On April 20, 2012, my life intersected with the life of musician and spiritual explorer Ian Hesford in a very strange way. I found myself trying to breathe life back into him after he collapsed and literally died on stage, a sudden cardiac arrest during a show with the band he helped found, Telesma.
For almost 14 years, I got to joke that “yes, Ian died on stage, but he got better.” I’ve written before about the moment and the train of synchronicities that led me to be there, to be part of a medical miracle; his survival after over an hour and a half without a pulse; and his return to a vigorous and healthy life. On bad sleepless nights, when I lay awake at 5am wondering if my life had significance, I could think of my role in his resurrection, and all the lives he touched through music, and reassure myself that it all “meant” something.
Without a doubt, the biggest grin that’s ever been photographed on my face was when I encountered Ian out and about at the Sowebo Festival a few weeks after his death and comeback.
But it was only a temporary reprieve. On February 13th, Ian suffered a second and final sudden cardiac arrest. (Friday the 13th, and the day before Valentine’s Day…even at the end he was living the irony, the synchronicity, the symbolism.)
Even miracles, it turns out, are only temporary.
It’s tempting to get angry about that, to shake a fist at the sky and demand an answer from the universe about how it can give us something wonderful and then take it away.
My friends, don’t let that temptation lead you into forgetting that you had something wonderful.
In 2014, the local online magazine What Weekly asked me to write a piece on Telesma for the band’s 10th anniversary, with photos by Philip Edward Laubner. I hadn’t thought about the piece in a while; What Weekly concluded its run and went off the web, and the band had gone on indefinite hiatus.
But the Internet Archive remembers, and I’ve re-discovered it. It’s reminded me of the community connections, the web of threads that wove Ian and I together before we even met. Because the story of Telesma is wrapped up in the story of the Starwood Festival.
Ian was inspired by his experiences at Starwood 2002, his first week-long festival. 2002 wasn’t my first time at Starwood, but it was my first year on the speaker’s roster. (I’ll be back this July.)
It’s probable that during that week I heard his didge from across the field, or danced around the fire to his drumming. Maybe he heard me chanting. Some connection in the sea of magick that is Starwood, almost a decade before that strange and fateful night when I was breathing for both of us for a few minutes.
Re-reading that What Weekly article, I rediscovered a metaphor I’d forgotten: “Hesford came out of the hospital with an implanted cardiac defibrillator. And maybe that’s a great image for what Telesma is all about: the most primal human rhythm backed by the creative and nurturing potentials of technology.”
Tech seemed more hopeful then, enshittification wasn’t yet the rule. But I want to keep that image in my mojo bag, next to Brautigan’s line about “machines of loving grace”, as a positive potential.
Ian has gone before us into the unknown, the undiscovered county. In my idiosyncratic reckoning that makes him an ancestor, and I’ll be enshrining him on my altar this Friday (another 13th).
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