You are bending over to look at this coffee-stained zine, this tattered remnant of a written word. You imagine someone, sometime, while the fire still burns 2x4s deep into the night and the songs still echo in the cob -- someone bending over ghostlit screen, tapping the voices that spoke the words that someone overheard.

Air

Mary: whispering Are you serious? I mean, it's kind of the height of hippiedom right here: look around. Blissed-out half-naked -- I mean, fully naked beautiful people singing dipshit songs about "no need to fear", "everything's going to be fine if you just smile and ignore all the crazy-ass shit coming down the pike", "oh, feel good, be free, indulge your white colonialist spiritual egotism and feeeeeel fiiiiine."

pause

Mary: Fuck me, I'm gonna go in there, aren't I?

j(A)de: Velvet, I love you, but why the hell did you bring us here? You know I'm allergic to this stuff.

Velvet: You kids need to get out more. Like most self-righteous initial judgements, yours is only skin-deep. Not even that: look -- most of the people here aren't even that beautiful.

j(A)de: That is supposed to make us feel better? Hmmm. But I suppose you're right.

Velvet: You know what I mean? Unlike most places -- bars, college parties, even political meetings -- people here are kind of visibly not all about looks, about popularity or getting laid.

Mary: I swear the 50-something guy over there is trying to get laid. And half these kids look like they're in college -- you're telling me they're not roaring hot for each other?

Velvet: No, of course it happens, but it's the mood, the feel, the energy of the thing.

j(A)de: Whoa! Woo alert! You know how Mary feels about that.

Velvet: Well, you might as well get ready.

Mary: Am I seriously going in? sigh

Fire

Fire burns. Night turns. Amid the strummed guitars and moon howls...

j(A)de: And you think this (waving at the circle, in a circle) is the beginnings of an earth culture?

base: I don't know. But maybe. I mean, it's got to start somewhere -- somewhere there's a little microclimate tucked in some corner of Empire that can foster something that gathers trace nutrients from various corners and casts a little spell for a seed to sprout into a sapling...

j(A)de: Are you smoking weed? Cause I'd love a bit... Kidding! Kidding! I'm in recovery anyway. No, look, it's a lovely thought, but I think it takes a bit more, I dunno, clarity and whatchamacallit, "rigor", to fight off the looming one-two punch of right-wing fascism and liberal pacifiers.

base: Look, you're not wrong. People around here say things all the time that make me just want to fall over and melt, and there's a culture of not really taking kindly to being called out on it. I'd be embarrassed if a native person were to come and ...

A man to their left coughs loudly. Well, he seems like a man, though they haven't done a pronoun circle yet...

Night Crow: What's this about earth people?

base: too quickly Well, I mean...

Night Crow: Aren't we all part of the earth, thus earth people?

base: Well, but lots of people have swallowed the kool-aid and jacked in to the technobabble ratrace life of consumption and glaze.

Night Crow: So those aren't "earth people"?

j(A)de: Um, I think what base is talking about is a culture, like the stories and rituals and shit you do that makes you a specific kind of person.

Night Crow: Stories and rituals and shit? Maybe songs, too? Is that what this is here -- a culture? 'Cause with my people, it takes a bit more than that! Especially an arbitrary group of folk that have just come together for a full moon, and don't do anything else together...

base: Well, that's why I say it's just a possibility, a fragment of hope. We surely don't know what we're doing -- and this couldn't possibly be all of it. But for many people, maybe it's a doorway into something they've always dreamed of, but couldn't believe possible...

Night Crow: Doorway into ... what? Where do people go from here?

base: Funny you should ask...

Water

Door opens and steam pours out, and also dripping wet bodies. Splashing, gasping in the brash cold splash, and giggles ebb to laughter.

Crystal: What just happened in there?

char: It was like ... like magic!

Earth

Clean-up, morning choring.

Jax?: So why'm I always doing clean-up, if I never go in that place?

Regina: Well, why don't you? We still have those earth-shattering moments of rhythm and humming, praying with the leftovers of a song and the vocal courage of us all. Along with all the fumbling moments too. You used to love it!

Jax: Well, maybe that's it. I feel like I remember those times as something that changed me forever -- but I've grown up now, I have my friends and our rituals and our music where we get it solid and strong more often -- and I know everyone! Who are these people, and where did they come from?

Regina: A lot have been around for a long time, now, and are holding it down along with us "core folk". In fact, it might not be so great to talk about "core" and "not core", especially when it seems to match how well people know the folk that live here. I remember when I didn't know anybody...

Jax: Me too, and why go back? Why have to work the whole time to "hold the energy" for a group of newbies that don't even get what we're trying to do?

Regina: Well, they feel it.

Jax: Or they don't, and don't come back.

Regina: And if there weren't new people always coming, how would all those folk discover a pathway out of smug-green-Portlandia-hell?

Jax: Well, you lose a bunch of the oldsters this way.

Regina: You serve in other ways, right? Now quit grumbling and pick up those towels...