2010 Annual Spring Goddessfest, July 10th to July 14th (Part Three)
And the home stretch. I'm staying up to finish this, even if it means I'll likely be asleep in baffling hours today before ending up at My Girl's today. It isn't as though she isn't awake over there as well. (*waves*)
Saturday (Day, The Second)
This is very usually my most favorite day of either of the events they put on, but for Springfest it is my second favorite. But I still woke up, to staring at the tent top in red and not my color. Thinking about the night before in grand, clear detail, before deciding it was definitely time to get up and forage for tea. To hand the bed I was sleeping in over to the person who looked positively rung out by a hangover, whereas I had none.
The first order of business for the morning was a class called "Multihand Massage" on the shadow-y deck of the pool. And it is a thing of such awesome and brilliance I think the whole world should have it done to them. It is a massage done with as many people who can fit around a table massage the person who lays down on the table, and instructs what is and isn't okay, and then just gets to lay there in heaven for like fifteen minutes. It's a beautiful process to take part in doing for women, and it's a heavenly set of minutes just laying down yourself in people's hands.
...and, yes, there were some hilarious, almost blush worthy moments and commented about my hand print, the first few seconds after I laid down. I believe they all came down remarkably to it's always the quiet ones you have to watch out for, isn't it.
After about two hours of this, so everyone had a turn, I went swimming again. It's a beautiful addictive pool, and was refreshing after so much energy and physical work on all the women. I wandered back up to campsite for lunch time, and more bouncing of the baby of adorableness. Before I wandered back down to the Reiki Healing Circle being held in the Temple. Once again focused on group work over a single person, going through everyone.
Had an interesting moment, ala June, again, of someone going, "Oh, it's your throat chakra."
Because everyone and their mother felt it in June. As my will waxed and my Heart Chakra had not been attended to yet. (And it leaves me wary in the wake of Heart being over, honestly, too. Because from here we turn toward the Throat. Speech and Boundary, Choices and Concessions. Making your wants, wills, compassions, balances, demands, compromises know to the world in your own voice.) It was a harder few minutes than I thought it would be.
Asking people to work on it for me. To help me with opening the doors, and the ways to healing I had been since coming home.
After this was a short break, wandering through more of the shops to see if anything new caught my eye in the last people to put things up. Searching for gifts for myself or for others, but finding nothing I really wanted aside from one red/maroon baby doll dress that I eventually decided against. So I settled down at a table with two more RCG women newly arrived, and talked through a good hour with them, while doing some more watching over and selling of the rings left for me to sell.
Then there was the Spell Stars class of amazing, where we learned to make biodegradable offerings/spell pieces made of only applesauce and cinnamon, which could be written on, left by trees, dropped into water. It was fabulously phenomenal, and I was in love by the time I saw the first one, and then when we were making it with her on stage.
During this whole class was when I finalized my decision too (even previous to the running of Heart Chakra, or Heart Chakra planning taking place) that I was requiring of myself to teach a class on Glass Candle Spells at Festival of the Goddess. I'm all sort of nervously excited about this whole concept now, too. Even more since Heart Chakra.
I wandered back to the camp site again, to check on the sleeping and hung over people, to set up my tent and a tiny air mattress only. Gathered water and helped collect things, and then wandered back down to do what I always do on Saturday nights. Help the caterers set up for the community dinner. Cutting vegetables, lighting and washing things, and general filling any space where it would help to have someone there doing. It's part of one of my favorite things to do there.
Even if every single meal for some nine now no one ever remembers that on my registration form I've continually written I don't eat starch and every single time it means I'm eating the same meal. Some piece of meat and a salad, while avoiding the six or so other things that are offered to everyone else. (I may see about asking for a defrayed cost due to this on FOG finally, since we pay for this meal and I have been encouraged to bring my own supplements next time.)
I actually had a lovely person i adore suddenly reappear with a pile of fruit and boiled eggs for me, without my request and it was all sorts of humbling. (I....miss these people so much already. Especially her. I felt like there was this sparkly little bond between us this time. All new and beautiful.)
