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I've been trying to put this into words for a few days now...
So, on Friday night we had a house concert, or what ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) cadhla has taught me is a good old-fashioned rent party, though I didn't know the term at the time. (Some videos and photos are here taken by Robbert Michel.)
The background: within a very short time period, three out of four of the residents of our dear House Cerulia had lost their jobs due to the Economy of Suck, and it was seriously looking like the Little Blue Household might have to be broken up. We didn't want our friends to lose their home together, and we also didn't want to see the loss of one of our favorite gathering places, places to hold house concerts and game nights and movie nights and relaxing dinners full of laughter and affection and friendship. We thought maybe we could do something to help them make ends meet.
Friends, my tiny mind is blown.
It was less than a week from announcement to concert date; only a couple days more than that from the day tereshkova2001 first called me on the way to work to say "I have this idea... I don't know if it's a good one or not, so tell me what you think...". Just about a week. And with that little notice, you? You all came through. The place was packed, with more RSVPs and more people than Cerulia has ever had at a house concert before, and the raffle was jam packed with all manner of shiny things (30 items!) donated by folks who wanted to help. And when they added up the total, including CD sales, raffle tickets, straight donations, IOU's and promised Paypal donations, they wound up with nearly a full month's rent. The Cerulia girls had estimated that, realistically, they would probably wind up with enough to pay their electric bill. We gave them five or six times that.
I've been struggling since then to find words for how overwhelming this is. The community came through for our girls just like they came through for s00j, just like they came through for Alec and Kore and Fae Hollow. The intersection of several communities, really.
It's like... see, we have this hobby, Tony and me. We go around singing in coffeehouses and at cons and at house concerts, and it's a LOT of fun, and it more or less pays for itself when you factor in travel expenses and whatnot. Sometimes our shiny friends who actually make their living at this let us join in with them, and that's even *more* fun. And it's delightful and it brings us joy, and it brings a lot of other people joy in the process, and that makes me deeply happy.
And then... our little hobby, this thing we do because we love it and it's what we do for fun on our nights and weekends off, it suddenly became this... power. This power that we can actually use to do things in the world. I'm looking back and marveling at things I should've marveled at before. In summer we used our magic to help keep friends from losing their house and property, and in winter we used it to help pay a friend's medical bills, and now we have used it to help more friends keep their house.
I... we don't just play and sing. We can actually do things. Real things.
Forgive me for only just now waking up and smelling the veggie quiche enough to put this into words. I just... usually when I talk about magic it's a metaphor. But there was so much love and joy in that room that night; I would already have put everything I had into that performance, but I was feeding off what you were giving me and sending it back out again and oh.
I have been marveling at our local and internet-extended communities for a long, long time now. This tribe, with all its branches, this family, they have adopted and absorbed and welcomed us like nothing I have ever known. I've tried and tried but I can't describe the feeling. And I've never encountered a community of people who, on the whole, so completely embodied the values they say they do; I've never encountered a group who were so *actually* loving, respectful, tolerant, communicative, friendly, open, welcoming... and who valued creativity and fantasy so highly. I've never encountered so many people who really did live their dreams.
You are all wonderful and amazing and I am floored.
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accomplished
numb
curious
