You can’t achieve the Island of Delights
Without a rugged soul to light the way.
Through sin, despair and ever-clouded nights,
You can’t achieve the Island of Delights
Until Jasconius extends his might
And fallen angels counsel you and say:
“You can’t achieve the Island of Delights
Without a rugged soul to light the way.”
“After hearing from St. Barinthus, Brendan quickly picked out fourteen monks from his whole community. He took these into an oratory, where he said to them, ‘Dearly beloved comrades in arms, I need your advice and your help. I’ve decided: if it is God’s will, I am going to find this Land of the Promise of the Saints that Father Barinthus told us about. What do you think?’ ”
Camped out in a fellow faster’s backyard farm over the weekend. We didn’t make the Friday afternoon get-together, but we made it just in time for the cacao ceremony.
This was his second such event, which is turning into an annual thing around the equinox. Others might call it a kind of music festival in the woods, but my buddy wouldn’t want it to degrade into something so simple. It’s about presence, community and shared experience. So, there are family dinners, meditations and plenty of hangout time.
I felt lucky to meet so many incredible musicians. They all play beautifully, but more than that, they’re great people.
It can be a strange experience, befriending folks young enough to be your kids. Having my daughter there also brought a weird and unexpected sort of energy that I think was ultimately appreciated. She kept insisting on giving people acorns. It was important to her that everyone had an equal amount.
The entire weekend was another reminder that I’m not young anymore. Not in how anyone acted, or in how they treated me—I considered them all peers, and I think that sentiment was more or less reciprocated. No, it was their friendships that ousted me. The way they were with one another. Life was still a game to them, and the way to play it was together.
I once had friends like that. From the age of about 12 to about 28, all I did was either hang out or make plans to do so. I didn’t play an instrument back then, but I did play with words; almost nothing I said was meant to be taken seriously. Humor was my way of playing the game, and the whole idea was to toss ideas in the air to see how they landed.
These days, I suppose things have gotten a little humorless. There are a handful of reasons why I talk to kids more than I do parents at birthday parties; there's a distance issue. Adults talk Netflix, sports and the best backyard flat top to use on the Fourth. I practice calligraphy, hit up the woods at night to converse with woodland creatures and go to my buddy’s cacao ceremony on the weekend. While I wasn’t looking, I have become a bit of a strange individual.
One of the folks I met on the farm was explaining his situation with his bandmates to me. They were all there, too, but not playing as a band. They were taking a break for awhile—both from playing together and from music more generally. After a solid year or two of hitting it hard trying to gain momentum for themselves, they couldn’t quite make the band work financially and they were burned out. Considering how well they play, this was a sadly familiar outrage. Ours is a culture that rewards quantified outcomes and impulses; those who offer presence and meaningful experiences are left to fight it out for online virality and its false promises of success.
He had a lot going for him, though, and I’m glad that he knew it. Playing that well is a gift for anyone who hears it, sold-out stadium or no. And the circumstance of trying desperately to make the band work put him on a course to meet the people he calls his family. Even among the iniquities of the modern music industry, he’s coming out ahead. But I also understand that it’s hard to appreciate a problem that hasn’t been experienced.
When Saint Brendan sailed west to find the Land of the Promise of the Saints, he brought fourteen souls along with him. Fourteen others who would lose their way in the misty West, find Judas upon the rock and learn the strange lessons from Jasconius. Hard travels require rugged souls indeed. But part of that means having the prudence not to go it alone. A very long time ago, about the time my new friends from the weekend had their first birthdays, I, too, had roughly the same number of compatriots as Brendan did. These days, I’d settle for half that. But it’s not like I’ve been braving the open seas lately; my voyages have become a series of milk runs, and that’s part of the problem. There’s nothing like a quest or two for Happenstance to show up and start making introductions.