After dinner there was the baby sitting the adorable tike while his mother got herself ready to run the Talent Show. Bouncing him around and taking care of things, while finding another outfit for the night to wander in. Since I had decided I wasn't of a mind to perform in the Talent Show. (Something I am not pushing myself to promise about doing in the fall. We'll see.)
The Talent Show was amazingly brilliant, as was the woman running it, and the women near out campsite performing, and the months of practiced dance routines by the RCG sister who is my everlasting inspiration. There were three things which hit me out of the blue in the space of this evening and it's Talent Show. The first was a performance of Travis Tritt's Can I Trust You With My Heart that all but literally pinned me to my chair.
Mostly just for the set of words the title repeats in the song.
For so many reasons, justified, inconsequential, and too late to matter.
The second was more cumbersome, but least traumatic, and that was having someone who'd I'd been hanging out with off and on for three days make their interest in me known. And by known I mean known. Like, even though you made me explain why I was writing the card in the middle of the Talent show song and you've vaguely acknowledged I'm in the middle of dealing with the massive traumatisms of number three as yet unlisted, and completely out of the loop because of it, and was not interested in that in the people who were absolutely safe in my bumper world, she's going to just sit by me and be passive aggressive with every step.
Invitations to elsewhere alone. Choosing to forget having of trauma moments. Comments in front of me to others about not getting to have what you want for the night. Choosing to lay on my foot or leg, and just sigh into the table. None of these are helpful to you ever, and they are especially only even more like walking on glass shards when my head is already in a bleak space of mind already over truly important things.
And number three. I want to frown and fret, sigh and down play this already. Except. So, after the Talent Show there is a Curtain Dance. It's one of the most moving and beautiful things to see during the weekend. We throw up this huge white sheet and run strobing colored lights behind it. Women of all ages, sizes, heights, weights dance behind the curtain and you get to see their shadows, mingled and unmingled, beautiful in every way.
I have never missed taking part in one until this year.
It took me the better part of twenty minutes to make myself walk up to the back part of the stage, even after all the others had gone at least two or three times. And then I stood there. Just stood. Leaning on the ice machine next to the lights machine completely incapable of actually moving between the lights and the curtain, dead certain down to the marrow of my bones I could not would not dance. That no part of me was okay with this or ready to.
That I might literally scream and run away if someone tried to force me to.
Not that anyone ever would at this event. It's always all about personal choice.
And I stood frozen there against the ice machine for a good ten minutes, just frozen by this realization. This locked part of my soul. This truly deep inability to dance. To expression myself in movement the way I used to completely forget the world for fire and night at bonfires and the curtain here. And i sent myself stumbling away, finally, into the darkness, trying not to burst into tears. Trying not to feel like an utter failure to and of myself, for the things I have done, the wounds still there somewhere, between who I am and how I am reclaiming expressing that person.
Which had me sitting on the table, seriously on a completely different plane of existence and sort of personal dawning hell, while number two was taking place on top of my skin. You know. The skin I was already quite aware had divested me of its ability to use. That someone else apparently saw and only wanted for it. ....and goddess, but this was winding gyre of bad for about an hour. Worse and worse in my head until I decided everyone and everything in my head had had enough.
I made an early night of this one. Glad for the day, but already acknowledging it would be lovely to be going home. To have my bed and my roommate and the person I talk to, or my journal for all these things. (That I apparently couldn't even take up the space of and for and on until a month later.)
Sunday (Day, The Last)
The last morning is always a little sad just on the first moment of waking, even when it's a breath of relief, a sigh of homecoming is coming soon. I am a Taurus, and I will never not be anything less than gratefully awe-filled to be arriving at my home, when it is mine, no matter how sad I am to be leaving. Which mingled in the morning. While I was rolling out of bed, breaking the air mattress seal and striking down my tent all in the first twenty or thirty minutes of being awake.
I was packed early, and thus got to play baby sitter for the camp, so the other two could pack. Which eventually led to, since he fell asleep on my shoulder while I was taking care of him, being told I could just take him down to community breakfast. Which would give them time to both pack and have some time alone. I didn't mind. He was adorable asleep.
