me prattling on about books, art, dharma, and life in Mullumbimby.
Every November a party erupts in this little town - the annual Mullumbimby Music Festival. By Thursday we are spotting the visitors - a girl in a cowboy hat and flyaway glasses cruises past in a 60's holden station wagon. There is a brightly-painted camper van parked outside the supermarket, Qld. number plates. More buskers than usual - dread-locked kids with didgeridoos selling handmade jewellery on the footpath next to a spiffy guy with a red bowtie playing ukelele.
My personal highlights:
1. Seeing Den sing in the Dusty Eskies, an all-male Russian choir.
2. Doing a quick shop on Saturday morning in the main street, where someone is pumping that happy happy "Happy" song outside a cafe. Four or five people are dancing. I dump my shopping basket and join them. We are all grinning at eachother. People walking past smile, wiggle their hips. Dancing in the street, why don't we do it more often?
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| street parade heads off |
3. Another dancing-in-the street moment: there's a mob outside the music shop drumming up hot African rythyms. A couple of them actually African.There's a fringe-festival happening on the pavements. The hippy-types who perhaps can't afford tickets. Again, a wonderful dance, on the pavement till I am hot and sweaty.
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| DustyEsky male choir |
4. Mario, Queen of The Circus - what a clever, funny, adorable guy and bloody brilliant performer. Star of the festival, along with the Dusty Eskies. Check him out.
5. Harry Angus and all his mates at the Village Vanguard Jazz Club. Not an electronic synthesiser in sight. Old-fashioned musical virtuosity - young guys with their Melbourne beatnik beards and dark suit coats - playing piano, sax, trumpet, trombone, double bass. Singing like angels - old songs and new. All having a ball, all giving eachother room to improvise and dazzle.
The hardest thing about the festival is dealing with Monday morning. The little holiday is over, I must prepare for writing group; gotta turn attention to emails, laundry, home maintenance and getting F out of bed and off to school. Actually, that last proved impossible. He'd been frolicking in the pool at midnight with his school friends after the last gig on Sunday night. We hardly saw him all weekend. He slept till noon on Monday.
I think I was dancing when the feeling washed over me: 'I am relaxed' Yes, relaxed. Not worried about anything. Just here in this body in this moment. It's easy.
Yet I seem to spend quite a lot of time not exactly relaxed. Worried about ticking off the to-do list. Cranky with D because he still hasn't hung the pictures and tidied up the mess on the deck and we haven't heard back from the solar panel guys and Felix spends too much time plugged into his iPod and not doing his homework and I have to get a skin cancer check and the garden is a mess and there’s a crack in my windscreen and Tony Abbott is wrecking the country and...
More dancing.
