Most Distant Space Objects: Turning Flips through the Air at the Harbin Dance, "Throw Down Your Heart," Why not sing with friends ... over the phone?

I visited Harbin yesterday and today ...



Here's an ongoing, occasional record, as ethnographic insight, into what happens at Harbin.



The weather in early December is so nice in California. We may have had only around 7 days of rain so far this fall. And the temperature is generally mild.

I went first to the pools. Alligator day had just ended. It's a regular draining and cleaning of the pools, which perhaps sometimes makes unexpecting guests feel like alligators. People in the remaining 2 feet of water or so, at its lowest, may also look like alligators, compared with when the water is high; people often look beautiful, nude, in the warm pool. People can soak in the heart-shaped pool on Alligator day, though, which is just a little cooler than the body temperature water of the warm pool. Alligator day can also be 'festive' - people chat with each other in the warm pool as the water is filling up, and the warm pool is a little less meditatively quiet than usual. I've occasionally seen large numbers of rubber duckies in the pools, as well as lots of kids in the warm pool, when the water is low, whereas kids aren't allowed in the warm pool when the water is high.

At the Tuesday night dance in the conference center, the music was great and very danceable. The space is harmonious, beautiful in a modern way with a lot of wood, and really well designed - especially for Harbin workshops and dances. I found myself turning flips through the air onto a large pile of pillows during the dance. The dances are mostly hippie boogies.

I'm amazed that Harbin in a way has institutionalized "the party," that they have created an adult playground, where kids, hippies and Bohemians of all kinds come to play. This thinking comes directly from counterculture and the 1960s. Harbin is very cool in 2009.

I wonder, too, how Harbin is performative in an anthropological sense. And while these are my ethnographic observations above, Harbin attracts a significant number of people these days, even in mid week in the winter; so variety and subjectivity of experience is diverse, and, as a whole, represents Harbin's 'culture,' - a pretty cool fabric of life. Writing or representing Harbin ethnographically might be complemented richly with an ethno-wiki-virtual-world-graphy approach, where many Harbin folks might represent it over years.


At 9, I went to see "Béla Fleck: Throw Down Your Heart," in the Harbin theater. In so doing I missed the Full Moon Ceremony in the warm pool. "Throw Down Your Heart" is an inspiring musical collaboration between a very fine banjo player (Béla Fleck), interested in African music, and musicians in a number of African villages in east Africa. The very inspirational Tanzanian musician Aniyo (sp?) seemed to have been personally transformed by music-making, in a very happy way. At one point after making music with Béla, Aniyo says "We are together," which is what music can do, and did for them in this film.

[THROW DOWN YOUR HEART, directed by Sascha Paladino, follows American banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck on his journey to Africa to explore the little known African roots of the banjo and record an album. Béla’s boundary-breaking musical adventure takes him to Uganda, Tanzania, The Gambia, and Mali, and provides a glimpse of the beauty and complexity of Africa].

After waking, I went back to the pool area in the morning. In the pool area, I began re-reading Ish's book "Oneness in Living." It's Ishvara's (Harbin's founder in 1972) remarkable record of Harbin language and thinking, and the 1960s and 70s, the New Age, and much else. I'll return to it again soon. After soaking in the pools, I ate lunch by myself outside in the now-dormant garden, sitting on the ground near an apple tree, not far from Harbin's beautiful temple (built in 2005).

Harbin creates a harmony, and kinds of togetherness, that are very far-reaching, and which emerge significantly from life around the pools. Harbin reminds me of so much, but a little, here, of the Beatle's song "Come Together." I get 'there' {to 'coming together'} at Harbin. You can too.



**

Time to read Alan Watts closely. He wrote about some of the themes I explore in this blog, I'm realizing, during the 1960s.


***

Why not sing with friends ... over the phone, for example? Why isn't this a common practice?


****


This is far out:

Most distant objects seeable with the naked eye:
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2008/brightest_grb.html












(http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2009/12/most-distant-space-objects-turning.html - December 2, 2009)