And I had a lot of people who commented on that fact i looked very natural doing it and at it. Just rocking him, tiny little three month old face tucked in against my collar bone. The ache of him and the words, and the things I am still waiting for from this life. Because children always feel right. All my little ones in Korea. And the weight of him in my arms, of standing and bouncing when he'd wake up confused, and little hungry, and then fall back to sleep still waiting on the re-arrival of his mother.
Breakfast was a smorgasbord of amazing things. While Saturday dinner is catered for us, Sunday breakfast is sort of an "everyone brings everything they have left over that is edible looking and puts it on a table for everyone to eat all at once" event. It was brilliant. I stole a bag of fresh cherries and devoured them.
After breakfast finished, we had announcements and then The Raffle. Which is possibly my favorite part of all things Springfest every time. This year, because I was unpacking my life post Korea, and cleaning house a lot, I donated (instead of the single raffle item required with admission) a bag and stacks of somewhere around like twenty-five or six things. From all varying states in my life, and even other people's near me. And I donated as always, about forty dollars to the Raffle itself.
It's an interesting raffle. Unlike Fog's raffle where you put tickets on specific things, SpringFest’s raffle is about pulling names from a cauldron and you simply go up and pick things from the wide tables in the order your name is called. I one once, and it sent me home with this huge bag of crystals and precious stones. Including the massively huge and daily well-loved chunk of Rose Quartz I've been carrying in my pocket for at least a month now.
After that we had a small, but intimate closing ritual at the temple, recognizing whole bunches of people. Followed by the taking down of the temple itself. There was a bit of hanging around for goodbyes, but I was really rather ready to go by that point, still completely packed from the first time I moved my camp site and the early put away, and my deep want for my bed and things comfortably home, having broken outside of my bubble in so many ways...and wanting to reassert some normality and comfort I recognized.
There was much in the way of hugging, numbers and name swapping, and then, I was back on the road home. Continuing my personal education of Rob Thomas's music until I broke in the bright, beauty of my gorgeous green back yard and home again.
Saturday (Day, The Second)
This is very usually my most favorite day of either of the events they put on, but for Springfest it is my second favorite. But I still woke up, to staring at the tent top in red and not my color. Thinking about the night before in grand, clear detail, before deciding it was definitely time to get up and forage for tea. To hand the bed I was sleeping in over to the person who looked positively rung out by a hangover, whereas I had none.
The first order of business for the morning was a class called "Multihand Massage" on the shadow-y deck of the pool. And it is a thing of such awesome and brilliance I think the whole world should have it done to them. It is a massage done with as many people who can fit around a table massage the person who lays down on the table, and instructs what is and isn't okay, and then just gets to lay there in heaven for like fifteen minutes. It's a beautiful process to take part in doing for women, and it's a heavenly set of minutes just laying down yourself in people's hands.
...and, yes, there were some hilarious, almost blush worthy moments and commented about my hand print, the first few seconds after I laid down. I believe they all came down remarkably to it's always the quiet ones you have to watch out for, isn't it.
After about two hours of this, so everyone had a turn, I went swimming again. It's a beautiful addictive pool, and was refreshing after so much energy and physical work on all the women. I wandered back up to campsite for lunch time, and more bouncing of the baby of adorableness. Before I wandered back down to the Reiki Healing Circle being held in the Temple. Once again focused on group work over a single person, going through everyone.
Had an interesting moment, ala June, again, of someone going, "Oh, it's your throat chakra."
Because everyone and their mother felt it in June. As my will waxed and my Heart Chakra had not been attended to yet. (And it leaves me wary in the wake of Heart being over, honestly, too. Because from here we turn toward the Throat. Speech and Boundary, Choices and Concessions. Making your wants, wills, compassions, balances, demands, compromises know to the world in your own voice.) It was a harder few minutes than I thought it would be.
Asking people to work on it for me. To help me with opening the doors, and the ways to healing I had been since coming home.
