The Dance of Life
The motto of Dubrovnik
is Libertas. That motto is lived each and every night at the Troubador
Hard jazz caffe, where owner/bass player Marko Breškovich provides an environment
of free music and warm conviviality. With sons Toni on piano and vocals
(and sometimes trombone), Niki on drums, and Vlaho on congas, the music
just pours out.
The Troubador is
a place locals also come to relax, talk, and listen in the outdoor summer
warmth. During my stay the first week of July I played music there every
night, never knowing quite what was coming up next nor caring, really.
The carnival of life just poured out.
The first night
I found myself accompanying a belly dancer, Susan Frankovich, on congas,
as well as playing harmonica. The second night Marko introduced me to a
diva from South Africa in the audience, who was on holiday with her husband
and daughter, and we talked of her transition between opera and broadway
musicals, and of music more generally.
The third night Marko’s 15 year-old niece belted out “I Will Survive” like a seasoned pro. Another night I sat at a table with a Croatian sailor, his wife, and Susan, talking about the sailor’s life at sea around the world, of how his wife can now travel with him. Susan spoke of how she arrived in Dubrovnik from Arizona with ten dollars and the desire to go to Spain, to dance her way to Spain. She was dancing on the edge, free. Through the touch of her finger bells and entrancing gestures, her rhythm rhapsody called out our improvising.
Hypnotizing hips shake the gaze of entrancement onto themselves. Unwary tourists walking through end up entranced, like Odysseus lashed to the mainsail with his ears unblocked, end up turned into participants in the hypnotic dance of life underway, transfixed until the song is over.
No exit, only entrance,
entrancing entrance. We musicians, entrancers entranced, pouring out the
energy that the moment is pouring in, sacred vessels of the music which
pours through us.
This was heaven
on earth, in the flesh, in the music, in the air, in the dancing, in the
stones, in the people in the city in the moment. Pouring music out of the
not-yet into the now, the ambrosia of life, pouring out creation. Being
the creation, fully immersed in it, in the dance of life.
Life flows as heaven
on earth at each and every moment if we open our hearts and our awareness
and our love and allow ourselves to feel it as it truly is:
infinite creation.
For as the medieval poet
Rumi put it:
...We
have fallen into the place
where
everything is music.
Stop
the words now.
Open
the window in the center of your chest,
and
let the spirits fly in and out.
