2010 Annual Spring Goddessfest, July 10th to July 14th (Part One)
This one has been so long in coming, both the writing and the happening itself. Spring Goddessfest and Festival of Goddess are two events which bookmark and cycle my year. The first in the spring and the second in the fall, run by the same women, but just slightly different for which event. In the fall of 2008, three months before I left for Korea, I had to say goodbye to the first thing of the many I would.
And even though it took four months past getting home, to finally come full circle, there was that feeling ramping the whole time. The closing of a book. The last goodbye, turned back into the last welcome home. And home, that word resounded so strongly during that Thursday. I've always gotten lost getting the camp site. Three years running. This year, with the same piss poor directions, I didn't get lost at all. Why?
As the universe whispered,
There is no blessing like being home.
You can't get lost when you know the way home.
Thursday (Aka The Early Day)
I woke up super early, finished the last of my packing, while rambling at a good friend and accepting help Earl. I drove the super not long, but lovely to finally be driving a longer than inside city distance to the camp grounds, never getting lost, blaring music on a still ever growing personal sound track in my head. My mind full of music and coming home and the uncertainty of surprise I hadn't quite wrapped my head fully around yet.
I arrived, as per my always normal, pretty much on the dot for when people were allowed to arrive and flew my car into the area where I always camp. In the corner at the bottom of the rolling grass hill, right overlooking the water fall (that lulls me to sleep, and keeps time with my mornings -- and that I fell down as a twelve year old, scraping up my whole shin, when I was twelve and thirteen and the Council of Magical Arts was still have events there).
I set up my brand new tent passed down to me from Earl's dad, finding it pretty much perfectly sized for me standing and it fitting my bed and one set of plastic dressers, for the witchy clothes and altar top. I only got about halfway through before the blistering afternoon Texas heat had me going, water and people and shade might be better. So I wandered in.
I was hugged by half a dozen people, getting the screeches and hard hugs of 'oh, goddess, you're home.' And while no one got the right location or reason remember really, it was hilarious and overwhelmingly lovely to be welcomed home so immediately on sight. I helped set up the raffle table and the workshop information boards, before taking over a table and just laying on its top, in the shade, letting the wind play mercy with my skirts and hair and closed eyes.
Somewhere in here I realized that cell phone reception, which two years earlier had been nonexistent, was not nonexistent anymore. Which meant the lack of contact with two specific people wasn't as complete as I had thought it would be. Nor would the thing I was considering doing have as much impact to me personally if I let myself take advantage of that. But also, there's something to being out of contact, and only communing with those present.
So, I made a promise to myself only to use it a few times a day if at all.
I kept my clothes. This is a recurring theme of this weekend, that says volumes more to me than anyone else. Because it's very much a wear whatever you want or don't want to event, and everyone is fine with whichever of those you pick. But since about thirteen I've been quite happily in the "not" or "nearly not" or once i arrive "clothing is like jewelry for skin" mindset here. And this time...
I kept my clothes. Which was very different.
And I'm still processing what that means inside of me.
About coming home. And about the parts of me still . . .
This was only not true with swimming. Oh, heart beat or heart beats, that bright blue jewel of pool. Where I lost my clothes Thursday evening in seconds for. And numerous times during the weekend. Beautiful, cool, cold water and bright colored pool noodles, and the over hand for air drying, and all the varied voices of women talking about any number of things. Setting up. The vendors coming. The past months and years and dreams and everything.
The last two things of the night were sort of miss mashed. I went to hand out with friend high on the hill where they'd camped behind the stage and pavilion, to play catch up and have somewhere to do amusing things into the evening hours. I found out amid this first that one of the new women makes amazing Sweet and Sours, but also that one of my event friends had gotten a divorce during the spring I was gone. Which was a sad thing to learn.
And then there was the semi-hilarious, pseudo-lingering exchange between me and one of the younger girls. Every Saturday night of both Spring Goddessfest and Festival of the Goddess is an amazing talent show. People prepare for months on these show pieces. And so I’m sitting there, bouncing an adorable baby in my lap, watching two women practicing a dance routine to Katy Perry's I Kissed A Girl and tossing out options and advice on it like everyone else there.
