Confesticles and Wymns Rhydms..

Me & my favourite Jesus lovin' cats

So not too long ago we landed back here in Australia. We decided years back that we'd return to Oz every 2.5-3 years so that we could reconnect with family and friends and our broader Jesus loving community because we deeply value those relationships, and so that's just what we're doing. It's been an interesting re-enty in Australian life and there have been plenty of moments of reverse culture shock that I wasn't quite mentally prepared for (more about that in a later post) but one thing the Wild Flower and I were really keen to do was get away on Confest 2014!

Confest is essentially a volunteer driven festival that takes place in the bush about an hour outside of Deniliquin (only a lazy 11 hour drive from Sydney) and I'd say that in the 9 years we've been going its probably attracted a turn out of a few thousand people each year. The motto of Confest used to be something along the lines of "the gathering and sharing of ideas of what it means to be a happy and whole being" and so it relies on people voluntarily running workshops on whatever makes their heart sing the most.

 

Essentially, if you play an instrument/have a deep knowledge of something sacred/are skilled at celestial twerking (yes that really was a workshop this year!)/ etc. etc. etc. and one morning you wake up and feel like running a workshop, you make your way to the central meeting area, write it up on the workshop board and you might get nobody turning up, or you might strike gold and get five thousand people turning up.

 
I've always been excited to get away for these few days in the bush with thousands of other people who are interested in digging into the deeper things of life, of meaning and of spirituality. For those who know me, I'm pretty open about my favourite conversation topic being based around 'what do you believe about spirituality and why,' and so a festival that's designed for people to share their thoughts and beliefs on precisely this topic means a lot of the time I'm feeling like a kid in a candy shop.

 

I also feel pretty blessed by the crew that go along with year by year. In the past I've always known pretty much everyone I was going with pretty well before Confest, but this year there was bunch of amazingly wonderful cats I got to meet for the first time and had some sweet moments getting to know them and building some new relationships. Being my first time on Confest with kids meant that getting to spend as much time with people as I would have liked proved to be a more challenging experience than before, but I'll take what I can get, and what I got was certainly nothing worth complaining about.

 

Like most Confesters, our crew really loves the Confest magic and we always strive to invest our love and skills into making it a greater festival experience for everyone (and I feel I can say this without compromising because in general all of the creative energy and greatness comes from others in our crew and not from me! I just get the joy of riding on the back of some truly fantastic coattails!). Over the years we've put on parades, Jesus Easter Gatherings, bush sculpture workshops, meditation sessions, classic 80's pop rock jam sessions, acrobatic classes, Javanese inspired back lit puppetry shows, all of which have been amazing, but without a doubt one of my favourite highlights each year has got to be the Chai High Tea.

For weeks in advance we're baking treats, hoarding Chai ingredients and raiding op shops for the most garish and outrageous outfits possible. We decided this years theme was 'Oscar Wild goes to a Rave' so a bunch of us went storming throughout Confest singing and dancing and inviting people to join in the festivities which saw about 50 or more people rocking up to join in the good vibes.

 

There's always this moment at the start of the Chai High Tea (just after this blessing was offered from up on high) when the cloth covering the baked goods is pulled back and the place explodes into a cosmic free for all. With live music, platters of amazing food, pots of hot chai and a forest full of crazy shenanigans, really, how could it be anything less than amazing?

One especially great element is thats everyone's "welcome at the Chai High Tea, where the Chai is hot and the love is free!" Even if you're a dirty feral, or a high flying corporate, we don't mind, bring in the lame, bring in the blind, even bring in this sleazy bearded homeless lady on her way from a Phd graduation ceremony, everyone's welcome!

And if you ever get a chance, you should most definitely do what we did and get yourself into the same space as these fine creatures in the above image! We've known these cats for more than a decade now and suffice to say they're some of our favourite people on this green planet! Reverend Rainbird, Lady Wildwood and their lil ones live (& kind of run?!) the Homelands community up in Bellingen on the midnorth coast of NSW so if you're WWOOFing or looking for an amazing place in Oz to be, these are most assuredly the people for you!

