler, In the Heart of the Beast is that exemplary thing: an arts organization that collaborates with other groups, including schools and neighborhoods, to create and truly transform communities, in an inclusive, sustained, genuine and original way. I can only imagine the many lives that have been affected by its artistry and vision. Mine certainly has.

At the end of a long winter in Minnesota, the In the Heart of the Beast May Day parade, ceremony, and festival infuse participants with renewed hope, creativity, and passion. Go to this page to see some of the beautiful posters created by Sandy Spieler over the years, as well as a list of themes of past celebrations. And for those of you in the Twin Cities, please contribute my enthusiasm to the parade!

Obama and the Dalai Lama

Many thanks to Martha S. for sending me this "picture of happiness and joy – a photo of two extraordinary humans." As she put it, "This photo speaks volumes as to hope and potentiality."

We are very fond of the Dalai Lama here in Bloomington, Indiana, where he has family connections. He has visited a number of times, causing a huge flurry of excitement (and prompting visits from Richard Gere and others). Some of the young people I know have had the privilege of meeting him.

There are two Tibetian monestaries here in Bloomington. The Dagom Gaden Tensung Ling Tibetan Buddhist Monastery represents the Gelugpa lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. The Tibetan Mongolian Buddhist Cultural Center hosted the Dalai Lama. It has a summer camp and grounds dotted with colorful cottages.

You see a lot of "Free Tibet" bumper stickers in Bloomington. One of my favorite memories of the Lotus Festival is of standing next to a Tibetan Buddhist monk during a Balkan Beat Box concert under a big tent. We were both grinning ear to ear, amazed by the antics of those wild and crazy musicians. The Tibetan monks make large beautiful sand mandalas during the Lotus Festival. Here is what they say about that:

On several occasions DGTL monks in cooperation with visiting monks have created sacred sand mandalas to bring healing energies to local and regional communities. Over a period of days or weeks, monks work meticulously to construct the image of an individual deity's celestial mansion from millions of grains of brightly colored sand and ground gemstones. The resulting mandala, which is deeply meaningful to tantric practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism, represents a map by which the ordinary mind can be transformed into an enlightened mind.

When the mandala is finished, the monks perform a sacred ceremony, destroying the mandala, distributing some of the sand to onlookers, and pouring the rest into community streams or rivers; the streams and rivers, in turn, send the blessed sands on a journey to heal all sentient beings. The swift destruction of the completed mandala often dismays Westerners, but it is a central part of the painting ritual, symbolizing impermanence, an important concept in Buddhist philosophy.

Martha's message came with a note from Slim Chandra-Shekar, of the Gayatri Project: "At 11.00 p.m. EST on election day, when Obama was declared President-Elect of the United States, there was a palpable shift in the energy of the country and of the world. It was not just moments of joy and celebration, but an upward shift in the collective consciousness of the human race!" You can learn more (and hear some prayerful music) here.

Lotus in the Park

Yesterday I worked at the Bloomingfoods booth at Third Street Park, during the free-to-the-public Lotus in the Park portion of the Lotus World Music and Arts Festival.

It was a gorgeous day, and the park was filled with people waltzing, playing with their children, attending music workshops, making art, and greeting friends. Musicians from around the world took the stage and united us.

My job was to serve locally-made brats and beef burgers with grilled onions. We also had vegetarian chili, and a local mushroom burger (also known as the fungi - 'fun-guy' - burger) made with shiitakes, criminis, and portabello mushrooms. Lots of spritzers, Musgrave Orchard apple cider, Needmore Oatcakes, and other treats.

Our prices were amazing: $2 for burgers (or 3 for $5), $3 for brats (or 2 for $5). I ask you, has McDonalds ever done anything like that?! The food was affordable and delicious, and the customers very friendly and appreciative.

Who organizes all of this? Our renagade band of proud community organizers, including 'Rags' on the grill (from Nick's English Hut), and his wife Susan, manager of the original Bloomingfoods in the alley off Kirkwood. Here is a picture of the two of them from our Salsa Contest, where they give guacamole and salsa making demos.

Nick's was in the national news last spring when Barack Obama just happened to stop by. Rags was wearing his 'Vote Obama' button yesterday, as were lots of other folks in the park. We had wonderful volunteers at our booth, including a software designer from Washington DC who came to Lotus for the week-end, Earnie and Martha from the co-op, and a great guy named Mikeal, a new student at IU.

I saw scores of worthy community organizers: people who work on food security, housing issues, Habitat for Humanity, mental health and disability support, improving our schools (or starting new ones), and spreading the positive potential of the arts.

