Encounters 01: Motherbeat 1994

Eris Drew's Psychedelic Midwest Rave Revelation.

When I announced the launch of the Journal of the Motherbeat on my Instagram last October, I promised it would stray into the esoteric. For my “Encounters” column I want to share some of the experiences which have invested my life with meaning that are, well, a bit strange. Why share such personal stories? What does this have to do with music and being a DJ? I hope to answer these questions in the writings to follow. 

Part I: The Importance of Actual Lived Experience 

I think our subjective experiences are very important. In a media saturated world which shapes our consensus reality, I think it is good when we try to remember that our own lived experience is more important than the priorities of capitalism and the dominant society which vie for our attention, money and concern through our phones, televisions, families and workplaces. What happened last week at the club might not be important to 99% of the world, but it might be really important to you, and that’s ok. Whatever your view of the universe, evolution and creation, the simple truth is that our subjective experiences form our life story and shape who we are. Whether you believe these experiences are random or determined, real, hallucinated or simulated, it doesn’t really matter in this basic sense: the things that happen to us affect us deeply—even the experience of a single day can change and shape a life. We can imbue our lives with meaning through subjective experience and extend our lives beyond the prerogatives of the majority. 

I used to “write off” a lot of my subjective experiences, including my “weird experiences”, as well as my emotional experiences, some of my physiological responses, and many of my drug experiences. But I try not to do this anymore. I try to keep in mind that we are not merely perceivers of a simple consensus reality, instead our minds are also world-creating machines. Maybe that hallucination you saw on shrooms was communicating something. Maybe you’ll remember for the rest of your darn life that person you danced alongside last weekend but never spoke to. Maybe music saved you in some way that no one else could understand except possibility through strained analogy. 

Some rationalists would say that anything you can't see, touch, or measure isn’t “real” and should be discarded or distrusted. I used to think this way sometimes and I’ll admit that it is a seductive framework. But through life experience, I have come to the opposite conclusion. I have come to believe that life is mysterious and only a kind of “presentism” would assume that humans living now have resolved all the true mysteries of being. Subjective experience is another name for our true lived experience and if we disregard it because it might be random, purely emotional, a product of imagination, or perhaps a so-called “trick of the senses,” we might lose an opportunity in life to put ourselves in the middle of the story of our own being. In doing so we might let others define what is important and what is real at our own peril. Culture is the collective dream of the masses enshrined by centuries of lives. Sometimes to our detriment, what we call religion, science and culture can serve to give evidence to the prerogatives of those dreams and to reject anything which challenges those dreams. Some examples of the generational collective dreams which shape our lives include the definitions of:

• what a happy person is;

• what makes a good life;

• what we should do with our bodies;

• what gender or sex is;

• which people can and can’t be together; and 

• which living beings we should and shouldn’t have compassion for.

Part II: Motherbeat Revealed

My Motherbeat experience in 1994 is difficult to put words around, but I’ll do my best. The experience might have been merely the synchronistic psychedelic projection of two close friends. That’s possible, but I know I needed that experience to become who I am today. Whether mental construct or mystical phenomenon, it doesn’t matter in the following sense; Motherbeat challenged what I thought I knew about the world and invested in me a sense of deep mystery and wonder. Sharing the story of her with others and interpreting the experience as meaningful–-rather than dismissing it as nothing more than a contentless auditory hallucination—added richness and meaning to my life. Among other things, Motherbeat gave me a sense of what was missing in my very rational and overly-controlled life, opened my heart to a childlike belief in a living world, and helped to start healing my relationship with nature; not just mother nature but my nature; my feminine nature. 