So they come sit down, and the young of two, snarky and popish and adorable, while taking her baby back, is talking about her love of this song and her life and other people. And turns on me, with this little wicked smirk that's got it's challenge-n-answer written all over it and says, "So, Amanda, how many girls have you kissed?" And I raised an eyebrow, easily tossing back in the same tone, "You think I can still keep count?" And she turned like three shades of red and white and gaped quite like a fish, finally managing to squeak out in this sort of horrified squeaky by utterly serious stupor of "But You're Straight!"
To which I blinked, pretty plainly, smart and snarky going straight into not, with "I am?"
This was the only phrase that seemed to fall out of her mouth at me for the next good twenty minutes (and it would reappear often during the next three days). Though for the life of me so far the only reason this assumption seems to have ground for her was that somewhere two or three year prior she had flirted with me and I had done absolutely nothing with it or about it. To which there was the response, well, you know, boyfriend. Billy.
And that wasn't really on my docket. Or ours. Especially mine then. We were still quite in the Bunny phase at that point, three years ago, and I had no room in my head for other people of any kind, when I was still learning to adjust to him post my relationship with Phoenix and Phoenix's death.
(And even if it weren't, does the lack of interest or realization really denote a lack of gender appreciation or interest? Because if you are basing this assumption on the fact you have never seen me either with or kiss a girl? Well, you've never seen with or kissing a boy, either. And far be it for me to be all logical and point out your assumption should be that I'm asexual, not heterosexual, at this point. I'm...just finicky and touchy about this whole labeling-assumption-categorizing thing still.)
But the night paced out from there. With other people rehearsing things for their show, and eventually even splitting off into the darkness. Where I went romping across the dark grounds toward my furthest corner from everything tent. I laid in the darkness listening to the waterfall and thinking about my life. The things there, the confusing moments of the day, the welcome home ones, and fell asleep to the sound of the waterfall behind me, cushioned on my huge air mattress.
Friday (Day, The First)
This was the morning I woke up in my tent to the sound of the waterfall and women talking across the rolling hills in the Coffee Pavilion area, and laid awake, listening to the water and thinking about English. Specifically the word 'miss.' I grow tired of the encapsulation of English definitions and it's limiting nature sometimes. Miss has such a codependent and desperate or wistful sound to it in most of our popular culture. It is a word that MUST be acknowledged and handled and answered and responded to and fulfilled and pushed into nonexistence.
And I found that word that morning, but not as any of those things.
Just as a notice from the universe about something not present, that was part of my every morning for so many mornings stretching through three months of America and a multitude of them in Korea. Not with the necessity to move toward it, but sort of with simplicity of universal need to acknowledge it, and its absence, and to keep rolling on with the important things of the morning. Like finding myself a skirt and a cup of tea.
Which happened about four minutes later when I made it across the green bare foot and giggling while myself and another woman from Sweden worked out how to make a creamy smelling Earl Grey in a rather defunct looking coffee pot. Which included triple boil dripping before I gave up and just started drinking it, while we talked a lot about working in other countries and how lucrative it is/was in comparison to working in the United States at present.
Which led to taking down of a bit of information about her company and its stuff.
The morning was spent watching shops set up and passing between helping the main people set up work things and hanging out with the girls at the top of the hill again. And there was the blast of coming down to help put up the temple again. For the first year in ever, I did not have to assemble the poles for them at the very start of it. But it was a blast putting it up, and I got to hand my massively huge red angel tapestry across the front of it, again, since I bring it for them always.
There was swimming, again, once all the temple construction and decoration was done, as wonderful answer to midday heat and work. Cold water across all of your skin, laughing and playing with everyone else who's been working the morning away in the warmth of the summer sun. I got to have awesome talks during this one about where the leadership of the Springfest and FOG (Festival of the Goddess) had gone or changed during my absence, too.
I spent lunch and early afternoon back up with the girls on the hill, where it was decided I should move my tent. Thus early afternoon was spent first helping to baby sit, followed by breaking down my entire campsite and shoving it all back inside of my car, followed by moving the car itself up to their area, and a little more babysitting. Which led to this hilarious exchange.
Phone picture sent across the world.
MSGArrives: Omg. Where did you steal a baby from?
Me: Well, I had to find something sufficiently innocent to sacrifice.
Them: (something hilariously goofy)
This is cuteness of my baby sitting. Who obviously was not sacrificed to anything except my utter adoration and obsession with him for like three days. He was so so so cute. And I was the convenient cast off baby sitter who never minded for the next three days, while the two women I was with finally got to have little bits of we're cute having out first camp out together-together bondy time or any amount of getting ready for things without having to worry over him.
