Dam, this one’s tough. So much to convey in words on a page, little squiggles of emotionless darkness against blank whiteness, adhering to confusing forms and rules of structure and spelling, to try and paint pictures in your mind that will evoke sights, sounds, smells, tastes and above all that, to stimulate your imagination.
From our first story posted in December 2012 about the wind, various writers have put the tales to tablet and tried to fill in the picture of East Jesus you imagined in your mind. They wrote of constructions, they documented the parties, they expounded it’s prose in poems, they touched upon it’s soul with words for Charlie.
Much the same way that we have tried to fill in this section of the desert. It started out pretty barren with just a line of trees and a field of trash. Chasterus took a look at the area in February 2007 and decided this would be a good place to begin “sublimating the unwanted and ugly into the purposefully beautiful. “ One piece at a time, one story at a time, one day, one friend, one month, one event, one year, one more thing.
It has become a beautiful thing. You can find plenty of adjectives once you have tired of saying awesome and amazing. Whimsical, inspiring, soothing, hospitable, youthful, omnificent, uncommon, etc. and it just doesn’t go far enough to describe this community, this retreat, this home-away-from-home. As one guest said “Everyone comes up and genuinely thanks you for doing things here.”
So many things to thank people for doing this year. The power department is working on wiring more panels, more lights, more subsystems, improving the state of the batteries, cleaning, testing, working into the night to keep things going. The construction of more things, the repairing of things, the re-purposing of things, the covering of the Dome in shade cloth to help grow more things, the mud wrestling/adobe prep pit to help cover things in mud, the painting of any thing that doesn’t move and several people and things that weren’t fast enough. And so many, many more things and many more people than we can give credit.
For example we have no real idea of how many people were here for Art Slam 2014. They started showing up for the party 9 days in advance and continued to arrive until before the sunset. The pulled in trailers with art, pitched tents in the back yard, parked vans according to age and nationality and faced the recreational vehicles toward their personal Feng Shui. And yes, when a caravan of young, energetic, international students find their way to your doorstep you find some room for them too.
Nor do we have any idea how much work got done as so many projects were being worked on over a large acreage. From continued work on the wood fired kiln, a roof over the work area, repairing tables, the stove, installing a clothes washing area, more carpeting to make the garden wheelchair accessible, etc.
We do know how much work got done by everyone to make the weekend go so well and want to thank them especially. To every new guest who volunteered to wash the dishes, to every old guest who picked up an empty bottle, to everyone who gave a tour, to the cooks for every meal, to the keeper of the composting toilets. To everyone who understood that ‘population 1’ means each individual is responsible for this place.
If we were going to drop names then we would have to thank Caddy for playing chauffeur during the weekend. Not many people can say they were delivered to the Slab City Prom, in a Dusty Junk artcar, driven by a tuxedoed, singing Welshman, where they got to see a trash-bag burlesque performance by our friend Donatella MeLies. Of course most of the best dressed ladies in attendance that night were friends of ours but we might be a bit biased.
During the official Art Slam contest art got created and we invite you to come and see the results displayed on the Tower of Barbarella. If I had to describe the competition it would be 50 people divided into teams took a look at 10,000 pieces of unwanted and ugly and created 8 beautiful things. I know that doesn’t even begin to give you an idea but I said this would be tough.
The other tough thing is that this will be the last view I write about East Jesus for little time. I’m taking a break and leaving it up to all of you to help keep what we imagined, growing. I want to come back next year and look around like all our new visitors and be amazed. I reminisce over all these stories we have shared, I look around EJ, and every piece has a person and story attached to it, I hear the voices of story tellers around the campfire and remember those who are now silent and I know that this thing has infected me.
Charlie told me a thing when I was building the bottle wall. He said “ Take a picture of your work every day so you can see the change as it grows.”
“I take stories.”