Ever heard that warning “if you stare long enough into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you”?  In my case this concept manifested during the Motherbeat experience as something like “Goddess heard, Goddess revealed.” In other words, what I heard that morning mirrored something back at me, specifically the divine feminine in all things, including kick drums and 18 year-old ravers from the West Suburbs of Chicago. My Motherbeat experience wasn’t pure observation by what science calls the “disinterested observer”, it was me and my best friend during a moment of subjective interpretation of an ecstatic phenomenon we were both experiencing in real time. I was there at the center of it and so were they. Recognizing the observer as part of that which is observed is a kind of “hermeneutics,” a fancy word for what philosophers could more simply describe as “subjective interpretation.” Choosing to honor my Motherbeat experience through interpretation and self-reflection eventually led me to share it with others and that process changed my life in ways I could never have imagined. If you told me in 2015 that I would find love, come out as trans and support myself as a musician I’d have either laughed in your face or cried. 

I’ve discussed Motherbeat in interviews and for articles but only ever told the story in my own writing as a poem. For this, the first edition of Encounters, I thought I would finally tell the story more plainly as a narrative and with more context than is provided in the poem or any of the prior journalism about my experience. 

BEFORE THE RAVE

“The human mind is a mythmaker. We do this because we need mirrors, and our myths are those mirrors. We use them to understand ourselves and to find meaning in the way we relate to the world around us. In ancient times, myths and stories were used to explore psychological states, desires, fears, and needs. Many myths are warnings about psychological territory that is dangerous to enter. … The more deeply we plumb the psyche, the deeper the well appears to go. Somewhere down in there, it would appear that there is a place where the line between the physical and nonphysical blurs, where imagination and reality somehow converge, and events unfold that are not yet understood at all.”

Excerpt from “The Super Natural” by Whitley Strieber & Jeffrey J. Kripal (2016). 

I had a best friend in high school. I’ll call them “Jam”. I have no idea what happened to them. We met in 1991 because we liked the same girl and we were both into industrial music. The girl caused some tension but industrial music friends were hard to come by so we were soon pals. We formed a gang of four with our combat-boot-wearing friends I’ll refer to as Col and Aire. All three of them were students at a high school one town over from mine. They were all a year older and got me into some solid teenage trouble. 

Punks and jocks alike hated us because they thought the electronic music we loved was “bullshit” for “fags” and not real music. We also got flack because we did our own thing, and lived in our own world of imagination and belonging. We had the nerve to form a musical group even though most people at the time didn’t view synths as musical instruments. Col taught me the basics of programming his Alesis MMT-8 sequencer and my parents bought me a Yamaha SY22 vector synth for Christmas. Col was unimpressed because my SY lacked a “filter” but we carried on with Jam writing lyrics and Aire banging on sheets of metal. We were all 16 years old and pissed off about living so far from the city, which housed bastions of industrial dance culture like Wax Trax records and Medusa’s nightclub for teens. The three of them took acid and we hosted shows at our parents’ houses when our folks were away. Our group was called Flaming Clockwork Bunnies, which we found hilarious and fitting after Jam lit a mechanical rabbit on fire once during an acid party at Col’s. 

I was scared to try acid because my aunt had a bad trip which my Dad had told me about a few years earlier. It was a cautionary tale I took seriously. I was a really rational kid that learned self control at an early age and believed Mom and Dad about most things. My parents were atheists who rejected anything “woo-woo” and tried to teach me to think for myself which was good, but they also imposed a kind of rationalism that moderated or denied some of the chaotic creative impulses which constantly stirred within me. As early as age 6 I conducted private rituals which let me express a feminine aspect of myself that I somehow learned to keep hidden even though no one ever expressly told me to hide this part of myself. I was a relatively smart, sensitive and perceptive kid though. I didn’t understand these impulses, so why share them, I thought. Media and the people around me made it clear what boys and girls were supposed to do and feel respectively. I never saw my impulses portrayed in the media except in really demeaning ways, so I kept the thoughts, feelings and signals from my body to myself. Media has the power of myth. Myths give us the stories we need to understand ourselves and society. And herein is a myth (lower case “m”) that I want to dispel: not all myths are “made-up” stories. Some myths are true. Myths are quite simply cultural stories—some based on true events, some redactions of true events, and some of course pure fiction. 