Which you'll hear bits about now and again through the left over days.
Dinner was spent on a blanket near the not-lit-yet fire ring with two of the women from RCG, who'd arrived mid-day and would only be able to be there for that singular day. It was an awesome little meal and playing a little bit of catch up. This was followed with looking over a little more of the shops that had been set up during the day, and then we finally reached the main forum of the night. Opening Ritual. I love opening ritual of SpringFest (and closing ritual of FOG) with such immenseness.
We line up from oldest to youngest, and amusingly enough, even at twenty-seven (and when did I get to be twenty-seven?) I was and am still the very youngest women on the grounds. Which was amusing. Even the girl with me, with the baby, who was used to be youngest on the grounds, actually counts as being a good score of months older than me. So there I am staring at this wide allotment of people in this circle spanning from me to the old Crone standing next to me, as we give our names.
And then they name the oldest and the youngest, causing me to blush when they get to me, because the lady running it is pointing out that I am back from my moving to the other side of the globe and back with them again. Then we get to start the birthing ritual. There's a chant we say over and over and over and over, and you walk through pairs of women starting at the oldest crones, who give birth through to youngest, so I went through the most sets of people. Who drop their arms to sing to you and love you and birth you through the community opening the festival.
And I'm having this sort of beautiful epiphany watching them all, thinking. About how one day I'm going to show up and there will be another woman after me. And another. And then many. Strange and glorious and beautiful and young and filled with such fire and youth. And one day I'm going to stand in each of these middle places. And one day I'm going to be the crone at the end. And the utter beauty, and depth of the love in all these lives, all these eyes, the heart and arms of my sisters, mothers, grandmothers, of this so dearly missed placed, welcoming me home, welcoming me in.
After it we have the first big bon fire of the weekend, wherein there is usually dancing for me. But there was not. Just as there was not at Joe's Drumming Circle. I didn't want to get up. And so when it was suggest I drum and I pointed out to someone I'd never tried drumming before, I was thrust next to drummers with a drum and I got to drum. It was fun and challenging and frustrating, and I was a little distracted by noticing a very beautiful union that blossomed into fruition for two people I count very dear to me.
When one of the many of RCG sisters there left, she asked me if she could leave her rings and I'd sell them for. Which I was only too glad to do. And for the most part, for the rest of the bon fire times, I sat and did my best learning how to use a drum for that night.
And even though it took four months past getting home, to finally come full circle, there was that feeling ramping the whole time. The closing of a book. The last goodbye, turned back into the last welcome home. And home, that word resounded so strongly during that Thursday. I've always gotten lost getting the camp site. Three years running. This year, with the same piss poor directions, I didn't get lost at all. Why?
As the universe whispered,
There is no blessing like being home.
You can't get lost when you know the way home.
Thursday (Aka The Early Day)
I woke up super early, finished the last of my packing, while rambling at a good friend and accepting help Earl. I drove the super not long, but lovely to finally be driving a longer than inside city distance to the camp grounds, never getting lost, blaring music on a still ever growing personal sound track in my head. My mind full of music and coming home and the uncertainty of surprise I hadn't quite wrapped my head fully around yet.
I arrived, as per my always normal, pretty much on the dot for when people were allowed to arrive and flew my car into the area where I always camp. In the corner at the bottom of the rolling grass hill, right overlooking the water fall (that lulls me to sleep, and keeps time with my mornings -- and that I fell down as a twelve year old, scraping up my whole shin, when I was twelve and thirteen and the Council of Magical Arts was still have events there).
I set up my brand new tent passed down to me from Earl's dad, finding it pretty much perfectly sized for me standing and it fitting my bed and one set of plastic dressers, for the witchy clothes and altar top. I only got about halfway through before the blistering afternoon Texas heat had me going, water and people and shade might be better. So I wandered in.
I was hugged by half a dozen people, getting the screeches and hard hugs of 'oh, goddess, you're home.' And while no one got the right location or reason remember really, it was hilarious and overwhelmingly lovely to be welcomed home so immediately on sight. I helped set up the raffle table and the workshop information boards, before taking over a table and just laying on its top, in the shade, letting the wind play mercy with my skirts and hair and closed eyes.
Somewhere in here I realized that cell phone reception, which two years earlier had been nonexistent, was not nonexistent anymore. Which meant the lack of contact with two specific people wasn't as complete as I had thought it would be. Nor would the thing I was considering doing have as much impact to me personally if I let myself take advantage of that. But also, there's something to being out of contact, and only communing with those present.