A friend I was talking to about Confest yesterday was asking me a bunch of questions about my time and we had a great moment when he looked me in the eye and said "Let me get this straight, you spent 5 days at a Clothes Optional Hippy Festival in the middle of the bush and you don't have any crazy stories to tell?!" And I think that's kinda true (Banaras what have you done to me?!?). I had an amazing time and feel greatly encouraged, but "crazy" stories, not so much this time round. Upon reflection, I guess naked bike riders, dog whisperers, tantric energetics, polyamorous communities and packs of naked mud people running around pretending to be cavemen have all become a more normal feature in my life than I first realised.

 
It was however, very sweet wandering around and running into people we hadn't seen in a number of years, especially when those relationships felt like they just picked up exactly where they had left off. We first went on Confest in 2004 and have gone every year since (except for 2012-13 when we were overseas), and so you make a lot of "Confest friends" who because they live in Melbourne of somewhere outside of Sydney, you really only connect each year when you're back on site, but it is interesting how much Wild Flower and I value some of those relationships, even if we only spend a very small percentage of time together each year! We even got to catch up with a good friend we met in Varanasi!

 

We begin each morning at our campsite with a time of connection. It's such a beautiful way to begin each day; praying together, meditating on the Scriptures, someone sharing a reflection or teaching, speaking the love of Jesus into each others lives and getting into plenty of great music and singing.

I had two gorgeous moments during our morning times of devotion this year; the first was playing along to some Yeshu Bhajans (Jesus Devotion Music in Hindi) with Wild Flower who played her harmonium in front of other people for the very first time. I've played with countless people, countless times throughout my life, but sitting side by side with my gorgeous wife, our backs warming in the morning sun, singing and making music together, aaah, it'll be a sweet memory I'll hold with me for a long time to come. The other was sharing a Bluegrass song I wrote last year and hearing it sung by a group of people for the first time. Around eighteen months back I was going through a real Bluegrass Gospel phase and set myself a goal of writing a song in the genre, so to then have 25 people all stomping their feet and belting out a tune I'd written was a pretty surreal moment.

Prayers, Scriptures, Devotional Songs, This Crowd = Bliss.

Lastly, I have a small confession to make. I have a guilty pleasure that I indulge each year after Confest. On the trip home, it's not unusual need to stop for petrol in the first could of hours after leaving the site and it's par for the course that many Petrol stations will be adjacent to a McDonalds. Now in general I don't eat McDonalds (I think I went 15 years without touching the stuff) and I don't crave eating it while driving home from Confest, but I do LOVE trying to make eye contact with other dirty footed confesters while they're sheepishly running to their cars with bags full of maccas. I think people must feel like they're committing the ultimate betrayal; 4 days of mostly organic, vegetarian, local grown foods at a Hippy Festival, followed swiftly by Micky Dees! Truthfully I really don't mind what people eat, but the look of horror on people's faces when they see they've been caught out with a mouth full of cheeseburger is just too priceless to pass up! So if you're one of those people I've seen over the years then I must convey a giant thank you for making my drive home just that much more enjoyable!

More realistic..

So finally, if you find yourself wandering around Bliss or Tranquility one day and you come across this campsite, make sure you stop in and enjoy the hospitality of some of the finest & furriest Jesus lovin' folk this side of the Jordan.. he's the cat on the right.

Paint The Town Paan..

Step out your front door, it'll be there. Take a boat ride down the Ganga ('Ganges River'), it'll be there. Walk into a fancy looking Government office, you'd better believe it'll be there! Paan, otherwise known as betel nut, is as ubiquitous in Banaras as the holy cow! And no matter where you go you can be well assured that it won't be long before your eyes (and probably your feet) will stumble across a smattering of someone's most recent chewing session.

