It was the drums that ensnared me.

After finding the keyboard, I was standing at the intersection at 4th and Howard about to get on my way to House of Thai in the Tenderloin, when the call of nature sounded and I deemed a visit to the lua at the food court on the first floor of the Metreon timely.

My corporeal business done, ablutions included, I headed back out to the street and it was then I heard the music. A drumbeat, shell gourds, ayoyotes (ankle rattles). So I turned instead to the exit leading to the Yerba Buena Gardens and saw a festival taking place, with booths and tents surrounding a stage in front of which were Mesoamerican dancers in the middle of ritual dancing and singing.

The wafting of sage drew me to the edge of the scene and I sat zazen in the hot sun and let the dance and chant transfix and transport me.

As with all such figures and archetypes of yore that I’ve encountered — by serendipity or with intention — throughout my life, I was transported by them.

The voice of the shaman; the darting forms of the women shimmering-jingling in space like so many neutrinos; and the ghostly shape of the muxe (“two-spirit”) person whose feet didn’t appear to be touching the grass as they stepped through the dance and who was wearing a hand-written red “FUCK ICE” emblem around the ornamented dull-green camo robe on their scant shoulders; it was what I felt, with a deep and uncanny urgency.

In the far distance to the right, nearer the MLK “justice rolling down like waters” waterfall-sculpture memorial, the theme of the day: INDIGENOUS JUSTICE. Later, I would read their pamphlets on the disappeared and unheralded, the women and teenagers taken, the abject stories of ongoing deracination. In this day and age yet. Still.

I stood nearby the front of their tent, listening to a couple of radio journalists from KQED interview a young woman leader telling her story. And behind her, a kupuna speaking earnestly with a couple of passers-by who had ceased being just that. Just like me.

An elder woman speaking at the stage behind me off-frame was telling a harrowing story of her niece being abducted, violated, mutilated. Later found, unable to tell her story as her spirit had flown elsewhere beyond the beyond. The echo of the loudspeaker incongruous in this bright summer air and the glittering glass of tall buildings surrounding the Gardens and their transplanted redwoods now growing stronger and taller, despite everything.

A young woman gave me a pin to wear; its image of a giant salmon swimming upstream three tiny human figures hanging on to it, all surrounded by the glyphs of a tribe, had caught my eye. A young artist at last summer’s Is’Siwa Tribal Youth Camp at Burney Falls in Shasta County had designed that story and it found its way to posters, t-shirts, and that artifact. I pinned it to the left breast of my black t-shirt and wore it there the rest of the day.

My steps drew me around the glade and by the many booths and tents {native jewelry, musical implements, garments, etc.} but it was at the Mothership where I stopped to watch, speak with, and learn. Three women were at work on their pieces.

Ash smilingly let me sit beside to observe her art-in-progress, kindly enduring my prompts ::chuckle::. Archetypal, she said, asking back if there was someone I recognized and of course, I replied, women in my childhood in Mindanao; she gestured with her paintbrush towards her friend under the tent working on her piece, telling me she was of Filipina ancestry. (It did not surprise me to find at a nearby table a book of batok,, indigenous Filipino body art, now practiced by said friend and co-founder of their tattoo collective in Auburn, CA, near the foothills of the Sierras.)

The artist was generous with her time and thoughtful commentary of the work emerging from her canvas, deep fire-orange color rippled through with flows of black on a field of subtle turquoise. Ashely showed me two small tubes of oil pigment that she had mixed to set the substrate. I could have sat beside her all day in silence, to watch her to the end of the piece, stroke by lucid stroke evoking the woman with the split face who stands for all of us now and through the end of our time.

A balete tree.

Penguin, the Filipina-American, said she was painting that specific tree. Immediately, I was transported back to my childhood in Davao, on Mindanao, where we were enjoined by our elders to always ask permission when passing by one of these totemic trees. Lest their spirits disturb us in our sleep, keeping us forever in dream. Then I told her how the darkpurple shapes she was brushing into canvas and light reminded me of the banyan tree in the middle of Old Lahaina Town that had survived the harrowing fire. Singed and burnt black on all surfaces of trunk, leaf, branch, but its core remained, still to live and grow on.

The face on Penguin’s tree perhaps her own, perhaps a great-grandmother she never knew back in the old country, to which she hopes to travel next year, inshallah. There too, nearby her canvas, I could see myself standing by this young-ancient woman kin to me in the usual inchoate way, for the rest of the afternoon. Her strokes too, like the ones Ash was making on her totemic face, were of flame and fire, indigo-dark, crafting the artifacts of the culture marrow-deep in me and so at the end of moments I was not surprised at all to encounter. Here. This time. The tree.

Bidding a shy goodbye I resolved quietly to follow them in the spaces allowable in these days of the ones and zeroes of latent space.