Ritual Dance

Here's the late, great Michael Hedges performing my favorite piece of his, "Ritual Dance," at Esalen. This really brings me back; the singer in my old band made me a tape of Hedges' stuff back about 20 years or so and his playing really blew me away.

I was looking him up because I remembered Hedges had died in a car accident in California in 1997 and I wondered if it was on the notoriously perilous Route 1 drive through Big Sur. I'll tell you, that will open up a chakra or two. Just imagine thousand-foot drops waiting patiently at the end of hairpin turns and barely a guardrail in sight. The views are breathtakingly magnificent, until you begin to contemplate how easily you could become one with the landscape. Happily, I found it much easier to take once I popped some Dramamine.

I've often contemplated how ecstatic countercultures tend to pop up in hazardous landscapes, like New Orleans, San Francisco, Key West, Big Sur, Black Rock. Maybe there's something about the constant possibility of instant karma that primes the brain to receive more elevated information than you might get in Des Moines or Schenectady.

At Esalen, I was very keenly aware of how huge the ocean is- and how fragile the coastline is- when it was there outside my window. I guess that I need a more sedate environment to explore the dangerous lands within.