What is Arrival Day? -- You may not know much about this annual celebration of May 22nd, but you will. You will hear of it as the children of those who know, and their children and grandchildren spread out into the world. You can see that happening now in the profiles of young nu-jazz on MySpace, "I am a force of nature," he said, "The Brother of the Wind"

That is how a myth works. It works because it works and this one, it's working.

Arrival Day - The annual celebration of an alien visitation, the day when an angel being came to Earth to speak to us, sent here with an important message from our Creator, a gift from our ancestors with a message about Space, about The Future, about The End of Sorrow, about The Sound of Joy. About Music.

Worldwide those who hear gather on the Arrival Day[1] to celebrate the message of an alien being berthed in the Magic City on that date.

Sun Ra believed in eternal being. Birth was a bad word in his lexicon. One of his "equations of sound -- similarity" was B-I-R-T-H = B-E-R-T-H. If you were born, that meant you were going to find your place of B-E-R-T-H -- i.e., your final resting place -- i.e., the grave. Sunny preferred to say he had "arrived on the planet," and was more than a little vague about when that happened -- maybe in 1055, he would say, maybe a few thousand years before that.
[ The Birmingham and Chicago Years ]

We Came From Nowhere Here, Why Can't We Go Somewhere There?

Reality has touched against myth
humanity can move to achieve the impossible
because when you achieve one impossible the others
come together to be with their brother, the first impossible
borrowed from the realm of myth

And so, today, to celebrate this message of Sun Ra, you should do something impossible. Reach out beyond this mundane plane of everyday limitations, out beyond the farthest we can see of ourselves, be what we have never been.

Those of the reality have lost their way. Now they must listen to what myth has to say. . .Somewhere else on the other side of nowhere, there's another place in space, beyond what you know as time. Where the gods of mythology dwell. . .These gods dwell in their mythocracy, opposed to your democracy, and your monocracy. They dwell in their mythocracy, a magic world that makes things to be.
[ The Cosmic-Myth Equations ]

Here is the very essence of the shamanic healing art of Changework: we must be discontent with the world as it is, somebody else's idea of things as they be and raise (Ra-ize) our beingness beyond the cursed gravity of that ground we call our everyday today-world. We manage one impossible, then another and its brother ... and in doing undoables we scale up and trans-form as creative angelic beings who first imagine their next Reality, then make it so.

Sun Ra carried a valid US passport. For "Place of Birth" it said "Saturn". We're not talking little impossibles here. We are talkin' impossible impossibles.

And so, here, now, today, another Arrival Day, and we each take that one and then the next impossible space-walk step out of His-story and into our personal My-Story, and thereby, we too become the angelics who arrive at our own berth.

Our happy Arrival day.

Arrival Day Celebrations for 2008

After you have done your own impossible thing you may have some time left to relax with a net-radio, or you may want to bathe in the rays of those who have gone before just to get your own true higher-order of being wound up enough to take that flight, either way, if you're looking to listen there are many annual Sun Ra fests that happen on or around Arrival Day and here are just a few; chances are there's none listed in your newspaper, but I'm sure you can find more with a google:

• Charles Blass presents Sun Radio on WKCR.org May 22, 1-5AM NYC Time and May 25, 2-7PM - With special guests Marshall Allen and Sun Ra Arkestra
• NYC Concert May 25th Evening at Sullivan Hall - see thesunraarkestra.com for details on this and other official Arkestra events.

  REMEMBER: it is far more convincing to see something impossible up close and first hand rather than as mediated by recordings or radio. For maximum effect, when ever possible, witness your impossible things directly.

• Australia's Night Air on Sunday evening, a Sun Ra retrospective that will include a rare interview with Amiri Baraka.
• ESP-Disk Tribute streamcast in three parts.
• Call your local jazz radio station!

Happy Arrival Day! See you in Tomorrow's World.