I am so fortunate to live in a place where these dedicated community organizers – some of the finest people you could ever know – enjoy the respect of our mayor! Together we seem to be achieving good things, not least of which was a very mellow, beautiful, calm, peaceful, contented day in the park.

Raucous, Soulful Northern Realms

Maybe I was a fiddler in a former life. With ancestors in Norway, Scotland, and Ireland, it's entirely possible. (Though I'm not sure about former lives: are we constrained to particular genetic pathways or specific geographical regions?) But how else to explain the hold that 'contemporary-traditional' music from Northern European countries has on me?

The Lotus Festival opened last night with its Northern Realms concert, featuring the groups below. At the end of the night they all shared the stage to play 3 tunes – a case of that immediate, intense 'file sharing' musicians have maintained for centuries, whenever two or three are gathered together. Here were over a dozen...and it was raucous, soulful, witty and transcendent.

I've pulled the info below from the Lotus Fest website. If you click on the video links, you too can be transported.

WALTZ WITH ME

Waltz with Me is the brainchild of Norwegian Hardanger fiddle virtuoso Annbjørg Lien, whose cohorts are fiddler Mats Edén, cellist Christine Hanson, and old-time fiddle master Bruce Molsky, The music of Waltz with Me crosses cultural and genre boundaries, moving from bluegrass, to Celtic, to Swedish fiddle music with ease and grace. Sponsored by Women of Lotus and IU West European Studies Center, Friends of Old Time & Celtic Music.
Artist website

JULIE FOWLIS

Julie Fowlis’s precise, lilting voice and mastery of Gaelic folk songs have earned her a list of awards as long as your arm, including BBC Radio 2’s Folk Singer of the Year for 2008. A native of North Uist, Scotland—where the majority of residents speak Gaelic as their first language–she sings in Scottish Gaelic, making ancient songs of the Hebridean Islands accessible to audiences around the world. She plays whistles, pipes, and other instruments, too. Her live performances move from tragic ballads, to light airs, to lilting, nonsensical “mouth music,” offering audience a rare listen to beautiful music from a rugged, ancient way of life. Sponsored by Women of Lotus and IU West European Studies Center, Friends of Old Time & Celtic Music.
Artist website | Video

FRIGG

The seven young musicians of Frigg play exquisite, lyrical string music rooted in Finnish and Norwegian traditions, with a hint of North American and Irish folk twang. The group contains three young Järveläs, two sons and a daughter of the most famous fiddle family in Finland, whose fathers and uncles founded the Finnish fiddle ensemble JPP. Frigg’s traditional sounds are supercharged with innovative arrangements, and combined with mandola, cittern, double bass, guitar and dobro. These Lotus fan favorites appear for one night only at this year’s Lotus Festival (Thursday). Sponsored by Women of Lotus, IU West European Studies, and IU Inner Asian and Uralic National Resource Center.
Artist website | Video

Lotus is Coming!

Each year the mid-sized midwestern city where I live is enriched for a few magical days, thanks to the Lotus World Music and Arts Festival. Musicians come from all over the world to perform in tents, churches, and the Buskirk-Chumley Theater, a renovated movie house. Our local food co-op, Bloomingfoods, sells food and drink, and the streets pulse with energy and rhythms from around the globe.

The Lotus Festival is only possible because of hundreds of volunteers. A small dedicated staff coordinates everything, working tirelessly to acquire passports for artists, raise funds, secure venues, publicize the event, and make it all remarkable. When the festival is over, they even remember to send out thank you cards.

Here's a little something I made to sit on my desk, to help me recall how lucky I am to have this event in my life. It's part of my effort to transform objects (and therefore the world) via images and Mod-Podge. (A modest aspiration, but someone has to do it.)

First I found a wonderful glass heart at Goodwill for $1.99. (I'm collecting those now, for future projects: the heart is a special genre of glassware, it appears.)

I glued to the bottom (face up) the note of thanks I once received from Lotus Fest assistant director LuAnne Holladay, a writer who also makes beautiful notecards and folding books.

I finished the bottom with a piece of wool felt, in the same blue as the lotus on the card. Voila. If I could say that in sixty languages, I would!

On Thursday night, while much of the world watches Sarah Palin and Joe Biden fight it out in the VP debate, I'll be at a Lotus concert, hearing music by Finnish and Norwegian fiddlers in Frigg.

Named for the Norse goddess who is the patron of marriage, motherhood, love and fertility, Frigg will thrill us with the message that the cosmos – in spite of everything – is big and generous, feisty, fertile and good.

They have a new CD called Economy Class: perfect for today's climate. Buy it!