When we want to feel...

What do we turn to when we want to feel something? When we want to touch further into and beyond our everyday, lifelong tasks, needs and challenges? Or when we long for some way to fit what we are experiencing into a context that 'makes sense' - when we want to fly with our eyes closed, want to ruminate on love, grief, magic, loss, beauty, excitement or fear? I myself have turned to music and poetry, more than anything, when I want to feel deeply, the experience of being alive...

Outlaw Dervish was born out of this turning, as well as the respect/full ashes of Pele's Tears - a project that seemed to come together out of nowhere. In late 2006 myself and a cohort were discussing the possibilities for collaborating together and almost right away he found and secured a live show for us. The performance was to be a session between four creators - a rowdy, charismatic Drummer, a transporting, awe-inspiring Dancer, a firey and passionate Flamenco Guitarist and myself, a Mystical Spoken Word Poet and Didjeriduist . At the time, I didn't have a lot of expectation about that gig, and saw it as much more of an opportunity to kind of 'jam' and have some fun. The evening was a knock-out amongst knock-outs and we ended up bringing the house down. That one experience led us to at least one years' worth of effort to get even slightly close to what we created that first night.

In the meantime , I was recording a Downtempo ~ Trip Hop album with the 'Surgeon of Sound', Ben Leinbach. Eventually I realized that much more than an album, the collection of songs we were creating could become the calling card and actual set list for what I wanted to do on stage. Hence, when Pele's Tears became something that was no longer supportable, for various reasons, I decided that the next project would bear the name of this latest CD I had co-created with Ben. We completed and released that album in June 2008.

That music was and is also born from the dawning realization that I had about the status of one of the great poet's to come out of the Sufi Mystic Tradition in the 12th century... Hafiz. A poet who is still read, contemplated, felt and enjoyed today, and a controversial word-smith who gives us lines such as ,

" I am like a heroin addict in my longing for a sublime state ".

Coleman Barks , who is well known for his translations and stirring presentations of the poetry of Rumi - perhaps the most well-known Sufi Mystic Poet and the most widely read poet of all time - refers to Hafiz as "the Bad Boy of Persian Poetry". While writing, saying, performing and studying my own poetry, a humble offering, to be sure, when compared to such as Hafiz and Rumi, I nonetheless became acutely aware of my own status as a sort of outlaw poet. Slightly before birthing Outlaw Dervish, I had been traveling in India, studying and practicing a form of therapeutic healing / energy work called Clarity Breathwork. At that time, I was going through an experience of feeling that I somehow - as always? - didn't fit into the structure of the culture I was participating in... and perhaps, at the end of the day, didn't really want to. This was even moreso apparent to me as a Westerner who stood out like a sore thumb there. I cannot think of anytime that I was in India in public when there weren't groups of people noticing me and pointing fingers, (and laughing!) and wondering about the 6'4" blonde skinny man with facial piercings walking about in Indain clothing. I have always chosen trappings that set me apart and attracted attention, and in this strange land I seemed to be the ultimate stranger. While I was in India, my own sense of this became clear to me as it never had before - the feeling of not fully belonging to any socially agreed upon group or community , and the sense that I had to define and accept my own experience and the ramifications of it for myslef , was right in my face at every moment. I think that this life-long identity has flowed from a sense deep inside that we can call into question our experience through a variety of channles. The more I have reflected upon it , the more it has seemed to me - and it still does - that the true place of a poet is to adroitly, adeptly and articulately comment upon the nature of things as she or he sees them, both inside the soul and outside in the world at large - for the sake of some inclusive and compassionate truth. Along with this comes a real disposition towards a delight beyond delight... an urgency towards ecstasy and finding ways to touch into the realm of time beyond time, Eternity, as William Blake and many others have referred to it. One of my own poems uses this kind of language to refer to identity and experience,

" Our deepest longing is for this, skin of a skin of a silken wind,
rising up out our deepest yearning wells,
sailing upon the mere moment of a voice, singing,
'HEAVEN HOLDS A SENSE OF WONDER, AND I WANTED TO BELIEVE' ".
(the last line is a quote from Silence, by Delerium)

In witnessing such moments as the one which brought these words forth to describe a realationship with the sacred , I feel there is a kind of threat involved in recognizing that this human leaning towards spiritual connection often contains the crazed elements of obsession which one finds in romantic and sensual expression. One begins to get a sense of how a dervish can become an outlaw (and vive versa?), especially when using such metaphors. Add to this the way Hafiz describes his longing for God (or, as Sufis sometimes refer to the Divine - the Friend, the Beloved) through the portal of addiction.

Dervishes spin in a ceremonial whirling dance, praying while they do so, seeking to open their hearts wide and full to that which is so far beyond understanding that poets give it such descriptions. Outlaws are found on the perimeters of society, because they do not fully accept and participate in the shared and agreed upon reality (comforts?) of the people at large. And sometimes the outlaw and the mystic are one in the same, because what they come back with, after the dance, out of the prayer, form feeling the music of the ceremony - and even during simple, everyday moments that suddenly become transparent, is so startling and challenging to the common ideas humanity has about the Sacred and Life, that the only place for them in this world is on the fringes...

Sometimes, however, the fringes and the center collide and mix and it becomes hard to tell what is the mainstram and what is the slipstream. As some have pointed out - this is the moment when things really start to get interesting. Stay tuned for some exciting collisons!