Coming Home Part I

It's August, 1993:

This is actually maybe 1991. Body image issues? Yep, totally sick with it.

I'm 21 years old. I just graduated in May with my Bachelor's in Social Work, and spent the past year interning at a domestic violence shelter. After graduation I got a summer job at the shelter doing whatever they needed: Overnight shifts listening to harrowing stories of how the residents got there or nearly didn't, pregnancy testing, accompanying victims to court, picking up donated leftover food from the hospital where the woman in charge of the kitchen flirts with me, working in the children's program with some of the most traumatized kids the coordinator had ever seen, organizing rallies for choice, and getting ready to start my new job at the Rape Crisis Center as a counselor...

It has been two years since the movie Thelma and Louise revealed some major fault lines polarizing American culture around the question of sexism and feminism, violence and women's anger. I was right in the middle of this discussion because I have been actively exploring this thing called feminism for a couple years now. In fact, my supervisor and mentor at the shelter wears a T-shirt with a logo for the Thelma and Louise Finishing School for Women.

I was surprised and relieved and gratified to discover that Feminism is completely relevant to my life. Feminism turned out to be so much more than just a word my mom rolled her eyes about. I discovered that Feminism is about more than just women; it's about everybody.

My parents have reluctantly accepted that I will probably never return to my political conservative Republican roots, and they blame the liberal Ivory Tower for this. It has been two years since I started taking Women's Studies and African American Studies, and allowing them to sink deeply into my bones. My parents may be onto something. I read Backlash right after it came into paperback, underlining whole paragraphs and writing notes in the margins with lots of exclamation points!!!

Less than a year ago, I jettisoned a crappy, porn-addicted boyfriend. The rage that fueled that long-overdue breakup is also fueled by P.J Harvey's song, "Dress" (seriously do click that link) pounding from my Honda Civic's cassette tape deck and my fists pounding the steering wheel. I learned about so many reasons to be so very angry; for myself and my newly-discovered world of sisters. I have a cute new SNAG* boyfriend at a University an hour and a half away. His name is Patrick, and I met him through a mutual friend when we all decided to read Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. He is one of the three men on his campus in their men's anti-sexism group.

I read the Feminine Face of God, and The Spiral Dance, and emphatically turned away from my Christian roots. I sculpted a Venus of Willendorf out of clay and fired her into stone. I declared myself and all women Goddess and Sheela-na-Gig my own. I have started paying attention to the seasons, the equinoxes and the solstices and celebrating them. I have started paying attention to the moon and how her cycles mirror my own. I am learing about the snake as a symbol of women's spirituality, how women and snakes have both been demonized in patriarchal religious culture. I look to the snake and her continual shedding skin for reassurance that there is nothing but change, and that this can be embraced. And yes, I stopped shaving.

Venus

A few months ago, my roommate Melissa's girlfriend Margaret, who was visiting from Chicago, asked me why I hadn't been to the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival yet. She described this amazing place of shirtless Amazons, sacred oak groves -- a land in the woods built by women -- womyn only, and attended by womyn only. She described a place of bodily safety.

My very first article of Festie-wear!

I knew immediately that I would stop at nothing to be there. The Festival is for all womyn-born-womyn, and is an opportunity to experience a place where Lesbians are not the minority. Margaret gave me a pin, designating me officially an "Honorary Lesbian" and we arranged to go. Melissa and I lived near enough for a day's drive to Chicago, stay with her girlfriend one night, and drive the rest of the way up.

I watched Margaret as we got closer to "the Land" as she kept calling it. She looked like a placid and contented statue of the Buddha, if the Buddha had been a forty-year-old Lesbian with spiky gray hair. Driving along the dirt roads approaching the Land, we were surrounded by pine and oak trees above, with dense green ferns below, and miles of cars full of joyful womyn in front of us and behind us. I had never seen so many feminist bumperstickers.