Paan is a chewing stimulant native to India and Pakistan and derives it's name from the Sanskrit word for 'leaf' or 'feather.' Due to it's psychoactive properties (most often tobacco) it's popular amongst hard working bicycle rickshaw wallas, auto rickshaw drivers, day laborers, taxi drivers, fruit sellers, tailers, fishermen, chai wallas, salesmen, water buffalo herders, businessmen, old ladies, ok, so it's pretty much popular amongst everyone. There's a pretty broad variety of Paan from the innexpensive to the slighty more pricey, but at its cheapest and nastiest it sells for only a couple of rupees (AU$0.08) per packet and once you've let it linger in your mouth for as long as you care to, it seems you can spit it out wherever the bloomin' hell you want.

I remember the first time I walked into my faculty building at Banaras Hindu University. The building is old and not particularly well cared for, but it's a university building and so it still looks big and official. As I walked inside the front doors, through the lobby area and began climbing the flights of stairs it was quite the shock to see that even inside a place as prestigious as BHU, the corners of every stair well, the end of every hallway and at the base of every window sill, the tell tail signature of someone offloading their Paan payload was still waiting there for the world to see.  

Sure it's gross, sure it's unhygienic, and sure it'll give you cancer, but the splatter often has a quiet charm about it if you're willing to accept it. It took me sometime to begin noticing but eventually I pulled out the camera and went for a walk to photograph some of the local "street art." This series represents just one 40 minute walk around my neighbourhood photographing the Paan stains in my local gullies. What this collection represents to me is that as long as there is Paan to be sold, there will be photographs to be taken.

Wild Foot At One..

"Running like a mad man down the center of the main road, with no shoes on, in the dead of night, in the south of India, that's what I was doing!" I replied. 

It was our lil Wild Foot's 1st birthday this past week and a large part of me is finding it terribly difficult to reconcile this with reality! One year old! Already! We call him Wild Foot because while he was still in the womb he would relentlessly try to kick the house down, and now that he's out in the big wide world nothing much at all has changed. We had a little 1st Birthday celebration for him with our family and the grandparents and at one point someone asked me what I was doing at this time 12 months earlier. That question sparked a memory of Wild Foot's birth which I had all but forgotten, and probably for good reason.

We live in Banaras which is in the North-East but had moved to Kerala, India's most southern state, a couple of months early in anticipation of the birth so that would could be close to Birth Village, one of India's only natural birth centres. We had an amazingly beautiful Home Birth from Little Feather in Australia and carried no desire to birth in a hospital, be it Australia or India (and especially not when you look at the stats of the ridiculously high rate of unnecessary C-Sections that happen in Indian Hospitals). So we were living in a lovely little house right in the center of Fort Cochin and had to regularly make a very bumpy 45minute trip in the back of an old Ambassador or Auto Rickshaw to the birth centre for our checkups. What became quite obvious was that at some point Wild Flower would be in labour and would need to make this journey, bumps and all, and that to first spend half an hour walking around town in search of a driver who would take us for a reasonable rate was simply not going to fly. Especially if she went into labour in the middle of the night! And so I went to work trying to find a reliable taxi driver (preferably with a decent set of wheels) who would agree to come, rain, hail or shine, and get us there in time!

One thing you quickly learn living in India is that just because someone looks you in the eye and promises you something, doesn't exactly mean that they mean it. Now look, I'm not going to get into debating the rightness or wrongness of this way of acting, but suffice to say it's a reality of life here and so when it comes to a taxi walla promising you that he will come to your house at any time, day or night, and take your pregnant wife to the 'hospital,' well, at best you've got about a 50/50 chance that he's telling the truth, at worst it's a bold faced lie. And so I hedged my bets and got 5 numbers, from 5 different drivers, promising big rupees if they would agree to keeping their phones on throughout the night and coming to get us when we needed them most.

And then one evening it happened; Wild Flower went into labour. Her contractions had been growing stronger over a number of hours and at some point she made the decision and it was time to go. So at a little bit after midnight I stepped out our front door into the warm Kerala night air, punched in the first of five phone numbers on my speed dial... and waited...

