An Open Letter to the Alchemeyez Visionary Arts Community, from The Teafaerie*

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Have you ever had one of those trips? You know, the kind that turn you inside out and blast you through a vortex of incomprehensible beauty, where you’re shown impossible things, tantalized by illusive meaning, disabused of your most dearly held illusions, overcome with bright optimism, confused, challenged, redeemed, purified, reborn, humbled and finally left weeping with gratitude and laughing hysterically at the same time?  

Well, I just had one of those trips last week. It was called the Second Annual Alchemeyez Visionary Arts Congress on the Big Island of Hawaii, and it changed my life forever.

I write a regular column for Erowid, and last year I wrote an article about the inaugural Alchemeyez event and how deeply I was moved by the spirit of what I encountered there. (http://www.erowid.org/columns/teafaerie/2010/07/07/artgasm/) I’m tempted to say all that again here, since it’s all still true and then some, but this is intended to be a letter of thanks and hopefully a message of inspiration to the organizers and to the participants who helped catalyze this year’s potent and unique act of collective alchemy rather than an overt commercial for the next turn up the Spiral, which will no doubt be even more magical and spectacular than this iteration’s rousing success portends.

I want to talk to you about this thing that we’re all building together, or maybe it’s something that we are together, or that we’re starting to be. And I’m not just talking about being the core group associated with the manifestation of a certain recurring event, or even of a Movement, as awesome and as worthy as all that is. I don’t want to talk about how all this could eventually provide us with opportunities to advance our personal and artistic agendas, because that seems to be implied clearly enough if we can manage to keep our momentum up. I don’t even want to go over what went wrong and how much better we could do it next time, because most of that kind of thing is always fairly obvious in retrospect, anyway, and I don’t think we’re going to come up against any new hurdles that we can’t handle once we’ve really got the drill down with the hotel or whatever. There’s always going to be a re-engineering phase after the first few runs of whatever we do, and it actually came off fairly well in fact, all things considered. Big Ups to Rio, Maricela and the rest of the Alchemeyez production crew for all that they do, both as gracious hosts and behind the scenes. We couldn’t do it with out all of us, of course, but those for whom Alchemeyez is a year-long endeavor deserve extra props and special thanks for their efforts. There’s no such thing as “above and beyond” the sacred call of Duty, but the Alchemeyez team gives it all that they’ve got, and in the end it turns out to be quite sufficient, with a big helping of Yum Sauce on the side. And it’s only getting better. So go Team Awesome!

What I’m really interested in is what went right at Alchemeyez this year. Now right and wrong, as we all know far too well, are rather slippery terms. The Universe is Perfect and it does what it Does, but naturally we as human beings have various dreams, desires, goals, hopes, passions, aspirations et cetera, and we define things that seem to be moving us in a direction that resonates with our aesthetic sensibilities as generally positive. So then the question becomes what is it that we resonate with? What do we want? What, if anything, are our common goals, and are we getting any closer to achieving them? What are our guiding visions, and upon what foundations do we propose to build our laboratory and our temple? What fuels shall we choose to stoke and temper the sacred flame that flickers and surges within each one of us? And what shall become of us all once the gold nuggets start piling up?

The official Alchemeyez Mission Statement says: “As collective of Visionaries from multiple disciplines, we aim to use our talents and methods to create new maps and models for an emerging society that will be based on principles of balance, sustainability, healthy ecology, and the promotion of an economy and society based no longer on the old paradigms of ignorance, violence, illusion, malice and self-centeredness, replacing them instead with a Vision of communities rooted in intuition, peace, intelligence and beauty!” And all that sounds pretty okay to me. Right? I’m willing to define that general direction as “good” for our purposes. Have we made any progress in that direction? (Suck it up for a second, I’m getting back to how awesome we are, I promise.) This is a harder thing to quantify. We certainly used up a couple of big airplanes worth of jet fuel getting to and from the conference. And frankly half of the people at Alchemeyez are artists. I mean at least half.  (Although, of course, this may shift over time.) Which means, in the broadest sense, that for the most part we’re preaching to the choir. Everybody at Alchemeyez is already rooting for the Home Team. So much so that it seems almost masturbatory, insofar as we’re a legion of galactivated superheroes who are essentially just getting together to celebrate ourselves and to enjoy one another’s company. And to sell each other stuff. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.  But how is it saving the world?

Of course that’s kind of a rhetorical question because I went on and on about the power of art in my Erowid essay last year; but it’s also sort of a serious question, or at least it’s a sincere one, because asking it forces us to take a closer look at what we do and why we do it.

The most obvious thing we do at Alchemeyez is art. We make it, we show it off, and we share our artistic visions, stories and techniques with one another both through official presentations and in the course of our casual encounters. And hooray for that! Art is great. It’s amazing. It’s a fucking miracle. And that goes double for Visionary Art, which often touches upon aspects of human experience that for one reason or another evade or confound rational apprehension. If the entire merit of Visionary Art lay exclusively in it’s power to communicate the commonality of, or at the very least the rough isomorphism between some of our most profound, personal, and difficult-to-express experiences, it’s value to the human race would be incalculable. Oh, but it’s so much better than that! Tell them what else they’ve won! That’s right! Not only can good art let you see into other people’s souls and vice versa, it can also inspire personal and social change, help us to revision ourselves as individuals and as a species, catalyze emotional integration, and prepare us for the next stage in our cosmic evolution. Even those who are already hosting the Vision can always be activated on a deeper level when exposed to the right stimulus. Right?

