Saturday night, my sister and I attended an event called EARTHDANCE 2009, described as a “Gathering of Global Peace at All World Acres,” as vendors. She sells good used books to supplement her Social Security. Since the plan for the event was that Saturday activities would run from 3 PM until 7 AM Sunday, my sister asked me to help her, because I am more of a “ night owl” than she or our friend Alice are. While they did have the “Global Synchronized Prayer for Peace at 7:00 PM,” my observation of the event as a whole was that for most of its participants it was really a “rave.”
While I would not say that the DJ's were playing my preferred style of music, I did enjoy most of it, more than my sister did. A lot of it was in the “Techno-Trance” category more or less, with which I once experimented creating on the computer for a contest. Although I did not finish my entry in time for the deadline of the contest, I did enjoy learning about the techniques. However, I have to admit that it was hard doing any studying with this type of music being played. Nevertheless, I did object to the suggestion of some in my age group that we were too old to enjoy it.
While I am a great lover of quiet and often play no music at all when I am home, once again I don't fit my age group, this time because I did in fact enjoy most of the music. However, there were some pieces that I actually despised, but that was most often because of the lyrics rather than the music itself. Nevertheless, in many ways neither I nor my sister fit in with this crowd, not an uncommon circumstance for us with regard to popular culture. Furthermore, the state of my arthritis kept me from walking around much, preferring to sit as much as possible.
All this created the perfect situation for others who might not be fully at ease there to gravitate toward our site and spend time talking with us. Whether it was the young man who had found teachings on the mental foundations of “success” but sought something more profoundly spiritual or the young lady who was there out of curiosity but found herself discussing how she had found her Roman Catholic upbringing failing her now and sought through Hinduism and Buddhism something deeper or another young man who had studied the very practical principles of Permaculture in Australia where it originated but was now seeing the deeper aspects of the inadequacy of consumerism as a way of life. In none of these or other conversations that we had that night did we preach or proselytize, but rather we merely talked about our lives and experiences and observations. Of course, some of these come from my particular perspective of having come close to death repeatedly and yet surviving, all within the context of knowing that I have lived multiple previous lifetimes.
As things turned out, this crowd was not really a group of readers, although we did sell enough to cover our expenses and give us gas money for the van. My sister may even have gotten enough out of it to cover a trip to the grocery store, but little more. However, with these conversations, we did stay later than we had planned. Nevertheless, when I observed what I thought might be illegal drug use, we decided that it was time to call it a night and pack up and go home.
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