My friend AJ finally cracked my psychedelic egg around 1992. He and I took a half tab at his parents’ house while they were out of town. Oh, if our ancestors knew that suburban homes empty of parents would become the church for coming-of-age rituals in the future, what murals would they have drawn? Looking back AJ was really very gentle about it. We listened to Jane’s Addiction and then laid in the backyard for hours staring at the sky and telling each other stories. 

My junior and senior year I got really into acid, but I found doing it socially anxiety-producing. I wanted to listen to music, spend time in nature, or bond with a single friend when tripping. What I didn't want to do was navigate the complexities of High School group social interactions or deal with boys. I remember one time walking home for two hours in the middle of the night down the tree-lined Prairie Path which connected the towns of the western suburbs neighboring mine. I took this journey in an effort to escape an awkward group LSD experience one town over. The trees along the path remind me now of the scene in the movie Never-Ending Story when the stone guardians come alive in response to Atrau’s presence. The trees along my path seemed animate and conscious, like they were watching me as they swayed gently in the wind, faces forming in the leaves because of the potent LSD and a massive bong hit. When I got home I laid in bed waiting for the acid to wear off. I was thinking about eternity and how scared I was to die someday. I tried to wake my parents up to comfort me but they wouldn’t stir, as hard I tried. Deep into the morning light I contemplated the shortness of life and extinguishment, until my body finally settled enough for sleep. 

I was into rave music before I went to my first party. A nice kid who was older than me introduced me to 808 State and somehow I stumbled onto Orbital. I loved how this music was about something different than pop. It engaged the mind in a direct way and was exciting yet also experimental. Unlike industrial dance, it was less masculine and focused on something other than angst. It was about the future, not some distant future, but actually living in the future…now. It was nearing the end of the century and everything was about to change. I wanted to be a part of it. 

Some of my proto-rave CDs and tapes.

Living an hour outside of the city meant that going to rave required a car, and neither Jam nor I had one. In the months before we became hardcore ravers we got ahold of a promo tape for Moonshine’s “140+ BPM” and  “Ravin’ USA” compilations. We also got a CD copy of a truly amazing Novamute compilation. Each of these releases were intended to sell underground music to American teens, young adults and would-be ravers. We experimented with taking acid to this music, again with the parents out of town, dancing and spinning to a 4-point solid state Model 2230 Marantz 1970’s home soundsystem in the basement, which delivered Plastikman’s Spastik in the most extraordinary detail. 

My Dad had the exact same receiver, which he eventually gifted to me.

That night we were raving even though it was just the two of us. We were utterly ecstatic, dancing into the wee hours bathed in cheap blacklights. That’s the first time I experienced something on acid which seemed to defy my rational upbringing. We each saw the same hallucinations moving and dancing on the wall of the basement at the same time. It was uncanny, these little hieroglyphic characters dancing as we described them to each other in detail. We were creating rituals. We looked into each other's eyes for hours trying to see something more than our physical bodies, to see past the game grid just behind our optic nerves. It is hard to explain but those experiences were a bit scary for me. I saw just how fragile and alive we each were, but also how our brains simulate and construct the world around us. We both loved the movie Tron and felt that as humans we were like programs on the game grid, able to shape reality in little ways but also subject to its rules. Could we break the wall of the game grid and see past it? As I sit here 30 years later I can still perfectly see those eyes looking back at me deeply but also looking through me. 

Jam was certainly an edge runner. They were a brilliant artist, writer and musician. Their compositions for SR-55 drum machine rivaled the work of more accomplished techno artists—at least to my young ears. Jam was also a little dangerous and liked to take risks. Way more than me. Once Jam got into taking acid they went all the way in. I took ten hits once on their not-so-gentle urging. I wanted to follow Jam into the abyss but I almost always held back. I had more to lose. Jam was living on the streets by senior year because of abuse from their stepdad at home, and was driving their aunt's barely street-legal motorcycle into the ground. The cops found it in a ditch once and let my Dad know so he could retrieve it. Everyone who cared about Jam tried to tidy up behind them. To my parents credit they knew Jam was a really special kid and let them stay with us. 

