OPENING PRAYER – INVOCATION – play the G bowl
Please put your hands lightly on your throat. You are invited to close your eyes.
You have been called here today by your own voice. What is in your voice? Everything. You. Are.
If you were born healthy, the first thing you did was make noise with your new self. It was there that day. Every need of yours became a cry. Singing was how you stayed alive. Then you grew up and learned how to be much quieter, but who you were inside your voice stayed the same. In whispered things to a lover. Every time you scolded your dog, called your cat, stubbed your toe on the leg of the table, looked someone in the eyes and lied about a tiny or not tiny thing. That mind blowing divine orgasm where you made noises that sounded like creatures from another galaxy, the time the taxi almost hit you and you screamed WHAT THE FUCK at the top of your lungs and all of NYC went silent for one millionth of a second due to the awesome anger of your survival instinct channeled into sound waves. The lines of Shakespeare and Walt Whitman that you memorized so they could flow freely through you. All the Kate Bush, all the Johann Sebastian Bach that bloomed in your mouth like roses. The things you say to yourself in the bathroom when you are all alone. The time that the worst thing in the world happened to you, and you stopped speaking for six months.
It’s all in there. Every time you introduce yourself and say your name it’s all in there.
Everybody say your name. Ready, go:
Say it again.
Say it loud. Say it quiet. Say it long. Say it short. Say it high. Say it low. Say it over and over until it loses all meaning.
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Today is the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year, when the sun is in its ultimate power in our hemisphere.
In researching the solstice, here was the passage that I liked the most: ”It was believed that on midsummer’s eve, the walls separating the worlds of the spirits and humans became as thin as tissue paper. The spirits of field and forest, of river and stream — all the inhabitants of that inner world — were free to pass back and forth between those walls and play among humans. It was a festival of fire, celebrating the full force of the sun-star. It was a time for feasting, a summer Christmas for play and pretending.
We’d say, without much deep thought, that sunlight is a generally happy thing.
Think about what the sun really is.
Our sun is a below average dying ball of radioactive plasma and boiling hot farts and someday it will swallow us all and incinerate everything we have ever been and it will be awesome.
This sun I find more compelling. Its dark side.
Wherever there is sun there is shadow, and the brighter the sunlight, the denser the shadow will be.
Not the shadows on pavement and on walls, in humans. And the shadow isn’t necessarily dark. Jung says that 90% of our psychological shadow is actually pure gold, bright like the sun, and we are very very afraid of it because we think it’ll consume us. And it will.
The sun blinds us, we’re blind to ourselves, the weight and heat of our own gold is so heavy, it sears our hands, it’s too much to take on so we give it to others: here’s my gold, it’s too hot and heavy, carry it for me, I can’t handle it, let me see in you the person I’m afraid I am, or the person I’m dying to become.
Today on the solstice you have come forth to withstand the heat of your own sun, to take the temperature of all the things in yourself you haven’t yet claimed for your own, to sing yourself into a fever, to let your shining center scorch you from the inside out and be baptized in your own sweat.
So today we celebrate the light of the sun but only on the condition that we pay homage to its darkness.
(We then sang some Hildegard, and then we sang “Black Hole Sun” together while Zoob, dressed in an entirely black outfit, invited people to come hug him as a proxy for their own shadows.)