Brief update on Starfest
There's a ton of stuff I could write about. We decided to "do" Starfest this year without vending, which meant we weren't tied down to our campsite/booth at all (and that I had the gazebo to cook and lounge in). I treated the festival as a spiritual retreat and got all I bargained for.
In no particular order:
In no particular order:
- Fantastic time of communion with Lili. Hanging out in that beautiful place, sitting on a porch swing looking at a lake which is teeming with local land spirits, running back to the tent one or more times a day for private time …
- I had gotten a strong hint a while back that I should be working more with the chthonic in general, and what better place than Starbridge? So I spent several delightful hours doing various kinds of underground/earth-current/underworld trances, all very productive. I don't want to sound like a newage woo-woo, but there are these huge awesome energy currents deep in the Earth, which one can contact, or at least connect to them at power places where they are closer to the surface … this needs more digestion, really. It resulted in my having another sort of gateway available, anyway, and we'll see how that plays out in the coming months and years.
- Spirit vision is getting much better. It so happened that between other events, I was reading Francis King's history, Modern Ritual Magic, and he characterizes some of the Golden Dawn offshoots as having basically become astral-vision junkies. I can see how that could happen! Anyway, you won't hear me whining about "I suck at visualization" any more.
- I had a really sweet dream about hanging out with my late parents, wherein they were having a lot of fun doing things that they didn't do much in life. In the dream, I was aware that I was seeing this because ER had played "For Your Own Ones" (or whatever the actual title is) in concert earlier that day.
- I got a brief lesson in blacksmithing, which is totally in line with something I'm doing with some online colleagues. Further, the same smith, who has made some great ritual tools for Lili and me, and is just an all-around fine fellow, had a role in the main ritual on Saturday night, as a sort of God of the Forge (needless to say, he brought a lot of power to that role).
- Edit 6/1: Lili's been after me to stop preventing myself from singing. I seem to have "learned that I can't sing" when my voice changed. One of the workshops this year was an introduction to voice taught by opera director and voice coach Kirsten Cairns, who met Emerald Rose a couple of years ago and helped them with their vocals. She has an incredibly well-developed and easy to follow system for putting all of one's parts in alignment and mind at ease, which was a tremendous help. You won't see me on stage any time soon, but I have already put aside the wounded-frog aspect of my singing voice, and I'll at least be more free to sing and chant in Temple (and the shower :-). In fact, I joked that this workshop was worth "clerical CEUs."