10 Years Ago: The Church of Zydeco

This 10-year old post happens to feature Curley Taylor. He and his band re-entered my post-Louisiana orbit in June 2019, when they performed at Tucson's Monterey Court.

 

Monterey Court in Tucson, Arizona. May 2019. Credit: Mzuriana.

 

 

Monday, November 23, 2015

Louisiana: The Church of Zydeco

Performance center, Vermilionville, Lafayette, Louisiana. June 2015.

Every Sunday afternoon, Vermilionville hosts the Bal du Dimanche ("Sunday Dance") from 1:00 to 4:00. Usually they alternate Cajun and Zydeco each week, with the occasional "swamp pop" or blues thrown in to the line-up.

I love both Cajun and Zydeco, mind you.

But. ... On every Zydeco Sunday, the same strange phenomenon occurs: I walk into the gift shop, show my membership card, get my paper bracelet, walk out of that building and into the courtyard, pass by La Cuisine de Maman's, and as I hear the Zydeco waft from the nondescript Performance Center in front of me, my mouth begins to form into a smile. It's an involuntary response, I tell you.

The nearer I get to the Performance Center, the louder the music gets as it flows through the cracks of the doors, and the wider my smile becomes. Heck, it makes me smile just writing about it.

A pale, pale sample of this phenomenon is in the video below:

On this particular Sunday in June, the Most High Reverend Mister Curley Taylor preached, along with his holy men, Zydeco Trouble.

Curley Taylor and Zydeco Trouble. Vermilionville, June 2015.

We celebrants confessed our sins and were blessed for another week. Or until later the same day for serious sinners, who congregated at Whiskey River [now closed, following a fire in 2023]. Or again that night, maybe at Randol's or O'Darby's or Feed n Seed.

Curley Taylor and Zydeco Trouble. Vermilionville, June 2015.

When a Zydeco band gets into a special groove, and the band members are in the music, and they lead us, the audience, up the road with them, and we add our energy to the band's energy, and the entire room thrums with a soaring, transcendent force, it evokes to me a trance dance that brings euphoria, of connection with humanity of today and humanity going back, back, back all the way to our very beginnings.

It's not just Zydeco music that does this, of course. Any music can do it. I remember a singular experience at the Lupus Chili Fest in 2013, in a garage. I described the feeling like this:

Sometimes when you listen to music, live especially, it pushes against you like an ocean wave or like a force of air, where you feel exhilarated and breathless at the same time, where your head actually falls back a little from the strength of the sound coming at you.  

This is what it felt like in the Lupus Garage when The Harvest Season played, as the band's flow rolled up and back in small waves, then pounded the shore in a rush against the beach.

If they had been calling to people at the back of the church to come to Jesus, why, I might have been tempted to do just that.

Amen.

 

Word of the Year: Meditation: The Facial

 

Face From a Cosmetic Spoon. Credit: Cleveland Museum of Art

 

 

I'm good for a five-minute meditation. Five minutes is achievable for me; any longer and I'm going to put it in the category of a chore, thus less likely to fold into a daily routine. 

This month: a meditation of touch. 

I lightly move my fingers over the terrain of my face, staying in the physical moment, feeling the sensation of skin on skin, how my face receives the touch of my fingers, and how my fingers feel the touch of my face. 

I note how the texture of my lips differs from the texture of the skin on my chin. I feel how my eyebrow hairs lay. I linger over the ridged skeleton of my forehead beneath the skin. I notice the warmth or coolness of my fingers on my face. Along my jawline, are there stubbly bits or is all smooth?

During this meditation, I know that tender memories will arise of my mother caressing my skin when I was a child and of me, in turn, caressing my daughter's face. I'll feel these memories, but I'll allow them to float by as I return to the meditation of my touch in the present, letting go of all else.

10 Years Ago: Learning to Dance: The Pause

 

In re-visiting this post of 10 years ago, I remembered "Caroline" and the power of a pause. Caroline is the protagonist in the book, The Camel and the Scorpion, about a young associate professor pulled into the case of an American woman arrested in Israel for espionage in the 1970s. Despite her innate shyness, Caroline had been a champion member of a college debate team; she knew that the force of a well-placed and well-timed pause is an effective tool for debates, speeches, sermons, and calls to action. [Disclosure: I know both the book's author and the real-life person who Caroline is based on.)

As a guide for daily living, there is also the acronym STOP to help us respond instead of react to an emotional or physical trigger:

• S: Stop:  Remember to pause.
• T: Take a few breaths.
• O: Observe my emotional and physical reactions in the moment
• P:  Proceed with awareness, choosing our response

 Perhaps I will claim self-actualization on the day I conquer the art of the pause.

