🍄 I Learned to Speak Alien

Two Sundays ago, I learned to speak alien. So did about two thousand other people.

I was at the Usher Hall in Edinburgh. It's a grand old domed concert hall, and I was up in the second balcony. On stage were two men from Quebec. They don't speak to their audience in any language that exists.

The band is Angine de Poitrine. One guitarist, one drummer.

The guitarist plays a double-necked half guitar, half bass. It's custom-made with extra frets for notes a normal guitar can't reach. At his feet is a pedalboard. Loops. Triggered sounds. Layers on layers.

After a while I gave up trying to work out what was looped, what was triggered and what they were playing live. The whole set sits just outside the tuning your ear expects. And it still absolutely rocks.

Between songs they don't talk. But they do communicate. They hold their hands up in a triangle. They make these noises, something like "oh" and "ah", each with its own shape of the body. They call them to each other across the stage. And somehow they pull the audience in.

Then the hall started calling back.

From up above, I watched it happen. Nobody explained anything. It just caught on, and suddenly two thousand people were answering. "Oh." "Ah." Hands up. Back and forth with the stage.

It felt like friendly aliens had come down to play a show for the humans, and we'd all picked up enough of their language to say hello.

Somewhere in the middle of the set I realised I had tears streaming down my face. They'd dropped into a quiet break and then ripped back into the main riff with another layer on top, and the whole thing tipped into something psychedelic.

For once, the tears weren't grief. They were awe.

Awe at how much they'd made. New notes. A new language. A new way for strangers to talk to each other. None of it existed until someone made it up. And sitting there, it landed. There's no bottom to this. Every time you think music has been done, someone finds a note between the notes. Behind every world someone makes, there's another one waiting.

Worlds upon worlds.

I know that feeling from sessions. In a deep psychedelic experience, many people touch something they can barely describe afterwards.

The nearest word is usually infinity. Reality feels far less fixed than it looked. Far more feels possible than the life you walked in with. Then, a few weeks later, ordinary life closes back over it. The world shrinks to its usual size.

That feeling doesn't stay on its own. You have to keep finding your way back.

Many of you have walked with me through the grief of losing Mum this year. It's been the centre of my emotional landscape, and I wanted to share it with you, not write around it. I've made sure my grief has had space, but I don't think it's healthy for it to take over everything, so that every part of life gets filtered through it.

So since Mum passed, I've made a point of going to see music. Manchester, London, Edinburgh, Glasgow. Music has always been a portal for me into other worlds. This summer I've walked through it on purpose. It hasn't replaced the grief. But it's given my life back its other dimensions. Wonder. Play. Standing in a room full of strangers, going "oh" and "ah" together.

This is a big part of integration. Find your portals.

Music, art, the sea, a forest, a certain kind of conversation.

Whatever reminds you that the world is bigger than the one you've been living in. Then go to them on purpose, especially when life has narrowed to one thing. That's integration. A big experience shows you the size of things. Your portals keep the door open in between.

And when you get there, join in. The band made the language. But it only became a language when the room answered. From the second balcony, that's what the divine creative process looked like. Every one of us adding something.

I went up to that balcony expecting a good band.

I came down remembering there's no end to what can be made. And that I'm part of it.

A reflection for you today:

👉 What helps you tap into a sense of wonder, expansion or awe?
When did you last go there on purpose?
And if life has narrowed lately, what's one portal you could walk back through this month?

What did this bring up for you? I hope you'll reply and tell me about it.