I was just beginning to rekindle a spiritual practice that had atrophied considerably (read: died) throughout my relationship with The Capital Ex, and I was more than a little intimidated.
That festival rocked me. Broke through barriers that I'd forgotten I'd built, made things shine and dance and sing. I felt like I found magic all over again, and fell in love with the world. I felt like intense and transformative experiences were hovering in my path, waiting to be collected.
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| Ding ding ding! Check out all my epiphanies! |
Since then, festivals have been good and bad and mixed, and I've repeated the mantra I was given my first year: Heartland gives you what you need. It's possible, I suppose, that the last few years I haven't needed that much. I've attended every year, but hadn't found that depth of feeling, that soft but urgent tug in my chest, the soothing dance of air on my skin or the smiling suspicion that the trees and stars were laughing with me, until this year.
(Why, yes, I did smoke a lot of damiana. Why do you ask?)
So many things could have gone wrong this year. I am nursing a sprained ankle/foot combo and a nasty cough. The forecast was rather gloom-inducing. The large group planning to camp together included several people who'd be meeting for the first time, so the possibility of personality conflicts loomed.
And, and, this was my first HPF without Satyr, who is currently far away and having far greater adventures. This festival has been our thing, at least in my mind, and the prospect handling it without a built-in ally was..."terrifying" is too strong, right?
Surely.
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| That looks about right. |
And I planned (to plan) rituals. I've found the spiritual connections, the mystical clue-by-fours, less obvious the last few years, and I was determined to bring that experience myself, if I had to. You'd be right to visualize this decision on my part as at least mildly petulant, with a dash of self-righteousness.
(I'd love to skip the disclaimers, my darlings, but you know I can't. It simply isn't my way.)
Please, let me be clear: I'll mean exactly what I write. I'm making no claims to spiritual authority or more than average wisdom. If I ever do, you have full permission to smack me.
I decided to run my own rituals, and it was one of the best decisions I've made in a long time. I wasn't sure anyone else would want to participate, but they did. I wasn't sure anyone else would get anything out of any of it, but I think some people did. I got a lot of input and feedback and assistance; none of it was in any way my show.
But the Saturday evening dusk procession from our Elysium campsite through First Field oddly paralleled the most intense experience of my first Heartland - an off-the-schedule, rather impromptu drum-down offered by one of our workshop leaders. I was not new to trance work, even then, but certainly out of practice, and intimidated by the prospect of putting my psychic well-being into the hands of a stranger who told us not to listen to underworld insects. (Apparently, they lie.)
Five years later, this procession is not a wild adventure, but a joyous co-creation, evolving with the contributions of each new participant. We have four drummers, our own herbs and oils and potions and stories. We are a community as the sun sets, sharing energy and space and laughter.
There is no great revelation of my own capacity for spiritual leadership here: consensus and shared power are deeply important to me. The revelation is that I am no longer pleased with the golden, shining spirituality that lingers in the paths. My dissatisfaction with my ritual experiences the last few years has at least as much to do with my need to co-create those experiences as it does the rituals themselves.
I am no longer content to witness and receive. I should, quite possibly, be embarrassed to have taken so long to have arrived at this conclusion. (Though a memory of a vision in which the Woman with the Bread yanks the Priestess card out of my hand with a teasing, "not yet!" suggests I couldn't have reached it sooner.)
I am pleased with my own progress since that strange, mosquito-bitten night in five years ago. Beyond that, I am inspired by a vision of community that supported and embraced me, not only in the circle, but throughout the festival. I am grateful to a lovely mixture of talented and spiritual people who came together, on purpose, to make magic, and I am restored in my wild hunger for community, for communion, and for an ideal of spiritual leadership that recognizes the core creative potential of each person, and the ways in which we are all teachers.
"...not easily nor without pains to stake out
the circle, the heavy shadows, the great light.
I choose to be a figure in that light,
half-blotted by darkness, something moving
across that space, the color of stone
greeting the moon, yet more than stone:
a woman. I choose to walk here. And to draw this circle."
-Adrienne Rich, Twenty-One Love Poems (XXI)
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