**The next 22 days I’ll be posting 500 words a day as part of a creative writing challenge. You can join the fb group here. **
Sometimes writing for 30 days means that there are a few good stories, some poorly-written stories and, in the case of what's below, stories that aren't even a story so much as a series of words in some sort of order.
Tonight we hosted a sound bath. If you don’t know what that is, it is not the thing where you hand your keys over when you walk in the door. What it is, is a thing in which you lay or sit around a listen to drone-y type music which lulls you into a deep meditative state. Except I was freezing and so I spent the better part of forty-five minutes obsessing over why I didn’t just ask people if they needed blankets, or say, the heat, before we started. Instead, I compulsively kept checking the room in near darkness to see if anyone had died from hypothermia. I’m a terrible host.
Just before Ryan moved to LA, I shared a house in Beachwood Canyon with three roommates. Each were either musicians or artists or both and I think of my brief time there fondly. Casey was on tour for a good portion of my stay at Chateau Shaman, and it was mostly Brian, Sarah and me making coffee in the morning and dinner at night. Brian and Sarah are atypical vegans in the sense they don’t come right out and tell you, so I made a handful of meals that no one else touched before I caught on.
It isn’t that anything spectacular happened during my five months at the Chateau (save Sarah’s birthday party). But the days spent around three people living so unapologetically filled me with a constant sense of possibility and wonder. Despite my corporate gig, I too, felt bohemian. Of the almost ten years that I’ve lived in Los Angeles now, those were some of my favorite days.
A couple of weeks ago Brian reached out to say he and his girlfriend wanted to throw us a sound bath as a housewarming gift. Brian is an incredibly talented musician, and also very generous, so, yes. I invited the other roommates to our house, plus some older and newer friends. I ordered too many potato tacos, and Brian and Angie soundchecked.
For the next forty-five minutes, I lay back against a giant floor pillow, amongst friends strewn about our living room, eyes closed, deep in meditation. After the ambient tranquilizer several of us stayed to talk about our experience. And while I’m no longer living in the Chateau, I felt like a legit bohemian all over again.