Monday, October 12, 2015

Learning to Dance: The Pause

Dancing La Marinera in Tularosa, New Mexico. San Francisco de Paula Festival 2013.

Last year, at the Feed 'n Seed, I danced with an older gentleman. A slow-ish song. About 30 seconds into our dance, he said quietly in my ear, "Slow down, we're not in a hurry to go anywhere."

This centered me right then, and for the rest of the dance, I could be in the moment with where my partner was going and which rhythm line of the song he was choosing.

Holi Festival 2014, Lafayette, Louisiana.

Earlier in the year, before the Feed 'n Seed experience, at a Vermilionville Bal du Dimanche, a woman generously tutored me on a zydeco movement. I had taken zydeco lessons a month or so before, and I'd learned a basic zydeco shuffle in which every beat of the eight-count in zydeco was accounted for with a step or tap. But this woman was showing me something different. I didn't see the eight counts in her steps, I couldn't replicate her movements, and it confounded me.

I asked her about the step count, and she said - bless her generous heart - "don't worry about counting, just move with the music." I couldn't do anything with that information, so I asked her to keep demonstrating her steps until I could solve the mystery. She graciously complied.

Finally, I saw it.

On the third and seventh steps, she PAUSED. The fourth and eighth step were there, but "silent." Ohhhhhh.

When I excitedly shared my newfound understanding, the woman looked a little puzzled, and then shrugged, as if to say "whatever," apparently not excited as I about my tremendous breakthrough in understanding. I'm guessing she had so internalized her step movements, she didn't even notice the pause, and thus didn't think to explain it.

Feed n Seed, Lafayette, Louisiana.

These two experiences planted seeds in my neonatal dance mind, but they didn't stick until I took a new round of zydeco dance lessons this month.

The instructor informed me several times that I was going through movements too quickly. He EXPLICITLY directed me to pause. He hammered these points when I struggled to make turns correctly, so that I'd finish on the right foot at the right beat.

Finally, I got it. I have to PAUSE when I take that first turn-step.

The pause makes all the difference.

There is a maturity, an elegance, a sensuality, in the dance pause.

It's gratification delayed, it's listening and feeling, it's a breath.



Related posts: 

Learning to Dance: Solving for X
Learning to Dance: The Tao of Following

 

Word of the Year: Meditation: Land Snorkeling

 

Caterpillar. Big Spring, Missouri. 2007. Credit: Mzuriana.

 

The title Land Snorkeling popped up whilst I was tunneling an online rabbit hole about something or another and it surely did grab my attention. I'm not gonna link that article here because its website throws up an egregious quantity of pop-ups into the faces of visitors in addition to making it too challenging to customize one's cookie settings. 

The founders of a different website, aptly named Land Snorkel, state they invented the term and its attendant philosophy.  

"Land snorkeling is taking the time to savor aspects of nature we ordinarily don’t see or pay attention to. Land snorkelers wander through nature with no real destination."

I'm happy to report to myself that I have engaged in land snorkeling for much of my adult life, although I didn't have a name for it. 

To make my foray a meditation, I abstain from phone use and earbuds, and slide up the volume of my senses: sights, sounds, smells, the touch of a breeze or the lack thereof. My focus is outward, not inward. What I mean by that is that I let go of self so that I can make room for other. 

 

 

10 Years Ago: No. Fifteen Years Ago: I've Gone Rootless

 

 

2023.0429. Cozy bed in Chez Prius. Ellis, Kansas.

 

September is the anniversary of my having gone rootless. 

It's been 15 years now. 

If all goes according to plan, I will re-root myself soon. But that's tomorrow and not today. 

In the meantime, a visit to my past: 

 

Flashback to September 2010: "I'm Going Rootless"

Gee whiz, it's been five years since I wrote my first post: 
 
 

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

I'm going rootless. 

I've sold my house. Move-out day is October 15, and, as of today, I don't yet have a forwarding address.

I'm going rootless.

 

Word of the Year: Meditation: Qigong

More than 20 years ago, the local parks and recreation department offered a class in tai chi. I was the only student who enrolled. The instructor, Brandon, would have had every right to cancel the class, but he didn't. Brandon and I met once a week for six weeks and he introduced me to both qigong and tai chi. 

Brandon used qigong as the prelude to the tai chi, and I interpreted qigong as a warmup. 