So, I made a promise to myself only to use it a few times a day if at all.
I kept my clothes. This is a recurring theme of this weekend, that says volumes more to me than anyone else. Because it's very much a wear whatever you want or don't want to event, and everyone is fine with whichever of those you pick. But since about thirteen I've been quite happily in the "not" or "nearly not" or once i arrive "clothing is like jewelry for skin" mindset here. And this time...
I kept my clothes. Which was very different.
And I'm still processing what that means inside of me.
About coming home. And about the parts of me still . . .
This was only not true with swimming. Oh, heart beat or heart beats, that bright blue jewel of pool. Where I lost my clothes Thursday evening in seconds for. And numerous times during the weekend. Beautiful, cool, cold water and bright colored pool noodles, and the over hand for air drying, and all the varied voices of women talking about any number of things. Setting up. The vendors coming. The past months and years and dreams and everything.
The last two things of the night were sort of miss mashed. I went to hand out with friend high on the hill where they'd camped behind the stage and pavilion, to play catch up and have somewhere to do amusing things into the evening hours. I found out amid this first that one of the new women makes amazing Sweet and Sours, but also that one of my event friends had gotten a divorce during the spring I was gone. Which was a sad thing to learn.
And then there was the semi-hilarious, pseudo-lingering exchange between me and one of the younger girls. Every Saturday night of both Spring Goddessfest and Festival of the Goddess is an amazing talent show. People prepare for months on these show pieces. And so I’m sitting there, bouncing an adorable baby in my lap, watching two women practicing a dance routine to Katy Perry's I Kissed A Girl and tossing out options and advice on it like everyone else there.
So they come sit down, and the young of two, snarky and popish and adorable, while taking her baby back, is talking about her love of this song and her life and other people. And turns on me, with this little wicked smirk that's got it's challenge-n-answer written all over it and says, "So, Amanda, how many girls have you kissed?" And I raised an eyebrow, easily tossing back in the same tone, "You think I can still keep count?" And she turned like three shades of red and white and gaped quite like a fish, finally managing to squeak out in this sort of horrified squeaky by utterly serious stupor of "But You're Straight!"
To which I blinked, pretty plainly, smart and snarky going straight into not, with "I am?"
This was the only phrase that seemed to fall out of her mouth at me for the next good twenty minutes (and it would reappear often during the next three days). Though for the life of me so far the only reason this assumption seems to have ground for her was that somewhere two or three year prior she had flirted with me and I had done absolutely nothing with it or about it. To which there was the response, well, you know, boyfriend. Billy.
And that wasn't really on my docket. Or ours. Especially mine then. We were still quite in the Bunny phase at that point, three years ago, and I had no room in my head for other people of any kind, when I was still learning to adjust to him post my relationship with Phoenix and Phoenix's death.
(And even if it weren't, does the lack of interest or realization really denote a lack of gender appreciation or interest? Because if you are basing this assumption on the fact you have never seen me either with or kiss a girl? Well, you've never seen with or kissing a boy, either. And far be it for me to be all logical and point out your assumption should be that I'm asexual, not heterosexual, at this point. I'm...just finicky and touchy about this whole labeling-assumption-categorizing thing still.)
But the night paced out from there. With other people rehearsing things for their show, and eventually even splitting off into the darkness. Where I went romping across the dark grounds toward my furthest corner from everything tent. I laid in the darkness listening to the waterfall and thinking about my life. The things there, the confusing moments of the day, the welcome home ones, and fell asleep to the sound of the waterfall behind me, cushioned on my huge air mattress.
Friday (Day, The First)
This was the morning I woke up in my tent to the sound of the waterfall and women talking across the rolling hills in the Coffee Pavilion area, and laid awake, listening to the water and thinking about English. Specifically the word 'miss.' I grow tired of the encapsulation of English definitions and it's limiting nature sometimes. Miss has such a codependent and desperate or wistful sound to it in most of our popular culture. It is a word that MUST be acknowledged and handled and answered and responded to and fulfilled and pushed into nonexistence.
And I found that word that morning, but not as any of those things.
Just as a notice from the universe about something not present, that was part of my every morning for so many mornings stretching through three months of America and a multitude of them in Korea. Not with the necessity to move toward it, but sort of with simplicity of universal need to acknowledge it, and its absence, and to keep rolling on with the important things of the morning. Like finding myself a skirt and a cup of tea.
