My brain made a practical decision that I would go camping this summer. It just made sense to do that before my coming two week intense of shamanic training. So I found myself unearthing my camping supplies today. Time for a gear check. I used to have a really big tent that I could set up a table in and have another person there, but I got rid of all that. What I do have is my very first tent. It must be at least 20 years old.

I set it up in the yard and I got inside – and whoosh! Memories!

You see, for many years I was pretty hooked on festivals. I went to as many as I could. The first one was to the Oregon Country Faire in the mid-90’s. After growing up in the country, and then living in the city for eight years without a car, it was a massive infusion of long-needed beauty and nourishment. During the time that I had not been in nature, I had gotten into witchcraft. I also had had a political awakening and become disdainful of mainstream culture. So, my first re-infusion of nature was combined with a counter-culture festival where people dressed in all kinds of other-worldly costumes. Wow! A space where people could be whoever they wanted to be! And then of course, there were the drugs. It was my first extended mushroom experiences. I mean, I think I had done them just once before.

So the witch in me relished the magic. I found other festivals, one that was focused on paganism, one that was focused on spiritual music and devotion. Then there were gatherings about fairies and herbalism. I spent every vacation I had in the summers on the road. My car was covered with years of festival parking stickers, like badges of honor. And you would’ve thought this was the best time of my life. But I fell in with the wrong people. I wanted so badly to find a way to share the magic that I experienced in my heart with a greater public and I could not find a way to do it. What I discovered was the worst of societal values (white male dominance, sex, drugs, greed, exclusivity) wrapped in symbolism that I held dear. I did not want to accept it so I kept trying and trying, year after a year. I even tried to contribute as a projectionist artist, but the people that got the good jobs were the people that were up partying all night long and though I did partake once in a while, I have never been a big partier.

[I had been down a similar road in my twenties, when I discovered the Fremont Solstice Parade in Seattle. As a young and solitary witch, I sat on under a tree by the road as the big puppets went by and wept with joy to see my core beliefs and values being so joyously and publicly celebrated. It was the beginning of a long search to find these people and take part in the sacred pagan celebration. What I found was a lot of nice people who drank an awful lot and didn’t know much about being a pagan at all. Will-O-Wisp.]

In 2008, I decided to take time off of work and travel with a troupe that was doing sacred mediumship through the elaborate costumes that they wore on the festivals. At least that’s how it was presented to me. I had just been trained in mediumship and was over the moon to be of service in this way. I remembered the Tree Person that never talked from my very first festival. But quickly it became something else. There was pettiness. There was narcissism. There was obsession for attention. I was the oldest – in my 40s I think – and I did not have a skinny body, so I felt shunned. No one took pictures of me. I brought my deepest psychic wounds to that summer and I believe other people did too. We were all looking for a way to create magic in the world, but inside, starving for it. We were all wounded.

Eventually, I could no longer go to festivals. A pattern had emerged, where the first night of any gathering I went to, I find myself wide awake in my tent, gasping, leaving a nightmare so strong my whole body was charged and I had to stay awake for a time so I would not go back into it. Even the times I forgot about the nightmares, they would come. When I was home, I would have long nightmares about being in a festival, hating it and not being able to get to my car or find my keys. Or being left behind by the festival bus. The overall theme was rejection. It was like a curse. So I packed it in and I left that whole subculture. That marked the beginning of a long, long journey, one that culminated in my finally learning to love and protect myself.

My camping gear has been in the closet for almost 10 years, I realize. Wow.

Today, in my back yard, I crept into my little tent that still had tags on the zippers from the Oregon country fair 2009. I lay down and looked at the ceiling and I was washed over with a palpable rush of magic. The magic that I had created every single time I had blessed my campground. The magic from all the attention and love I had put into the accoutrements I brought with me and the expressions that I tried to share. One year, I walked in slow motion for hours, dressed as a tree on the festival grounds. Another year, I received a spiritual initiation from hearing Kirtan for the first time under a summer moon. There are lots and lots and lots of precious memories between the thorns of the roses.

This was an enormous and welcome surprise to me. I thought maybe the tent would be full of yucky energy and I’d have to get a new one but instead I reveled in the wildness of my younger self. I went in the house and searched in my boxes for the long gold colored chain that I used to hang on the ceiling in my tent. That is definitely coming with me in this year.

I have been thinking for a few weeks about doing a trip to recover parts of my soul that I may have left on the road during these years and now I know how important that trip is. It might happen in the one I’ve already planned on either side of the shamanic training, or I might make a special trip to that first festival in Eugene, Oregon. To walk those dusty trails between the wooden booths, listening to all the different music around me, smelling the food, stopping by vendors that I used to know, some I may not have good memories of, visiting the big leaf maple dharma tree I lay under one year on mushrooms, and on other years trying to recreate that experience. Taking in the culture that is now. Receiving it as I am today. And not camping there. Staying at a friend’s house or camping off grounds. With the option to leave and go to the coast if I want to. Other memories there.

I think this is really important. The people that I knew are still alive in my memories at the same age when I knew them. But they are no longer. Their lives have moved on just as mine has. What has happened to them? Have they evolved? I will probably never know.

What will I wear? Oh my goddess, what will I wear? I don’t fucking care. What will I carry with me, is the question. I will carry my strength and my knowledge without a yearning to share it or show it. I will walk out to the end of the trail, near the camp where I used to stay inside the gates. And I will remember the raging drunk/acid tripping of my neighbors, their incessant screaming into the night, and be grateful I am not there anymore. I will appreciate the earthy, elaborate art, the temporary village they erect year after year, that I can still track in my mind. Though it may look the same, I am sure it will feel very different, not only because of how I have changed but because the festival scene really did get out of control as capitalism set in. Luscious, sacred tents of one type of festival became marketed, filled with the same pillows, almost an icon and no longer an experience. I mean, I still believe that transitive spaces can shift consciousness but it’s the same as when a good band gets picked up by a big time distributor. The magic bleeds away. We’ll see. Maybe the new generation has infused it with something new.

I relish in the thought of sleeping a few nights in this tent that has so much history. I will give my younger self so much love. And I don’t have to wait. I am doing it now. There’s no reason to wait.

There is no reason to wait.

During these hours today, my back hurt, like it used to. By the time I finished pruning down the cookware, ordering a smaller stove, packing up my tent, I was emotionally exhausted.

I sit here now, by my open window listening to the sublime song of the birds, the sun streaming in. It is heaven. I am rich, in knowledge and appreciation for what I have built for myself. (I was rich before, but underappreciated – from myself.) I am grateful for the year ahead, the new tiling of the soil, the fresh beauty sprouting its head above the earth. So funny, I realized year ago, that I associated all this sweetness and magic with those people, when the sweetness and magic was not coming from them. It was emanating from Mother Earth.

So maybe when the summer is out, I will have recalled parts of my soul and my memories, too. I hope to look back with equal appreciation for that time of my life as I have for my life now. I hope to open wide the sparkly flow of magic that lives in my tent, from the long past, into life here as it unfolds.

I guess this experience of altruism to disillusionment is similar to my friend’s, who lived through the 60’s and actually lived on a commune – and then had to leave it. Does this remind you of a similar path you have walked?