September 2012
Monday, February 25, 2013
Sunday, February 24, 2013
A Ritual to Abolish Fear and Self-Doubt
FLOWN enacted a public ritual to abolish our intimate demons of fear and self-doubt at a punk show with friends and strangers on a Thursday night in September of 2012 at a dive bar in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
On the day of the show we gathered around the kitchen table and engaged in a stream-of-consciousness writing exercise using strips of newspaper and colored pencils. We scribbled down the litany of insults, hate words, fear-driven vitriol, undermining assurances, condescending fuck-you's, and iron-clad inadequacies that echo in our minds, distorting themselves in the echo of their emptiness and looming large in our psyches. We have magnified the power of these demons by keeping them silent and hoarding them for ourselves. On this day we choose to expose them, to name them, and to destory them.
"Lazy. Stupid. Is this what you have done with your privilege? This is terrible. Give up. Why even try? Dumb. Slut. Ugly. Waste of time. Worthless."
We inflated a balloon, filled with hot air, and sealed it. Then we slathered each strip of hate in a petrifying bath of flour and water. We covered the balloon with this cavalcade of vicious fear and we let it dry. Once dry, we sealed it with a layer of paint. Each of us inscribed a face on this hardened head, our ritual sacrifice. Illuminating the faces of our demons made us laugh, and laugh, and laugh. Soon we will destroy you.
...
We went into the garden and breathed the lingering evening air. We placed our hands on the kitchen herbs in their boxes: rosemary, sage, lavender, thyme, lemonbalm, peppermint. We reveled in their earthiness, their goodness, their promise of healing. We felt the sun on their leaves and felt the roughness of their branches. We inhaled deeply, filling our heads with love, connectedness, and the smell of dirt. We plucked stems and leaves and thanked the plants for their gifts to us.
Back inside, the table overflowing with herbs and seeds, we sat and wrote love letters to our demons.
"It will be ok. You are loved. You have time. Thank you. Trust yourself. You are beautiful. You can do this."
We opened up a bowlful of little plastic prizes from the gumball machine at the supermarket. Emptied of candy, we filled each plastic shell with affirmations, herbs, seeds, heart-shaped rings, crystals, and tiny blessings of love.
With great fanfare, we popped the balloon inside our hateful demonhead. Shriveled bits of plastic stuck to the inside of its empty skull. Then we scooped up piles of our little plastic love-bombs and filled our demonhead to the brim with affirmations and herbs from the garden.
...
At midnight, when all the other bands were done, we processed, three hooded witches, through the spilled beer and cigarette butts and strung our demon from a broken mic stand in the middle of the concrete floor in the back room at Tommy's Tavern. We chanted our hate-speech, hardened in the skull of this effigy. At first in a whisper, it grew quickly to a cacophony of shrieks: ragged, bilious words, spit out with greater and greater urgency, a whirling dervish of the most wretched thoughts amplified and echoed until they became an incomprehensible noise, transformed into a litany of feedback and decaying screams. Who knows delivered the first blow. The demonhead swung like a pinata, its faces blurred in the dark and distorted by the guitars crashing into it, ripping it asunder.
...
The smell of fresh dirt and white sage explodes into the room. Geodes fall on the beer-slick concrete and shatter. Prizes scatter across the floor. Friends and strangers shout and grab in the dark for a piece of the light or the noise.
FLOWN
September 2012
Monday, February 11, 2013
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