It's a funny feeling waiting for someone to answer the phone. You kind of expect that they're not going to answer on the first or even the second ring, but there's this moment that happens around the 4th and 5th ring, and when it happens you know it, and it's the moment of unexpectedly hearing another ring. The window in which you expect someone to pick up is closing, no ones going to answer you, and it feels like you've breathed in the pungent smell of failed expectations mixed with a dash of isolation.

I hurriedly ended the call and dialed in the 2nd phone number. Followed by the 3rd. Then the 4th. And finally the 5th. Pressing in those final numbers was a nervous moment but I remained optimistic because hey, surely 1 out of 5 has to come to the aid of a pretty pregnant lady! But I was wrong, 5 sets of phone numbers had all rung out!

I felt sick to my stomach. The dead quite streets of Fort Cochin did little to ease my nerves and I began redialing the numbers. All of them, again, nothing.

Now not wanting to worry a woman (who has just decided that it's time to go and deliver a baby) with the news that I might in fact have to carry her to the birth centre, I did the only think I could think of; I ran. I ran like a mad man down the center of the main road, with no shoes on, in the dead of night, in the south of India, searching for someone, anyone, who would take us where we needed to go, and as you'd expect, there was not a single soul on the road.

For what felt like an eternity (but was probably just the longest 15-20minutes of my life) I ran up and down every street I came to, feeling sick yet super charged, desperately praying that God would miraculously send a taxi around the next corner, but instead he sent me to the only building that still had the lights on, the local police station. I busted through the open doors and into a typical Indian Police scene; a whole bunch of men with large mustaches sitting around doing a whole lot of nothing. I hurriedly explained my situation to the stone faced police officer whose glazed over eyes told me that he could not have cared less about my plight and whose bulging cheeks told me that his mouth was full of Paan which he was in no way willing to spit out in order to talk to me. The officer sitting next to him nodded his head to the side, indicating the road to the side of the building, I looked at him again and he repeated to nod his head in that direction and I took off down the street, a mixture of sweat and curses pouring from my face.

Coming to the end of the street I could hear the sounds of music coming from a building only a short distance away. I ran towards the sound and minutes later came upon a guesthouse with a number of locals sitting around watching television and a beat up old Auto Rickshaw in the driveway. In that moment, that Auto was probably the greatest sight I'd seen in all my life! I ran up to the men, asked whose Rickshaw it was, then began to explain my predicament to the owner whilst he causally leaned back in his chair and lit up a cigarette. He said he would gladly take us... for a price. And when he told me his price (probably the same as what I'd pay for my family to fly back to Australia) I gave a nervous laugh, he knew he had me over a barrel and there was not much I could do about it, but still I postured. I told him I'd pay him about a third of what he offered and without waiting for a response walked over and sat in the back seat, a bargaining trick which only occasionally works, and he slowly and reluctantly stood up, took a long drag on his cigarette and told me to wait while he went inside to get his keys.

In those next moments as I sat waiting, worried how Wild Flower would cope being in labour and having to make this 45minute trip in the back of a beat up old Auto and not a taxi, my heart still pounding and still feeling short of breath, I began a silent dialogue with God. I began explaining the ridiculousness of everything that had just transpired (I guess I thought he needed to be reminded) and expressing some thankfulness that it seemed that at the very least we'd be leaving for the Birth Centre soon. Midway through this conversation I heard the familiar sound of my phone beginning to ring in my pocket and I assumed it was going to be Wild Flower, probably being more than a little concerned that her husband had disappeared off into the night, but it wasn't, the number on my screen was none other than that of missing Taxi walla #3 returning his missed call!

And wouldn't you know it, he was ringing to let me know that he was already on his way!

I'm sure it comes as no surprise that we made it to the Birth Centre and from that point on everything went smoothly (well.. mostly) and that the next day our cheeky, smiley, noisy, cuddly little man was born sporting a righteous looking Mohawk. He's been challenging and delightful and we love him to pieces! This story for you little man, and I'm so glad you're my son!