You might wonder why I am using “they” pronouns for my old friend. After all, “they” wasn’t a thing in the 90’s right? Right. But Jam and I were deeply drawn to each other and we both had a feminine side and an unspoken queerness (well, I did come out to a few friends as “bi” but never as trans). I am pretty sure they were experiencing dysphoria. They had a girl’s haircut (punk “Chelsea” hairstyle) which they wore so well until their parents shaved it off in the middle of the night. So here in this writing I leave it an open issue as to their gender and just trust in something that most trans people know deeply: we are drawn to each other long before we understand what stirs within us or come out to the world at large. 

MY MOTHERBEAT EXPERIENCE

“I experience the Earth consciousness as a pattern that is manifesting repeatedly through vibrations in sounds and visual forms in nature, trying to reach out to us. I believe, throughout the generations, many cultures perceived it, but we in the Western society have yet to interpret it. We can, through the use of technology, begin to decipher some elements of it in our generation. The interpretation of these ancient Earth sounds and patterns is exactly what I am setting out to do [in my work with babies]. This is a global and cosmic language.”

Excerpt from “Encounters” by D.W. Pasulka, quoting Dr. Iya Whiteley.  Whiteley is by profession a deeply respected Space Psychologist, a training developer for NASA astronauts with a background in Clinical Psychology and Cognitive Engineering and an innovative Baby Book Designer and Illustrator who is attempting to teach a test group of toddlers the “earth language” as she calls it.

After a few months of steady raving we wanted to bring our one preppy friend to a rave. I’ll call her CC because she has kids and I don’t know if she wants to be inserted into this story. She had access to the family car, the trust of her parents and was game to go on little adventures with us. Jam and I were acceptably rebellious to her because even though we got into a lot of trouble I was good at covering our tracks and we were always nice to her mom. CC was pretty and I got a little kick out of occasionally stealing a kiss from the head cheerleader, as silly as that seems in retrospect. We did have a genuine friendship and she decided she would take us to the rave in the family minivan, old McDonalds wrappers, baby car seats and all. 

The rave was so great (oh if I had a Time Machine!). It was at the old Oak Street theater which even in 1994 was falling apart and probably should have been condemned. The dancers were all on the old stage since the main part of the theater still had its seats. The DJs played music from the closest balcony and a speaker wall covered the entire back of the stage. What a powerful metaphor for the soul of rave at the time. Our backs were to the DJs facing the monolithic stacks of black speakers. The dancers were on stage instead of the performers. In lieu of a backdrop, the back of the stage was outfitted with a giant EV or Turbo Sound speaker wall (I can’t know which for sure). Mystic Bill was playing the most amazing elemental house and techno while we danced in rows to the pulsating beats. Everybody and every body was dancing into the speaker stacks, the sole point of focus. This was truly a new dawn and a new day for teenage America. Jam and I snuck in some acid. We each took a few of these LSD soaked sugar cubes (suspended previously in food dye) which we bought in vials from older deadheads. This was before the off-duty cops working at the party took them from us. I still can’t believe they didn’t kick us out of the party, because we had enough on us to clearly be sharing, or even selling. But they didn’t. Bright-eyed, we handed over our acid. They didn’t even search us. Within minutes we had left the balcony where we got caught and rejoined the dancefloor. 

808 State’s ‘91 full-length ex:el, worn out from my High School Sony Walkman.

CC didn’t partake because she had to drive and was a mostly responsible kid. She hung in there for a few hours but eventually got bored. The whole thing was an interesting spectacle and would make for an interesting story but she wasn’t about to go down this irrational rave rabbit hole with us. I can’t know for sure but I think that was her one and only rave. By the time we hit our first “peak” it was already time to go. 