After this was a short break, wandering through more of the shops to see if anything new caught my eye in the last people to put things up. Searching for gifts for myself or for others, but finding nothing I really wanted aside from one red/maroon baby doll dress that I eventually decided against. So I settled down at a table with two more RCG women newly arrived, and talked through a good hour with them, while doing some more watching over and selling of the rings left for me to sell.
Then there was the Spell Stars class of amazing, where we learned to make biodegradable offerings/spell pieces made of only applesauce and cinnamon, which could be written on, left by trees, dropped into water. It was fabulously phenomenal, and I was in love by the time I saw the first one, and then when we were making it with her on stage.
During this whole class was when I finalized my decision too (even previous to the running of Heart Chakra, or Heart Chakra planning taking place) that I was requiring of myself to teach a class on Glass Candle Spells at Festival of the Goddess. I'm all sort of nervously excited about this whole concept now, too. Even more since Heart Chakra.
I wandered back to the camp site again, to check on the sleeping and hung over people, to set up my tent and a tiny air mattress only. Gathered water and helped collect things, and then wandered back down to do what I always do on Saturday nights. Help the caterers set up for the community dinner. Cutting vegetables, lighting and washing things, and general filling any space where it would help to have someone there doing. It's part of one of my favorite things to do there.
Even if every single meal for some nine now no one ever remembers that on my registration form I've continually written I don't eat starch and every single time it means I'm eating the same meal. Some piece of meat and a salad, while avoiding the six or so other things that are offered to everyone else. (I may see about asking for a defrayed cost due to this on FOG finally, since we pay for this meal and I have been encouraged to bring my own supplements next time.)
I actually had a lovely person i adore suddenly reappear with a pile of fruit and boiled eggs for me, without my request and it was all sorts of humbling. (I....miss these people so much already. Especially her. I felt like there was this sparkly little bond between us this time. All new and beautiful.)
After dinner there was the baby sitting the adorable tike while his mother got herself ready to run the Talent Show. Bouncing him around and taking care of things, while finding another outfit for the night to wander in. Since I had decided I wasn't of a mind to perform in the Talent Show. (Something I am not pushing myself to promise about doing in the fall. We'll see.)
The Talent Show was amazingly brilliant, as was the woman running it, and the women near out campsite performing, and the months of practiced dance routines by the RCG sister who is my everlasting inspiration. There were three things which hit me out of the blue in the space of this evening and it's Talent Show. The first was a performance of Travis Tritt's Can I Trust You With My Heart that all but literally pinned me to my chair.
Mostly just for the set of words the title repeats in the song.
For so many reasons, justified, inconsequential, and too late to matter.
The second was more cumbersome, but least traumatic, and that was having someone who'd I'd been hanging out with off and on for three days make their interest in me known. And by known I mean known. Like, even though you made me explain why I was writing the card in the middle of the Talent show song and you've vaguely acknowledged I'm in the middle of dealing with the massive traumatisms of number three as yet unlisted, and completely out of the loop because of it, and was not interested in that in the people who were absolutely safe in my bumper world, she's going to just sit by me and be passive aggressive with every step.
Invitations to elsewhere alone. Choosing to forget having of trauma moments. Comments in front of me to others about not getting to have what you want for the night. Choosing to lay on my foot or leg, and just sigh into the table. None of these are helpful to you ever, and they are especially only even more like walking on glass shards when my head is already in a bleak space of mind already over truly important things.
And number three. I want to frown and fret, sigh and down play this already. Except. So, after the Talent Show there is a Curtain Dance. It's one of the most moving and beautiful things to see during the weekend. We throw up this huge white sheet and run strobing colored lights behind it. Women of all ages, sizes, heights, weights dance behind the curtain and you get to see their shadows, mingled and unmingled, beautiful in every way.
I have never missed taking part in one until this year.
It took me the better part of twenty minutes to make myself walk up to the back part of the stage, even after all the others had gone at least two or three times. And then I stood there. Just stood. Leaning on the ice machine next to the lights machine completely incapable of actually moving between the lights and the curtain, dead certain down to the marrow of my bones I could not would not dance. That no part of me was okay with this or ready to.