Below is a video with a morning set of qigong movements.  I like this video because there's no chatter other than the intrusive sound of the ocean waves, which I turned off.

 

 Credit: Qigong Meditation

I always like the story of one of my favorite movements. It goes something like this: 

• The sun comes up
• You push open the window for a better view
• You spread the curtains wide
• You reach down and gather the sunlight
• Toss it up into the sky
• Pull what falls to your abdomen and rest your palms there

In my emerging meditation practices, the qigong movements help me focus on my physical being in its parts and its whole, pulling me out of my brain's incessant talk talk talk.

 

 

10 Years Ago: Louisiana: Sweet Potato Talk

 

I do love sweet potatoes. 

 

Sweet potatoes. Longmont, Colorado. June 2023. Credit: Mzuriana.

The original source, from Al Jazeera, about "troubling work conditions for North Carolina laborers" who harvest sweet potatoes is no longer accessible. Here is a November 2015 replacement source from NPR: Behind Your Holiday Sweet Potato Dish, Hard Work in the Fields. 

Friday, August 14, 2015

Louisiana: Sweet Potato Talk

2010 Yambilee poster, Yambilee Festival Building, Opelousas, Louisiana

I was standing in line at my neighborhood grocery store the other day, and a man came up behind me with only one item to buy, so I invited him to move ahead of me. A happy consequence is that he noticed the two gigantic sweet potatoes I had among my stash, and this sparked a memory for him.

Yam sign outside Yambilee Festival Building, Opelousas, Louisiana

When he was a kid, he dug up sweet potatoes during the harvest from, he said, first thing in the morning til the end of the day. It was terrible hard work, he said, but at mid-day, the labor was suspended for a large meal, which gave him energy to re-commence with the work in the afternoon. The man allowed as how it made him feel strong and good. ... though I suspect this is more how it feels to him in retrospect than at the time.

Sweet potato patties, Walmart,t Lafayette, Louisiana

The man observed that digging the sweet potatoes is no longer necessary, as there is a machine that can do it now.

Yambilee Festival Building, Opelousas, Lousiana

Recently, I've been buying sweet potatoes in bulk because the price at my local grocer is so giddily low right now and I love the durn things. I bake two racks of them at a time, skin them, distribute them into portions, then freeze the portions in freezer bags.

Sweet potato chips, Louisiana

The man's story got me to thinking about sweet potato agriculture.

The American leaders of sweet potato production, in order from largest to smallest, are:

1. North Carolina
2. California
3. Mississippi
4. Louisiana

Louisiana State University produced the video, The Sweet Truth About Sweet Potatoes, which focuses on commercial sweet potato agriculture, from planting to harvesting and curing:

Based on what I've learned in the above video, I'm thinking the sweet potatoes I'm buying today are those that were harvested last year.

What I see in the LSU video about commercial sweet potato agriculture in Louisiana is at odds with the troubling work conditions for North Carolina laborers that I'm reading about [in 2015]. In the LSU video, I see mechanical harvesting (which conforms with what the gentleman at the grocery store told me), but the reports about North Carolina refer to hand-harvesting, which is where labor abuses come in.

North Carolina Sweet Potatoes [said] this about mechanical vs. hand-harvesting [at the time of the original post in 2015]:

"Sweet potato roots are turned up on top of the ground by a side angle disk plow and partially exposed to aid the workers in picking and sorting. Sweet potatoes are very susceptible to damage at harvest; therefore hand-harvest is preferred over mechanical harvesting. ... To harvest, the field rows are usually plowed with a modified disk or moldboard plow with a spiral attachment. Roots are then hand harvested and graded in the field. Sweet potatoes can also be dug by a chain digger or a riding harvester that conveys the roots to a sorting crew using a harvest aide. Potato harvesters are sometimes used to harvest sweet potatoes but damage is usually unacceptably high."

Even though Louisiana might use mechanical harvesting, and therefore maybe there aren't all of the same labor equity concerns here as in North Carolina, there is still a question about how commercial farmers in Louisiana protect workers during and after pesticide spraying.

Just as the movement builds to protect people from second-hand smoke in businesses .... when we have an opportunity to do so, let's encourage our food suppliers, legislators, and local, state, and federal regulatory agencies to create and enforce safeguards to protect agricultural workers (and their families - and consumers) from unhealthy work and living conditions (when provided by the farmers). Some advocacy and regulatory organizations include:

Farmworker Justice
Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)
United Farm Workers



On a different note ... Do you notice how I side-stepped the whole yam versus sweet potato conversation?