It was still pitch black when we got in the car for the hour-long ride home, but the entire city was encased in fog; white pillows of impenetrably thick fog. CC was so nervous she kept the radio off and had us both sit in the back of the minivan. We were high as kites and trying to control ourselves. She ran the air conditioner on full blast to keep our bodies, hot from dancing and the stimulation of our nervous systems by the acid, from fogging up the windows and making her already compromised visibility worse. We were so ecstatic we were giggling at the sheer intensity of our visuals in the fog and the utter ridiculousness of heading home that high when we could still feel party in our bodies. 

So this is how it happened. How she was revealed to us…

Jam and I had a special connection that made us experience aspects of the psychedelic experience in synchronicity. I could hear Billy’s kick drums in the oscillations of the minivan’s air conditioner. It was pulsing and cycling. Without saying a word, and very much unprompted, Jam looked me deeply in the eyes and said with a smile, “It’s the Motherbeat.” They heard it too. In that fucking stupid minivan air conditioner, the most banal of American instrumentalities, was the Earth’s fundamental rhythm. Bo Diddley said he heard rock ‘n’ roll in the old trains, and decades later we suburban ravers heard techno in the bloody minivan. With locked eyes I returned their gaze and signaled that I understood. Did I ever!

Through this experience I had a series of realizations. This music I fell in love with wasn’t just the future, it was also the past. I felt in a deep and uncanny way that there is no separation between that which is artificial and that which is natural…all that is human is part of nature, including our technologies. I came to feel that it isn’t only the rational which governs our lives but that forces far simpler and more mysterious guide our path. I saw that culture is merely a gloss on top of something that is always there. That there was music before there was music and that our bodies are like the sensing device for the universe—we are the tree hearing itself fall in the forest when no one else is around. And then also there is the issue of she. We didn’t hear the god beat, we didn’t hear just techno in the A/C, we heard MOTHERbeat..the ancient goddess cast out by the monotheistic religions. The divine feminine in ourselves shunned and castigated by the dominant societies. Or at least that’s how I see it now. 

There is something that I want to make sure is very clear. We didn’t just hear the party in the air conditioner, we heard the air conditioner in the party so-to-speak. People sometimes miss that detail when I talk about this. We heard the fundamental earth beat in the A/C, not just the echos of the party. Everything collapsed into one. All was the Mother and she was the totality of sound. The experience was a complete dethronement of categories.  

CC of course was focused on driving, and once she got close to my house she dropped us off on a corner a few blocks away. The fog was still very thick. Jam and I wanted to keep dancing. We were still hearing Motherbeat. Some type of spiritual MIDI cord was sending a timecode to each of us from the same master clock, because we were bobbing and dancing in time without any music. But I was nervous because suburban cops don’t look the other way when freaky looking teens dance on residential street corners at 4 in the morning. I got a little adrenaline rush navigating Jam back to my parents’ and was nervous enough about them waking up my parents to “sober up” a little. I wisely locked Jam in the guest room. I checked on them once and found them spinning in circles giggling and smiling. “Get in bed Jam” I pleaded (or something like that). “Please, for god’s sake” I thought to myself as I shut the door. Eventually I slept. 

DIS-INTEGRATION - A Failure to Integrate 

You might think the next part of this story would be about how Motherbeat helped me to heal but that simply isn’t true. The experience was shocking (ontologically shocking as the philosophers would say) and I had no idea what to do with it. If excess leads to the palace of wisdom, it is often a palace made of sand, because everything around Jam and I was falling apart. They had been crashing on couches and had basically overstayed their welcome in the rave scene. I was in my second semester at UIC in Chicago and staying in the dorms there. Each dorm contained quads, the four rooms that shared a bathroom. The student in the single occupancy room next to mine had moved out and given his keys and cafeteria card to Jam, who now occupied the room even though they were not a student. I mean they had been a student of another college until they quit and decided to be my quad mate without mentioning it to me. 