That I might literally scream and run away if someone tried to force me to.
Not that anyone ever would at this event. It's always all about personal choice.
And I stood frozen there against the ice machine for a good ten minutes, just frozen by this realization. This locked part of my soul. This truly deep inability to dance. To expression myself in movement the way I used to completely forget the world for fire and night at bonfires and the curtain here. And i sent myself stumbling away, finally, into the darkness, trying not to burst into tears. Trying not to feel like an utter failure to and of myself, for the things I have done, the wounds still there somewhere, between who I am and how I am reclaiming expressing that person.
Which had me sitting on the table, seriously on a completely different plane of existence and sort of personal dawning hell, while number two was taking place on top of my skin. You know. The skin I was already quite aware had divested me of its ability to use. That someone else apparently saw and only wanted for it. ....and goddess, but this was winding gyre of bad for about an hour. Worse and worse in my head until I decided everyone and everything in my head had had enough.
I made an early night of this one. Glad for the day, but already acknowledging it would be lovely to be going home. To have my bed and my roommate and the person I talk to, or my journal for all these things. (That I apparently couldn't even take up the space of and for and on until a month later.)
Sunday (Day, The Last)
The last morning is always a little sad just on the first moment of waking, even when it's a breath of relief, a sigh of homecoming is coming soon. I am a Taurus, and I will never not be anything less than gratefully awe-filled to be arriving at my home, when it is mine, no matter how sad I am to be leaving. Which mingled in the morning. While I was rolling out of bed, breaking the air mattress seal and striking down my tent all in the first twenty or thirty minutes of being awake.
I was packed early, and thus got to play baby sitter for the camp, so the other two could pack. Which eventually led to, since he fell asleep on my shoulder while I was taking care of him, being told I could just take him down to community breakfast. Which would give them time to both pack and have some time alone. I didn't mind. He was adorable asleep.
And I had a lot of people who commented on that fact i looked very natural doing it and at it. Just rocking him, tiny little three month old face tucked in against my collar bone. The ache of him and the words, and the things I am still waiting for from this life. Because children always feel right. All my little ones in Korea. And the weight of him in my arms, of standing and bouncing when he'd wake up confused, and little hungry, and then fall back to sleep still waiting on the re-arrival of his mother.
Breakfast was a smorgasbord of amazing things. While Saturday dinner is catered for us, Sunday breakfast is sort of an "everyone brings everything they have left over that is edible looking and puts it on a table for everyone to eat all at once" event. It was brilliant. I stole a bag of fresh cherries and devoured them.
After breakfast finished, we had announcements and then The Raffle. Which is possibly my favorite part of all things Springfest every time. This year, because I was unpacking my life post Korea, and cleaning house a lot, I donated (instead of the single raffle item required with admission) a bag and stacks of somewhere around like twenty-five or six things. From all varying states in my life, and even other people's near me. And I donated as always, about forty dollars to the Raffle itself.
It's an interesting raffle. Unlike Fog's raffle where you put tickets on specific things, SpringFest’s raffle is about pulling names from a cauldron and you simply go up and pick things from the wide tables in the order your name is called. I one once, and it sent me home with this huge bag of crystals and precious stones. Including the massively huge and daily well-loved chunk of Rose Quartz I've been carrying in my pocket for at least a month now.
After that we had a small, but intimate closing ritual at the temple, recognizing whole bunches of people. Followed by the taking down of the temple itself. There was a bit of hanging around for goodbyes, but I was really rather ready to go by that point, still completely packed from the first time I moved my camp site and the early put away, and my deep want for my bed and things comfortably home, having broken outside of my bubble in so many ways...and wanting to reassert some normality and comfort I recognized.
There was much in the way of hugging, numbers and name swapping, and then, I was back on the road home. Continuing my personal education of Rob Thomas's music until I broke in the bright, beauty of my gorgeous green back yard and home again.