So I’m struck with a novel bit of fan-dom.  It’s been a long dry spell, I think Ralph Macchio in Karate Kid was the last time I got this riled up??  I think I’ve resisted it since the tabloid-pimping-boobtoob-hustling-fame-game has historically pissed me off as a master plight to hypnotize the masses into forgetting their own power and letting personal giftings hibernate untried. Now that I’m practicing letting go a la ‘what you resist persists’ and leaning into embodying my latent power and light with complete abandon,  buzzing adoration of current thought-leaders —aka fan-dom— is flooding back in a wash of heart palpitations & major swooning . . . . Among my new crushes (also known as Teachers) are: Amanda Palmer, Sera Beak, Stoya, Kris Carr, Danielle LaPorte, Rising Appalachia, and sliding in an easy first (she blushes) : Nahko & Medicine for the People. Based in my frozen needs around earning a precious workaholic daddy’s attention, he pretty much had me at this line:  “….you got the keys….. but i’ll never keep my door locked….you can always come right in….and if my arms are full you can bet your sweet ass i will drop that shit right then…i might be busy… but i always got some time to surrender to your beauty”….   !?!?!?!!?!?!?  Freak out.  Trigger.  Melt.  Lyrically laying out the map for transforming a masculine-overdrive society to the present-moment-minded sensuality of feminine consciousness.   If you ask me.     So when I caught facebook-wind of their video contest for the song Budding Trees, I was flabbergasted by the instantaneous and complete physiological “do this now” that flooded my body.  Overwhelmingly.  Adrenaline whoosh, spirit-created to override my “…but that’s just not something i do…..”  Oh yeah……… Desire! I remember this.   An engraved fuck-you to Reason’s “Reasons Why Not.”    I stumbled on the contest late but saw I had a handfull of days before deadline, so I made a list of images/places that aligned with this song that had already made a home in my soul.   I carried my camera with me on bike rides, to studio, and in the garden and found surprise collaborators with a field of dancing wheat and a masterful thunder storm.  And my mom.  Even goofed a bit with stop motion.  Here’s what I created, with the willing camera-work of Mama, Morgan, and Monica (thanks, ya’ll!):

Watching the other video entries (google search youtube MFTP Budding Trees Video Contest), my typical residual patterns of crusty-egoic better-than/worse-than dissolved into a softness of celebration, of sacred curiosity, of connection.  Tenderness in my feeling-body, getting visual food to help grok how songs crawl into each of our souls and lay eggs that hatch into harmonies that carry us back home, toward each other.  Toward the whole. Toward God.

Yesterday they released the final cut.  When I watched it I remembered this fantasy I used to have of heaven when I was little.   That heaven would be getting to feel inside of all the bodies alive at once.  Like…… “I want to Be all of the people who are taking showers right now all over the whole Earth” or “I want to Be all of the people walking.”   Sketches, right?  Art is practice.  Creation in step with the technologies we’re playing with.    To my heart, this is good art ~ casting a wide playful web toward embodying that sense of Now-Heaven-Is.