My hooping playlist gets renewed every half year or so and is currently twelve hours of eclectic: Amadou&Mariam, Balkan Beat Box, Basement Jaxx, Gorillaz, Hot Chip, K’naan, MIA, Moloko, Thievery Corp, and assorted others (ok, Shaggy’s in there—I cop to it)… but I realized last week that I’ve been really limiting my freedom of expression with it.

Back in the day, at Allstars rehearsals, Christabel would talk about challenging ourselves to hoop to wildly different music to inspire different gestures and combinations. Once or twice, for the performance jam at the end of rehearsal, she’d pop in a CD that drove her point home. I remember Natasha getting some operatic number—I mean literally from an opera. She did well with it, incorporating her years of ballet training. The next song was, like, Frank Sinatra. And after that, maybe Tibetan chanting or something. When Christabel wasn’t there to enforce it, though, we stuck to our own favorites, on rotation.

I spent last week in heaven—living close to the land and in tight community on a gorgeous property known as Black Mountain in the Russian River area just an hour’s drive north of SF/Oakland. And among the many amazing folks up there, several talented musicians. One of them played classical guitar—think Andres Segovia—haunting Spanish riffs like my favorite heartrender Recuerdos de la Alhambra; some Bach, Schubert, very old traditional pieces like Greensleeves; things that sounded familiar but that I could never name… and I was invited (challenged… called….) to hoop to them.

So I hooped to Bach and I hooped to Greensleeves and to Andalusian melodies. And I think I had some real Moments out there… Some supercharmed Flow. It felt like I did, at least. (For better or for worse, none of it was captured, except in the minds’ eyes of folks who happened to be watching or passing by…) In fact, my hooping felt like it had a life of its own, almost separate from me, and I was just the conduit. It was phenomenal.

Just one more reminder that nature thrives with diversity, and is stifled by homogeneity…