But when does that really occur? 

A whole suite of things have to go right in order for one person’s vision to successfully move and transform another person’s life. There were a lot of pieces at Alchemeyez this year that were obviously beautiful and well-executed. There were a lot of interactions taking place with the art on a “wow, I really like this one!” level. Or even “I really resonate with that one, I feel like I know where it’s coming from.” But what does it take to put someone into a state of aesthetic arrest where they honestly can’t move because they’re staring at this piece of …art… that’s totally rearranging their soul-settings and modifying their entire concept of what it means to be a human being? It requires a set of nested synchronicities that don’t really seem all that likely: the artist has to be a clear channel for Spirit in the first place (which I do not propose is in opposition to the positive applications of the ego http://www.erowid.org/columns/teafaerie/2010/06/03/altered-ego/ ) and the ideal witness has to be in exactly the right frame of mind and standing in just the right spot at the right moment with the right song playing in the background, and all of the other ten billion things that have to line up precisely perfectly in order to create the space for a genuine miracle to happen all have to happen to occur at the exact same instant. That’s when the shit gets real. That’s when hearts and minds are changed. That’s when art has the power to heal people. That’s Alchemy, folks.

And it happens all the time. Or anyway it does around folks like us. Have you noticed that? If you haven’t noticed it, then you’re out of the loop or you’re not paying attention. So many people at Alchemeyez were actually talking abut it. Yeah yeah, I know, we’re pattern recognizing machines and all. Pick a number out of a hat and you’ll start seeing it everywhere if you obsess on it hard enough. And certain lifestyle choices can make things seem deeper and more portentous than they “objectively” are. I get it. But you know how it is when there’s a vibe at a party that’s so thick you can stick a fork in it? Do you know what I mean when I say that sometimes the Game is On and everything just meshes like clockwork? It’s a state in which it seems possible, even trivial, to manifest damn near anything you want. Everybody has crazy stories. Like whoa crazy. Ask people. And mini-miracles are so common in our community that many of us take them as our due and kind of feel out of sync when books don’t just fall open to the right page every time or whatever. You know how it is: you go looking for your friend and guess who steps out of the elevator door when you push the button? Boom! You reach into your bag and blindly withdraw that one little thing you normally might have had to dump your whole backpack out onto the lobby floor to find, the bathroom stall you pick at random is clean and well stocked, and your comic timing is impeccable. In the fire spinning world we call this state Flow. And it’s some kind of a resonance thing. Like literally. And casting it and holding it and nurturing it and using it to create or potentiate tiny moments of grace and great big huge size-matters-not type world-saving miracles is a shamanic art form and most of us are really really exceptionally good at it, whether we do it intentionally or not.

When it comes right down to it, that’s what I think of as the most intriguing and important thing about Alchemeyez. I mean, it’s all about the art, of course. (and here I include music, dance, flow arts, body modification, fashion, ritual, theatre, performance art, and etc. as well as traditional painting and sculpture) but part of the important thing the art is doing for us is it’s opening us to our higher natures and bringing us more deeply into resonance with one another. It’s literally helping us format ourselves to sync up better, so we can create a stable field dynamic (I know I’m reaching for terms here) so that everybody who catches the wave can draw on the collective pool of energy or signal strength or bandwidth or whatever. And we all know a few ways to make that effect just a little bit stronger, now don’t we? (hint: it works better when you’re happier and more open) And it’s not all that often that so many of us are in the same place at the same time doing the same thing, you know? Not with so much intention and so little distraction. And I don’t think that there’s anything at all that we couldn’t make come true if we collectively wanted it hard enough. Because even one tiny little person can mold the whole Universe like silly putty when they’re really On and truly free of internal conflict and almost every single one of you already knows that as a fact.

And I did see genuine miracles at Alchemeyez this year. Some of them were of the type I described earlier: the kind that are about seeing good art. And others were more about being good art. The morning march of neo-tribal space elves after the 6 AM sweep or a perfect moment on the dance floor can be as beautiful and transcendent as any canvas. (And not just for us. Our interactions with the muggles are all part of the magic, and I bet we inspired at least as many people as we offended. It is, after all, our mission to comfort the disturbed and to disturb the comfortable, and if we rocked even one random world it was well worth it!)  Hotel room hook-ups and elevator alliances can be as potent and important as feature presentations, when all is said and done. Heck, I saw one ten minute trip in the jungle that was a good enough reason to drag all of our asses out to the Hawaiian Aina, just by itself. There is an subtle order that’s particularly intrinsic to a certain type of chaos, and if every single one of you hadn’t done exactly what you did and talked to exactly who you talked to and etc, those particular people never would have run into each other just then and there, and that scene never would have happened. Like I said: we can’t do it without all of us. 

And it seems like we’re going to be doing this Alchemeyez thing together for a while. So I suggest we take the opportunity to get really good at what we do best. Which is making good art and being good art, making and being good friends, having a good time, upholding one another, doing the kind of magic that we do, validating and empowering each other’s inner warriors and inner superheroes, focalizing our collective intention around our collective intuition, learning more about ourselves and about each other, honoring our planet, celebrating our victories, and figuring out how to better tune ourselves into a mutually reinforcing state of collective resonance and flow.

There’s real live Alchemy going down at the Waikaloa Hilton and that’s not all. The time is here, the game is up, the die is cast, the chips are down. The stakes are very high. This is it. And it’s our sacred Duty - no really - to rock it as hard as we can.

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Repost elsewhere at will, just credit and let me know. (ruespieler@yahoo.com)