When you’re someone who goes to festivals, it’s easy to
forget that there are people who DON’T. There are people who think “energy
healing” is a form of Clif bar. There are also those for whom a
“transformational” gathering—complete with fire-spinning, sage-burning, and
copious amounts of face-touching—is something akin to a weekend in hell. “I think
Patrick might like to go to Lucidity,” my mother told me; meaning my
stepfather, the same man currently puttering around in the garage, and the
proud owner of nearly two dozen paintings of poker-playing dogs. “Don’t you
think?”
I looked at her, trying to find the best way to say no, I think he’d rather spend a week
under military torture than have hundreds of gorgeous hippies ask him about his
feelings; however, I just laughed. Who
am I to judge what person will benefit from three days under the oaks? Just because
my tent looked like I sneezed out four pounds of glitter, who am I to say that
someone who sat in silence for the duration of the festival—feeling, perhaps,
that he was in the exact wrong place,
wishing he could be anywhere else—didn’t transform just as much, if not more?
6,000 festivals
just happened, oftentimes within the same person. Oftentimes before breakfast.
There is no such thing as one “festival experience”: the whole is woven of
countless little threads, each one leading to a particular version of heaven.
Whether heaven was pounding a dance floor, covered in dust, or the rogue
avocado that got squished to your pillow—it’s all part of the cloth, and heaven
just the same. All I have is the way that I feel; so here I go, tugging.
The week before Lucidity, Jill asked me for fashion
advice. Mind you, I’ve never considered myself to be a “festival person”; I
still forget earplugs, and at least once during each gathering can be found
hiding under the covers, wishing my face didn’t stink of patchouli and
sunscreen. I’m no more well versed on the intricacies of festival season than I
am on any other season, baseball and television included. Still, when asked, I
can provide a pretty accurate orientation on the rules for dressing at festivals: mainly because, there are none. Feel good, I told Jill. Feel silly. Because, after all, bound up
in the intense ephemerality of festival culture—and the fact that whatever you
choose to glue on your navel, braid through your hair, or stuff in your boots,
it’s all gotta fit in the trunk of someone’s
Volvo—runs a deep appreciation for the absurd: the chic, the dangerously zany.
“So,” she asked, palming her hair from her forehead. “If I bring a pink boa and
Valkyrie hat, I should be good, right?”
Correct.
Fashion within chaos is one of many ironies bound up in festival
culture: the most glaring of which, perhaps, being to ‘Leave No Trace.’ The
fundamental concept of creating a temporary city out of thin air leaves, well,
a bit of a trace—and you can bet that for every well-intentioned mermaid
separating her paper from plastic, there are at least a hundred eighteen-year-olds
wondering how many cans of PBR they can bury behind their tent. It’s
inevitable. However, the idea of tracelessness begs more than the question of
whether we can leave the land the way we found it. Besides pillars of bamboo,
the countless vendors, mason jars, LED lights, and camp stoves, what happens
when thousands of people pack an entire coming-of-age into the course of a
weekend? Regardless of whether our tire tracks can be seen in the dust, can
that much energy simply dissipate from whence it came? Would we even want it
to?
That’s the thing about transformational festivals: they
are miniature lifetimes, disguised as weekends. One can’t show up without
expecting to encounter a little puberty. Now, I’m no Lorax; I can’t begin to
speak for the trees, nor the countless glow-sticked Lucidibeings who spent the
entire festival on a wave of compassion and bliss. Perhaps theirs was paradise,
pure and simple. However, to claim that my experience was entirely positive
would deny a fundamental aspect of what I value most about these things: that within each festival, as within a
life, there are peaks and valleys. Reuben put it best when he said
that for some, the transformation occurs when you park a mile away from the
site and schlep your bag up a hill. For others, it’s lying in a cold tent, feeling
the weight of Alone. If you’re lucky, you come face-to-face with the things you
like least about yourself: because
oh, how the mighty fall when the Porta Potties stop getting serviced! When
their friends ditch them, when they can’t find their toothbrush! In the end,
though, it’s not the difficult moments that outweigh the whole; the people you’d
rather not see, the snippy remarks that emerge from camping with friends. One needn’t
watch MTV to know that when you throw a bunch of people in a teepee, shit
happens. No: the difficult moments simply lend credence to the victorious ones,
reminding us of their beauty, providing contrast. Like the negative space
within a painting, it’s the cave that reminds us of the light.