Jam had a selfish streak and was experiencing what I can only describe as a kind of deepening drug psychosis. One day when I was working at a sporting goods store they came in and took a snowboard off the wall and walked out of the store. My manager liked me even though I knew absolutely nothing about sports (I got hired because I had a black belt), which is good because he grabbed me instead of calling the cops. Jam later explained that they believed if they had a “pure heart” they could have walked out with the snowboard and no one would have noticed or cared. Incidents like these were multiplying and of course stressful. Within a few months of our revelation relations were strained between us. 

I was also not doing well. I quit going to class, got into a dysfunctional relationship with another raver, and started experimenting with drugs other than psychedelics, E, and weed. My friends were now dabbling with meth and heroin and dealing drugs in quantities that could have changed our lives in the worst ways. One of my pals that I got into acid sold a few sheets to an undercover cop. He was studying virtual reality at the university level and had a promising future. “Never sell acid to a dude in wing-tip shoes,” he told me during the lead-up to his trial and sentencing. Noted.

I finally got kicked out of school and had to move home. I “straightened-up” (I mean that in more ways than one), went to community college to bring up my grades and eventually went on to DePaul university and then Law School. Yeah, I studied law for three years, graduated with a JD etc etc. I still made music, bought records and went to parties but my psychedelic days were over, or so I thought. The rave scene had changed too. I DJ’ed at some really cool undergrounds in ‘96 and ‘97, but the scene as I knew it was disintegrating. My favorite DJs were playing in clubs and restaurants (it had become allegedly hip to have a DJ at a restaurant). My second residency was a posh restaurant that turned into a club at night. It was great for my skills (5 days a week for 7 hours a night) but it felt far away from the raves and the community assembled at them which had exposed me to something truly profound. I knew of no way to integrate what I learned at raves and what I loved about raves into a happy “normal” life. You can’t live in church unless you become a priest (or a priestess as the case may be). Instead I smoked weed by myself, hid my queerness/femininity from everyone and shared my love of music with only a few close supportive friends. Shouts to Mazi, Aaron and Justin Aulis Long for keeping music alive in my life while I worked jobs I hated and had one dysfunctional relationship after another. 

Jam moved to San Diego to work for and join a yoga cult in late 1995. The cult leader (they called him a guru)—who drove around in luxury sports cars—owned a building that wayward kids could live in as long as they worked at the yoga retreats, book stores or other businesses for no or little wages. I think Jam really did enjoy and get something out of the spiritual yoga practice and liked having a stable place to stay after years of living a transient existence. The building had technology for the kids to make music and some amazing people lived there and/or passed through, but in my opinion it was a con. After years of it Jam moved to Kaua’i, lived on the beach and supported themself by doing freelance computer repair. They lived as an ascetic and wouldn’t even eat oils or fats (asceticism is basically the practice of forgoing everyday comforts to gain spiritual insight). The last time I saw my friend was during a visit they made back to Chicago around 1999. I barely recognized them. I am sure the feeling was mutual. Shortly after that they moved to Japan and I never heard from them again. What I would give to speak with them again. To hold them in my arms and tell them I love them and that what we experienced together ultimately gave my life meaning and in a sense saved me. 

RE-INTEGRATION - An Act of Becoming 

“All that is visible must grow beyond itself, and extend into the realm of the invisible.”

- Dumont from the film Tron. He is the Tower Guardian who protects the I/O (input/output) link between the Computer System in the movie and our Earthly world of programmers and users in the original 1984 film.