We emerged from the shady road into the bright sun, and onto a huge mowed field through the gate where inordinately happy Lesbians of all ages, shapes, and sizes said to us with all sincerity, "Welcome Home." We were greeted with the discovery that Melissa and I were "Festie Virgins", and this was usually accompanied by lascivious squeals, and even a ringing bell somewhere at the orientation tent. I made sure not to let anybody know it was my first Festival after that.

Though I think it took about five minutes for me to take my shirt off.

I entered the Festival like a shirtless duck to water. Ironically, Melissa was terribly uncomfortable. She kept her shirt on pretty much the whole week, and seemed kind of creeped out from time to time by the various sights and experiences that only the Michigan Festival can provide. The Honorary Lesbian, however, finds herself totally in love with the whole shebang:

Quiet forest paths with soft woodchips for my Birkenstocks to walk upon, fearlessly roaming bands of girl-children with their faces painted and their craft projects streaming behind them, a woman walking completely buck naked except for the beanie hat with a propeller on top, impromptu drum circles around warm firepits, an actual bearded woman in a Goodwill prom dress driving the tractor shuttle, a continuous stream of amazing professional music performances on three stages all day and all evening, Laura Love on Day Stage!, a huge craft area (essentially a feminist mall), live comedy, movies under the stars, amazing outdoor showers where I could see actual womyn's bodies in all their incredible uniqueness, and see my own within this context, beautiful vegetarian food, workshops on everything from astrology, to fomenting feminist revolution, to vermicomposting, and yes indeed, bodily safety.

I had to keep reminding myself about this bodily safety thing: I could actually walk anywhere anytime, and not worry about anyone attacking me or hurting me. I could walk buck naked with a propeller beanie on my head at 3am or 3pm, and the most likely thing to happen to me would be someone saying, "Nice hat." In fact, every single person I passed on the paths smiled and said hi. If I got lost (which I did a few times), all I had to do was ask anyone, and they'd stop whatever they were doing to be of assistance.

Not only was my body safe, but my stuff was safe too: I had gotten a beautiful ceramic mug at the crafts area (gorgeous large mug with raku designs and a snake for the handle), and set it aside with my jacket somewhere, got distracted and forgot about it. I remembered it several hours later, and was sad that it would probably be stolen. Nope. Still there, safe as a kitten.

Before departure, I rented a green pup tent from the university rec center's "Base Camp" and a sleeping bag with a few little holes I suspect might have been from stray burning pot seeds. I nearly froze the first night, because I had no idea I needed a ground cover under my tent, and I didn't even have a sleeping mat. The women I camped with gave me a plastic tarp to put under my tent, and I slept in total comfort right on rugged Mother Gaia the rest of the week. The womyn I camped with shared all their food and their systems for navigating the Festival --like getting their blankets and tarps in a great spot for sitting at night stage, or making sure I had a good volunteer workshift to do. I walked around in stunned awe a lot of the time.

The Meditation Circle was the most amazing place. There was the sacred oak grove, with a veritable carpet of soft moss in the middle. At one end was an overturned tree stump, her roots exposed and weathered, creating an elaborate altar space and focus for the grove. Womyn had come along making beautiful offerings of shells, beads, poems, candles, flowers... you name it. It was absolutely by and for the Goddess, and it was beautiful.

Meditation Circle, Michfest 1993

Indeed, I had come home. I had come home to the Land, to my sisters, to myself.

It's May, 2009.

I'm 37 years old. I have made that pilgrimage every single August for sixteen consecutive years. I have traveled by car, train, airplane, and even hitching a ride home from Fest (that was an adventure). I did five or six years as a Worker -- mainly because I wanted to stay longer than a week, and being on the short crew to help staff the thing allowed me to extend my experience into two weeks each year. What have sixteen years of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival given me? It is impossible to calculate and maybe impossible to communicate, but I will write about this in my next installment.

*Sensitive New Age Guy