Beats over beef

What’s beef? Photograph: Allstar/LIONS GATE FILMS

I have a friend I was on the outs with over a thing.

I’ve been through plenty of things with plenty of friends, and we usually work it out and keep it moving. This one hit particularly hard, as my friend’s a healer and one of my spiritual advisors, and our thing colored how I received his healing and spiritual advice. This man was part of the healing team that kept me alive during my Dark Night daze, and the distortion in our friend field affected me on a soul level. As it turns out, I lean on my friend’s healing and spiritual advice way more than I realized.

Our thing also involved my wife, another friend friction first, but that’s another story for another day.

My friend tries many things and is good at most of them. One thing he’s really good at is music, and he and his band frequently perform sound ceremonies that I attend and enjoy. The band uses gargantuan gongs, celestial sound bowls, dramatic drums, rhythmic rattles, and spacey synth soundscapes to create an immersive vibrational experience not unlike a plant medicine trip.

I usually lay down on a yoga mat, prop my head on a blanket, place crystals over my heart and third eye chakras, feel the vibrations move through my entire body, and blast off into the astral realms. I look forward to sound ceremonies like Trump looks forward to WackArnold’s bringing back the McRib. 

Recently, my wife invited me to a sound ceremony, and I didn’t know what to do. I love sound ceremonies, but I had my beef with my friend over the thing. 

I did a quick spiritual balancing test, and my desire to hear bangin beats way won out over my beef. I tapped into the version of me that went with beef over beats, and that version of me is a sad man. 

I’m so glad I went with beats over beef, as this last sound ceremony was a megabanger. The vibe from the earlier ones I attended was mellow and contemplative, but this one was more of an energy-raiser. Not everyone loves drums and bass, but I do, and they were on and poppin’ at the ceremony. It’s no coincidence that my friend’s a percussionist, and his skins game was on hit and hella on beat. The whole band was uncannily zoned in, not unlike Talking Heads locking in so hard in Stop Making Sense that it felt like they were aliens.

When my friend’s feeling it during a ceremony, he’ll move through the crowd singing ayahuasca songs and waving one of those big, hollowed-out rattle sticks that sound like the ocean. Sometimes, he’ll get up in your mix to sprinkle Florida water in your mug, tap your third eye or something if the spirit moves him and he receives an energetic invitation, and share some of his good juju.

I don’t know how my friend does all this with just two hands, and when he’s locked in, he reminds me of Xavier Rudd, who has a million instruments onstage at his live shows and seems to play them all at once and keeps on sangin’. My friend pulls it off like Rudd, I love it, and when he did it with me the other night at the sound ceremony, the last of my beef melted away.

My friend communicated vibrationally everything I needed to know about where I stood with him: he thought our beef over the thing was stupid, and it was high time to move on and be friends again. My friend’s fortunate that the Universe gifted him the ability to say things with sound and music that most of us can’t say with words. I’m fortunate that the Universe allowed me to tune in to what he was saying.

I don’t know if the version of me that went with beef over beats could’ve done it.