Campfire

Bathed in golden light
Faces gently lit in the glow
A silent hum fills these walls
And echoes through my bones

 I enter a dream
For it is here reality fades
This is my trance
I’m swimming through its veins 

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Many moons ago, our ancestors gathered together and told stories. Knowledge, from one person to another, was transmitted through our ability to share through speech, song, fable and dance.

This is how Campfire was born.

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It is an icy cold Saturday night. The street is an ocean of strappy shoes and tight dresses and musky aftershave and clinking drinks. I slip through crowds of flickers and sparks, a symbolic yet contrasting foreshadowing of the place I am going.

Off the bustling road and down a dark cobbled street, the stirring backdrop of the city vanishes. In the inky blackness of the night, I am led only by a glow that bleeds from an open doorway. Uncertainty bubbles in my chest.

A long, golden hall gives glimpse to bustling room at its end. Hesitant but transfixed, I let the wind gently sweep me into the unknown. Behind me I feel the world drop away.

I know, the moment that I am here, that I have tapped into a different state of being. The edges of reality soften, and with acute awareness that sleep does not permit, I feel myself fall into a dream.

I sit in the back row, elated by my surroundings but ruled by my shyness. People move like a gentle stream around me, and eventually, I surrender to the current, joining the swell of conversation. We migrate, attuned to the room’s secret frequency, to a conglomerate of chairs facing an old grand piano.

Welcome.

I am lulled by song and by story and by words. People, strangers, pour their creativity into the space between eager ears and eyes. The sensation of satiation fills me; with each performance I am full, in spirit and in soul. I am suspended in midnight sky.

The fire turns to ember, and the ember dissolves to ash. I am released by the dream’s embrace and return to consciousness. I thank the pianist, the poet, the singer, the lyricist.

I know it is time, and in the same way I arrived, I feel the wind pull me back and deliver me to the night.

The streets have emptied; frivolity soothed to sleep by the final drops of drink.

I walk alone, suspended in silence, under the guise of the moon.

Only the night knows where I have been.

Only the night knows about the Campfire and the stream.