I visited Santa Barbara once again for its Summer Solstice Festival this weekend, an evocative event that always gives me something new to ponder and take home, both on film and in memory.  This time I came home thinking about cultivation.

S.B. is a cultivated place with a cultivated character.  The town is neat, terra cotta, white and green, and lushly, thoughtfully flowered and treed.  The coastal mountains and foothills push against the sea leaving a gentle slope to the ocean interrupted by creeks.  A stroll down State Street is an imperceptible acquiescence to the Pacific.  You feel yourself draining west.  To stand on the beach and look back inland is to gaze at achieved comfort, your eye will squint up and climb to those nearly-hidden ridgeline mansions and may leave you with a dream not all your own.  Whether it’s the American one or the human one is up for grabs.

Eavesdropping on the conversations of folks along the parade route I heard more than once that this is the single day of the year the town “gets crazy.”  I’ll give them that.  A place that doesn’t disguise its wealth can’t afford a feral reputation.  But I love this festival and its parade.  Love.  Because of a moment that happens each time.

For me and for what seems the majority of the parade-goers the highlight of the procession is a group of dancers who are there every year, perhaps a dozen children followed by a couple dozen adults, mostly girls and women, who move along in Afro-Haitian dance.  On the surface, these are students from a local dance studio.  On the surface.  They are dressed in colorful skirt-wrap thingies and move to the rhythm beat out by a line of drummers who follow them.  That sounds pretty standard for a parade of this nature, doesn’t it?

Well it ain’t standard here, because leading them is a woman, this one particular woman.  Young, young to me, anyway.  Thirties?  I seem to have lost my sense for seeing the age of a woman, and it may be her fault.  She stands at the front, and command simply issues from her presence.  That’s the thing about this woman out on the double yellow line.  She’ll raise her arms, her hands fling out, stretched wide.  Perfectly strung for tone, she’ll throw back her hair, her chin will rise a bit, and a light will come out of her eye.  It is a beam that lights up her dancers.  This is her tribe.  She knows it humbly, and they know it right back, and it is as clear to us as the sun in the blue.  Her whistle or her clap or her leg bangs open the beat and the drums burst out as big as her smile.  She is happy.  There is no doubt about this.  Then, in an instant, in unison, the women ignite and throw their arms and selves in arcs and shimmies and pulses and thrusts and supplications to the sky.  The drums thrum the chests of all who see this and boom! some sort of psychic resuscitation is happening, right there in the middle of the street.  The shock is sudden and the passion that rises in the crowd is the same stuff you see in riots, but this is the sweet kind.  The Female kind.  You want to throw your heart out a window.

Something’s building and the crowd knows it and the dancers give everything they have.  Their faces are bright and beckoning and take in the sun like honey.  And this woman, this generous queen, she turns to lead, her dark hair flies as her hands fling up again and she slices forward with her smile.  She’s almost laughing now weeping with glee and she can’t help it, the thousands watching her troupe, her spirit move through the middle of the town in the middle of the day.  She has opened wide this dark gate we’ve been clutching closed and we cannot help but love her the way she loves her dancers and the way they love her back with their full-blown bodies turned out in joy.

The drums seek out my heartbeat and my heartbeat seeks them back.  I can’t help but pull away from the curb and move into that snaking line of followers along the sidewalk, those to whom her spirit has also called, pressing through the throng to be alongside them, to be alongside her.  Her strides are long and they bounce and we bounce and this line we make to follow is like blood through a vein up each side of the street in the middle of the town in the middle of the day.

I am drunk on this woman’s presence now and clearly so are others, so many others, and we become her children and she becomes our queen and she knows this and it fills her more and the glory grows and it goes and it goes until at last the dancers are spent and the drums relent and the final rhythmic beats are beat in the sweat and the heat and it ceases.  Bam.  And they freeze.  In the sun.  Where they stand stock still in a gesture to the sky.  And take a bath in the sudden unbidden burst of bubbling booming cheers.

And then she turns, signifying relax.  With her hands and eyes and smile and sobbing laugh she thanks her dancers and us and god for all that just happened, all that we felt, and knew we felt, on this one single day when the town goes wild and roars with joy and gratitude for this woman, this woman who makes us fresh.

I don’t know what the rest of her year is like.  But I am certain that in this moment, on this day, she is the happiest human alive.  I don’t know where she’s from but boy is she home.  She cultivated it.  Her selfless self.