Festival

Coming home always feels like a chore of acclimating myself into the world again. Spending time getting use to a space where safety isn’t always present and time isn’t filled with thousands of women. It’s always hard to explain the experience called festival without rambling on for pages and hours.

A highlight was Staceyann Chin, a spoken word artist who I have followed for years now. The first time I actually heard her speak her words was at festival this time around and I laughed and cried with pure joy from the experience. It was like an unknown dream coming true.

I am not sure what else to share. There are so many things.

I will share that on my last night there; I spent time with four songbirds who I can call friends. We took a trip down to the Acoustic Stage in the darkness and moonlight. There I listened to one of them simply sing with this harmonious beauty that just melted away time and space. We sat on the stage while she danced and moved, mixing silence between her song. She touched the stage like a lover or a familiar friend with an endearing hand. When she was done, we were left in the silence of it all. We were then kicked off the stage because we really weren’t suppose to be there, but I remember telling her I was glad we did it anyway. Then we spent the rest of time just moving through the woods and the community built there. My words do not give justice to the moment. The line that comes to my head is:

I am thankful for the moment, in all its contradictions in strengths, because at that moment the beauty pierced through us and lived.