23 years after the Motherbeat was revealed to me, I finally experienced a full integration, or at least the closest I’ll probably come to it. In late 2017 I left my office job. I started touring full-time. I restarted my psychedelic practice with mushrooms, taking them almost always on their own without other substances or intoxicants. I met Maya—love at first sight I must say. I started HRT. I shared the story of the Motherbeat for the first time publicly and played the most embodied beautiful and spiritual DJ sets of my life at Hot Mass PGH, TUF Seattle and Honcho Campout (Penn.). I felt seen for the first time as an artist and as a human. I was leaving behind others’ dreams for me and finally living my own. I was letting myself in some sense channel the Motherbeat through my sets and my body. It was at TUF that I decided I needed to share the story publicly. I was supposed to play from 4am until 6am or something like that but kept going until 9am or so. I played out of a single record bag (a converted file bag for legal size folders of documents) and mixed as the sun was rising behind me to the most amazing crowd of souls. People of music, people of chemistry, people of rhythm…

"TUF 'Till Dawn Seatle", August 26-27, 2017.

After blending everything from Todd Terry, to PM Dawn, Orbital, Quest For Bass and Bassbin Twins alongside tracks by DJ Zozi, Unit Mobius, Laksa, Nyra, and Ténébre, I played one last song and joined the dance floor for the softest most enveloping communal rave dance of my life to KLF’s slow dubby “No More Tears.” I had made myself very vulnerable during this time and in doing so finally came into my own as a DJ, channeling something ineffable for (and with) others.

On the flight back from Seattle to Chicago I wrote feverishly in my journal, scribbling everything I could remember about the morning with Jam and CC in 1994, my failure to integrate over the subsequent years, and my recent acceptance of so many things I had been denying myself. I suppose if the fundamental beat which was calling to me is present in air conditioners, there was no real escape, and I finally was reconciling that. There was no way to turn around once I saw what was truly in the mirror. “No way back” as some of my friends would say.

This was the first Journal of the Motherbeat in a sense. Where I wrote down my intentions, memories, poems, and sigils.

But these becomings and transitions were far from smooth. The prior years had been a total crash and burn. I had moved home, again, late in my 30s after losing my job (which sucked almost all the life out of me) , picking up a bad cocaine problem, getting unintentionally outed (inadvertently discovered is a better way to put it), and racking up credit card debit. The bottoming out was what needed to happen though. Coke was a permission giver and that was dangerous because literally nothing else gave me permission to do the things I needed to do like buy girls’ clothes, wear makeup, and experiment with my gender expression and sexuality. But I finally came to terms with the truths that I was indeed a trans woman and an artist at heart that couldn’t keep herself in a box anymore. Trying to do so was ruining my life—a life I hated in almost every way except a few lights in the dark, which were mainly my music, the amazing party at Smart Bar I threw with a crew of DJs, and a few devoted friends that stuck by me despite all the chaos and destructive negativity swirling inside and outside of me. 

I can say with the benefit of intervening years that from that all chaos and those ashes rose a stronger, more gentle, more centered sense of self. I am better now, and as I told my Dad who worries about me navigating the world because I am trans, “Dad, if anything ever happens to me out there, know in your heart that I truly lived.” I now live a life filled with music and love. I found a true kindred spirit in Maya, who wants to share dreams and make things in the world together… our little cabin, our label, our events, our soundsystem to name just a few tangibles. I still have anxiety sometimes, and depression, but I have hope because I learned in meaningful ways how to cope. I thought sharing my experiences as a trans person would mean the end of my life, and in some ways this was true, but that needed to happen for me to become the person I am today. In my hardest moments I am still grateful to be able to share music with others and to have wonderful friends, not to mention a bonkers record collection and studio, which are in so many ways part of my life-long project to build a temple of dreams around me.   

Over the last 6 years I have arrived at many understandings, of which I’ll share a few…

I can give witness to the fact there is something magical, positive and powerful in sharing that which is hidden. We all have the potential to tell the true stories that don’t get told. We can invest in the mystery of our own being instead of living in the dreams of others. In doing so we can dissolve the boundaries, restrictions and covenants of the dominant societies. We can unlock the potential of our minds and bodies and heal our relationship to mother nature. And we can begin to find the others like us and create new realities to live within. 

Next week’s Journal of the Motherbeat will feature a new Raver’s Toolkit where I talk about the drug protocol that led to these powerful experiences.