Emergent Global Culture

This post is a version of the email I wrote to my girls, most expressions come out best the first time around so I'm just copying it to here...

Holy crap. Brian and I went to a 3 day psytrance party in this rubber tree grove outside of Krabi, Thailand. It turned out we would save big money by coming this way anyway, which we took as a good sign. Ohhhh wow...The music was amazing, so diverse and varied and funky as all hell. The decoration was splendid and the rubber trees created a full canopy for constant shade and coolness. The food vendors sold fresh, cold coconuts and banana pancakes and Thai food. The weather was perfect, we glowed radiantly but didn't wilt in over-exertion.

But it was the crowd that made it mind-blowing. We met so many people and had so many of the connective, lucid conversations which we crave but which are sometimes elusive, so that was special enough, but the magic was that each connection was with a group from a different country and culture than the last. I probably connected with people from 25 countries. There were only about 1000 people so faces became familiar and a family vibe emerged gracefully and effortlessly. It was as if language was irrelevant, for it became easy to connect even with the Japanese kids who couldn't speak any English. The freaks of the planet converged to laugh and dance our butts off.

At one point I shrieked in delight to see two dready Japanese boys standing in front of the groovin German DJ with their tongues wagging out and enormously bright grins on their faces as teeny Thai girls carrying psychedelic parasols paraded around them and drunk Belgians rolled in the sand in front of the speakers where a black man was shaking in full tranced-ness and tattooed, wide eyed Israelis jumped up and down ecstatically and a tall British man whirled his blond-with-neon-streaks seven year old daughter around on his shoulders. (By the way the universal essence of cuteness resides in the hearts of Japanese trancer girls.)

As I danced I was overwhelmed with emotion many times, realizing that our generation does indeed have a soul, and this is it, our music is innovative and powerful, and our spirit can't be taken away from us. We were all people who don't care much about our nationalities and were instead feeding an emergent global culture based on dancing and peace. If more were like us our world would have peace. It was sad to leave last night after dancing and socializing for over 30 nonstop hours. But I feel renewed and my body feels floppy and light from flopping around so much on the dance floor. Now we will spend a couple days busing it back to Cambodia and get back to work, refreshed and charged.