Which happened about four minutes later when I made it across the green bare foot and giggling while myself and another woman from Sweden worked out how to make a creamy smelling Earl Grey in a rather defunct looking coffee pot. Which included triple boil dripping before I gave up and just started drinking it, while we talked a lot about working in other countries and how lucrative it is/was in comparison to working in the United States at present.
Which led to taking down of a bit of information about her company and its stuff.
The morning was spent watching shops set up and passing between helping the main people set up work things and hanging out with the girls at the top of the hill again. And there was the blast of coming down to help put up the temple again. For the first year in ever, I did not have to assemble the poles for them at the very start of it. But it was a blast putting it up, and I got to hand my massively huge red angel tapestry across the front of it, again, since I bring it for them always.
There was swimming, again, once all the temple construction and decoration was done, as wonderful answer to midday heat and work. Cold water across all of your skin, laughing and playing with everyone else who's been working the morning away in the warmth of the summer sun. I got to have awesome talks during this one about where the leadership of the Springfest and FOG (Festival of the Goddess) had gone or changed during my absence, too.
I spent lunch and early afternoon back up with the girls on the hill, where it was decided I should move my tent. Thus early afternoon was spent first helping to baby sit, followed by breaking down my entire campsite and shoving it all back inside of my car, followed by moving the car itself up to their area, and a little more babysitting. Which led to this hilarious exchange.
Phone picture sent across the world.
MSGArrives: Omg. Where did you steal a baby from?
Me: Well, I had to find something sufficiently innocent to sacrifice.
Them: (something hilariously goofy)
This is cuteness of my baby sitting. Who obviously was not sacrificed to anything except my utter adoration and obsession with him for like three days. He was so so so cute. And I was the convenient cast off baby sitter who never minded for the next three days, while the two women I was with finally got to have little bits of we're cute having out first camp out together-together bondy time or any amount of getting ready for things without having to worry over him.
Which you'll hear bits about now and again through the left over days.
Dinner was spent on a blanket near the not-lit-yet fire ring with two of the women from RCG, who'd arrived mid-day and would only be able to be there for that singular day. It was an awesome little meal and playing a little bit of catch up. This was followed with looking over a little more of the shops that had been set up during the day, and then we finally reached the main forum of the night. Opening Ritual. I love opening ritual of SpringFest (and closing ritual of FOG) with such immenseness.
We line up from oldest to youngest, and amusingly enough, even at twenty-seven (and when did I get to be twenty-seven?) I was and am still the very youngest women on the grounds. Which was amusing. Even the girl with me, with the baby, who was used to be youngest on the grounds, actually counts as being a good score of months older than me. So there I am staring at this wide allotment of people in this circle spanning from me to the old Crone standing next to me, as we give our names.
And then they name the oldest and the youngest, causing me to blush when they get to me, because the lady running it is pointing out that I am back from my moving to the other side of the globe and back with them again. Then we get to start the birthing ritual. There's a chant we say over and over and over and over, and you walk through pairs of women starting at the oldest crones, who give birth through to youngest, so I went through the most sets of people. Who drop their arms to sing to you and love you and birth you through the community opening the festival.
And I'm having this sort of beautiful epiphany watching them all, thinking. About how one day I'm going to show up and there will be another woman after me. And another. And then many. Strange and glorious and beautiful and young and filled with such fire and youth. And one day I'm going to stand in each of these middle places. And one day I'm going to be the crone at the end. And the utter beauty, and depth of the love in all these lives, all these eyes, the heart and arms of my sisters, mothers, grandmothers, of this so dearly missed placed, welcoming me home, welcoming me in.
After it we have the first big bon fire of the weekend, wherein there is usually dancing for me. But there was not. Just as there was not at Joe's Drumming Circle. I didn't want to get up. And so when it was suggest I drum and I pointed out to someone I'd never tried drumming before, I was thrust next to drummers with a drum and I got to drum. It was fun and challenging and frustrating, and I was a little distracted by noticing a very beautiful union that blossomed into fruition for two people I count very dear to me.
When one of the many of RCG sisters there left, she asked me if she could leave her rings and I'd sell them for. Which I was only too glad to do. And for the most part, for the rest of the bon fire times, I sat and did my best learning how to use a drum for that night.