Who Knows Where or When
Welcome to the final installment of our
Summer Camp News Bulletin.
We just concluded our first ever online summer camp! Though we have been sharing weekly newsletters about our experiences, it has been difficult to fully tell the story of what has taken place – how we created a whole virtual mystical reality together that felt more real than any physical reality. It’s as if we have been dreaming together since June. It’s now time to wake up! (Or is it?)
It will probably not surprise you that we wrote a book about it: What I Did On My Summer Vacation: A Sacred Ecstatics Mystical Journey to the New Summer of Extreme Love. It includes all four creative ritual experiments that we conducted as a group this summer. We aim to get it spit shined and out in the world as soon as we can.
Today we’re sharing one final summer of love vision. On the last night of summer camp, Brad was sent to his favorite spiritual classroom and brought us back a musical gift. Here is his report, followed by links to two versions of the song that came through.
* * *
I was in a jazz club with Erroll Garner. He sat at a Steinway grand piano and started playing. I was overcome with joy that my favorite saint was gifting us with a song at the end of summer camp. It was a Broadway tune by Rodgers and Hart entitled, “Where or When.” Its lyrics express how summer camp and its many visits to the past touched our hearts in an unforgettable way:
When you’re awake, the things you think
Come from the dreams you dream
Thought has wings
And lots of things
Are seldom what they seem
Sometimes you think you’ve lived before
All that you live today
Things you do
Come back to you
As though they knew the way
Oh, the tricks your mind can play!
It seems we stood and talked like this before
We looked at each other in the same way then
But I can’t remember where or when
The clothes you’re wearing are the clothes you wore
The smile you are smiling you were smiling then
But I can’t remember where or when
Some things that happen for the first time
Seem to be happening again
And so it seems that we have met before
And laughed before and loved before
But who knows where or when?
As Erroll played this song in the dream like no one else ever could, he looked at me and I felt we had looked at each other in that same way before. He then threw the music into me. I can’t explain how—it was the same experience I had the first time I heard him play when I was twenty years old. It seemed to be happening again.
I then sat down at the piano and whatever magical muse played through Erroll now came through me. Making music this way in the vision seemed so natural, as if we had played together like this before. And laughed before and loved before. But I was unsure where or when. Was it happening now or then? Here or there? And on which side of the veil?
After I got up the next morning, I found I could not fully wake up from the dream. Still hearing Erroll’s music fill the house, I wept at the majesty of being alive like this. Then I remembered how Hillary and I met. With one look and one hug, we felt as if we had been and would be married forever. The next day we started teaching an online class we called, “Cooking the Silver Trout,” inspired by Yeats’ poem about catching love in a stream.
Since then, no matter where or when, we have never stopped fishing for trout and hunting for n/om. Sacred Ecstatics has always been a summer camp with a fishing pole and frying pan in hand. Let us never stop catching extreme love, climbing and dipping into the highest dream where things are seldom what they seem.
* * *
Consider this musical gift as an everlasting song rope to our summer camp where open hearts found extreme love. Any time you need to travel back to campground, reach for this song and, like a heavenly highway, it will take you straight there. Don’t ask whether this summer was more about correcting history, changing the present, or altering the future. There’s also no need to ponder whether we really went on the many adventures we took around the world and into outer space—or whether we dreamed it all.
Just soak in this mystically delivered song that came to feed your everlasting longing for the extreme love that blurs dream with the way you think when you’re awake. Own this feeling and allow it to reel you back to the summer camp where we laughed and loved to the extreme. Rest assured we’ll meet each other this way again, though who knows where or when.
The Song
Erroll’s version, and then one with the lyrics sung by Barbara Cook:
-The Keeneys, August 30, 2020