So you’re spat into the Universe, discover face paint for
the first time, hit an awkward growth spurt around Saturday night when your
sleeplessness kicks in, and circle around to the glow of wisdom by Sunday
afternoon; hopefully in tea with close friends, catnapping in the shadow of a
cycle well-spent. But what happens on the other side, when you’re forced to
reintegrate into life as you left it? For me, after an hour-long struggle with
a dead car battery and spastic descent down the 154, I went straight to my job
as a cocktail waitress. I probably don’t need to explain what a challenge this
was for you to imagine me there, sun-drenched and sad—with a nose full of dust—seeking
a flicker of recognition in my customers’ eyes. There’s a reason for
decompression parties. After a week spent engulfed in the festival blaze, the
default world seems vanilla; you see an accordion, and feel bummed when it
doesn’t spit bubbles. What do you mean,
it’s socially inappropriate for me to kiss someone on the mouth every time they
deliver my coffee? What do you mean, you don’t want to hold hands? Like
every good teen movie, there’s the moment you look at your festival
family—buoyed by the connection that lingers so effortlessly, bringing you
home—and ask: What happens when we leave? Like the kids in The Breakfast Club, leaning on archetypes, all hormones and fear:
“When we see each other in the halls on Monday, will we say hi?”
The truth is, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes,
reintegration is selfish and swift; and before you know it, you’ve forgotten
the feel of that one perfect shower, and are worrying about things like loan
payments and bras. You’ve forgotten the people who occupied space, who became
all you wanted, if just for a night. In that way, festivals are like summer
camp: as Isabel put it, a land where you gauge your successes and failures
within the microcosm of Friday to Sunday. Alive Stage to tent. On the one hand,
when the “real world” returns and what seemed like the Biggest Mistake is now
distant and mute, there’s relief. You exist, you move on. On the other, like a
postcard dug up from a sea of old summers, we must learn to re-read what we felt.
We sink into the evidence, a talisman of feelings past, to remember the weight
of what seemed like the whole. After all, isn’t it better to have wandered
around the festival, looking but not looking for that person you made eye
contact with—who saw you, who you may have decided to love—than not to have
loved at all?
Yes.
At their core, that’s what festivals are: the bold-faced
desire to create something beautiful out of the extraordinarily temporary. I
felt it when we set up our teepee, stringing fabric and lights in the trees,
filling our nest with live music and baskets of food. I felt it again when we
hung lengths of silk across a chain link fence, bunching and lifting just so,
making it lovely for just that: to be. To
exist for three days before the same crew of people rolled through with Kubotas
and screwdrivers, tearing down everything they just worked a year to create. Maybe
it’s weird to decorate a dumpster. But if you don’t at least try to make good what you’ve got—to make
light of what’s fleeting, what one day will leave—why bother with living at
all?
According
to Michael Meade, “Myths heal us by placing us in proximity of a ‘whole story.’
Not that any one myth tells the
whole story, but that a genuine myth has everything it needs within its shape
of beginning, middle and end.” Lucidity is myth: our collaborative tapestry, a
lifetime contained in a campground. The
truth is, for every time I sat in the Pyrobar, swearing I’d clock the next person
who said the word “manifest,” came a moment of total tranquility: a child in a
garland of feathers, or an hour spent flat on my back with the stars, the hum
of a deep set of frequencies lodging themselves in my bones. I’m not above
a little Kool-Aid. Viewed from the outside, it’s easy to dismiss festival
culture as frivolous and false; and yet, like Meade says, “The same can be said
of love.
“Only those who surrender to love know what love means,
how it heals and how it teaches. Myth also requires some surrender and, like
love, a little sacrifice.”
I don’t know about you, but in this, I’ve been saved. I made
life in Lucidity, and found peace in my growing pains, too. Nowadays, we
sacrifice so much to the linear progress of time; “Yet to find again our mythic
sense and touch timeless things, time is exactly what must be sacrificed. Only
when time becomes broken can the ‘once upon a time’ realm of genuine
imagination appear again.”
I
remember the first time I heard about fairies, and felt that belief make a nest
in the pit of my heart. Lying in the Lucidity starfield at night, a mess of
green laser beams, I was that small girl again.
“Then,
creation becomes possible again, and love has a place to enter…”
I
may not be a festival person, but I know a good thing when I feel it. And like
you, I feel it. I feel it in my bones.
“…and
healing can follow.”
Follow it has, follow it will. Down the rabbit hole, into
the Universe, across the plain of a dream only just coming true: it no longer matters
to me whether sleeping or waking. I know what has changed in my heart, what
pressed up from those grounds. Like most things worth experiencing, until you
feel it, you can’t know what you’ve been missing; and like most things worth experiencing,
it’s better to know it will vanish by morning than not to have loved it at all.
The doing of it is what makes your
heart sing: the giving of it, of
ourselves, is what makes this sweet festival real.
So you
know? If it’s packed in a tarp until next year, if it’s gone when a storm finally
hits, so be it. Paint the sign, stick the fence full of flowers; you’ll be
better for it, by the time that it washes away. We can love it enough to let
go. In the end, we can still pray for rain.
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