Chaos in Harmony

Photo Credit: Eric Allen

The story picks up from my last post about Envision: Sunset in the Vortex

Saturday night, I’m not sure when, exactly. Time is starting to lose meaning after witnessing a miraculous sunset and spending what seemed like an eternity relishing the most delicious mango I’ve ever consumed. I’m at the Lapa stage, where the deep house DJs have been laying down thumping, hypnotic beats since the festivities commenced. The other stages have bigger names and more elaborate productions, but Lapa is my home, nothing moves my body like house music.

The DJ, Alejandro Franco, is taking us on his journey, and we’re kicking into high gear. The music has seeped down into the foundation of my being, I’m helpless to resist it. I close my eyes and surrender to the beat, fully, completely. Often when dancing I close my eyes, it helps me feel the music, blocking out my other senses. Usually only for brief periods of time, because there are people around, and I don’t want to bump into anyone. But here, in this place, in this time, I totally let go and I’m swept deeper into the music than I’ve even gone before.

The music consumes me, I am the beat and the beat is me. As I dance, eyes still closed, my awareness expand outward, sensing everyone and everything in my vicinity. I don’t need to see, I can feel my surroundings, flowing with the music where I need to move.

My awareness unfurls beyond the dancefloor, I feel the rest of the festival. Lapa sits at an intersection between the other big stages, and behind the rhythmic pulsing of the beat, other music bleeds through, from Luna and Sol, as well as the smaller Village stage, and the dozens of other pockets of music interspersed throughout the grounds. All of these surging, throbbing swells of energy seethe around me, like Lapa is the center of a giant vortex, where all the disparate wavelengths from everything transpiring at the festival swirl together into a cacophonous, glorious amalgamation of sound and vibration. The dynamism writhes around me, at times conflicting, at times syncing, but underneath it all, a magnificent unity of existence, utter chaos in perfect harmony. Everything is connected in a wondrous melody of essence, and I feel my place in it, part of the whole, at total peace amidst the maelstrom.

The universe is showing me this metaphor for the spectacular mess we call life. We all broadcast ourselves at different wavelengths, vibrate at different frequencies. Sometimes we resonate with others, sometimes the dissonance is nauseating. The beautiful thing about Envision is it creates a space that encourages everyone to fully express themselves. When we reveal our true selves and let others do the same, without judgement, harmony emerges from the chaos. We’re all different, but we all fit together perfectly in the greater whole. It can be dissonant and repulsive or resonant and beautiful, but it’s always perfect, it’s always right, it’s always exactly what it needs to me. We just have to open ourselves to the experience without demanding that it fit into our preconceived expectation of how it should be.