See You In August!

I should be packing. I'm heading to the 35th annual Michigan Womyn's Music Festival (my 17th).

Not much to say these days.

So I leave you with some random recent shots of the Heavenly Realm that is the Pacific Northwest. One of its Rose Gardens, the Japanese Garden, some rural mountain views, and "gorge"ousness from the Columbia River Gorge.

There are people atop this falls - see if you can find them for scale.

May we all be deeply happy.

Coming Home Part II

What have 16 years of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival given me?

Bodily Safety
I wrote about the feeling of bodily safety on my first post. This is one of the more obvious gifts of the Festival. Speaking of a different kind of bodily safety, I cannot quantify the effect of seeing real women's bodies, naked, in the showers (or out) every day for a week for sixteen years. Even women who would be considered conventionally beautiful; to see even those bodies and their curves and creases and stretch marks and imperfections -- it was surprising -- to be so surprised that is. I mean, I knew that real women do not really look like the women we see in media, but it was still a shock to see this full range of bodies, and none of them looking like any of the "bodies" I had seen in media. All of them beautiful. I had no other opportunity to experience this reality in my childhood nor my adult life. Not that I have it all together about that, but

I. Have. Come. A. Long. Way, Baby.

I have been given the experience of bodily safety from within. Internalized. I am so grateful.

Sisters
I didn't get to grow up with a biological sister. I was not a girly-girl. I started fighting against dresses at about age 3 or 4. It was clear to me that being one of the guys was a waaaay better deal. I loved softball through grade school, and junior high, but then the human gyroscope of puberty hit.

My aforementioned porn-addicted boyfriend in college had a wandering eye. It drove me batshit crazy, and because I didn't have what I needed at the time to kick him to the curb, I projected a bunch of the resulting insecurity and crap onto the other women he was attracted to. *sigh* It was a rough time. Untenable for long though, and the stars aligned for me to finally say enough! Just a couple years later, I heard on Day Stage THE song that summed this up completely, "As Cool As I Am" by Dar Williams (I am the others! oh do please listen):

And I must say here, that there is nothing -- nothing -- in this world like the feeling of standing with thousands of my sisters to the yearly anthem at Opening Ceremonies, "Amazon Womyn Rise"

Love
In 1997 I fell madly in love at Festival. Seriously. Madly. It was the kind of thing about which I had absolutely no choice. It was a knee-weakening, all-consuming, dizzy-making collision that had an impact on me from the very first moment like a speeding U-Haul truck. It would have involved a U-Haul truck, except that she was from another country, and had all of her belongings in a backpack, so there was no need. It was passionate and sweet and lovely until, for a variety of reasons some years later, it wasn't, and it ended. In my story with all the hindsight, there are no villains, and I would readily do it all over again; maybe just a few teeny changes there towards the end. Sometimes these chapters in our lives just write themselves. Those are the ones we learn the most from, I think.

And just for fun, here's a great FAQ sheet to address the annoyingly persistent myths about bisexuality: Enjoy.

Spirit
"She changes everything she touches, and everything she touches changes."

Ah, Puritans. In my DNA seems to live the presumption that the flesh is completely corrupt, especially female flesh, and the only hope of Grace resides in a distant and moody male God, and that Grace comes only from faith, which is invisible and uncertain in us flawed humans. According to Max Weber, the Protestant Work Ethic developed in this absence of reassurance from the (Catholic) church authorities of Grace from "good works"; so its only visible expression got channeled into the zealous pursuit of a worldly "calling" (work) and the only evidence for Grace would be worldly success. The Puritan asceticism, deep mistrust of any form of pleasure, and belief that "idle hands are the devil's workshop" all congealed in an anxious spiritual backdrop that I could never do enough to be okay. And I'm probably not working hard enough.

So...abandoning the disconnected body and spirit patriarchal white-guy-in-the-sky stuff was only possible because I was able to find an expression of spirit I could see, hear, smell, touch, and taste in the patterns of nature and my very own body.

The snake became a potent symbol for me -- the reclamation of the snake -- from the embodiment of evil and temptation to a potent symbol of wisdom symbolized in the shedding of skin, the natural cycles of death and rebirth. I found comfort in the seasons of nature, the inevitability and connection of death to life, the seasons of a woman's life, the appreciation of the four elements: fire, air, earth, water, (five if you count spirit), every aspect of this Earth and the acceptance that large natural forces exist internally in the form of emotions, and that these are just as pure and whole as a volcano or a gentle rainshower.

Without a local group of women to practice with, my yearly trek to Festival allowed me to be in community with others practicing in this way. I did workshops with Vicki Noble and Z Budapest. I got to experience raising a "cone of power" by toning with maybe 30 women and usually a singing or chanting workshop in the beautiful moss-covered oak grove of the Meditation Circle. It was incredible. And so healing. There is no hierarchy in a nature-based spirituality, but there is an ethical guideline, blessedly simple, "And it harm none, do what ye will." All this was so refreshing.

Magical Moments

There have been so many thousands of magical moments. This is really the biggest gift of Festival, these ordinary and extraordinary moments. Here's a random few:

• Walking past the African Dance workshop in the Community Center tent, feeling the heat and power and joy emanating from it.
  
• In workerville, after getting off my shift a little early and catching much of the Indigo Girls' show, then showering alone under a full moon during their encore and hearing "Closer to Fine" live.
• Unbelieveable thunderstorms at night, wondering if the tent would leak, enjoying the chorus of appreciation throughout the woods after every lightening strike and thunderclap.
• Seeing the amazing womyn who cook the food in enormous iron vats over a firepit in the heat of summer in their heavy gloves, jeans and longsleeved shirts, hats and hankerchiefs covering their faces.
• Tarot readings with clearer significance after a week of quieting down.
• The damp, wooded, shady fern-embraced path from Waterworks Way to Tubman Trail. My favorite walk in the whole Festival.
  
• Every single show with sign language interpreters, sometimes more amazing than the performers themselves.
• Walking all the way to the parking lot after night stage performances were over to use the phones at night. Only slightly intoxicated, calling my sweetie, and then lying down in the meadow watching shooting stars streak through the clear sky.
  

Obviously there are too many to mention. I could think of a thousand more. Multiply that by the thousands of womyn who attend. That's a lot of magic.

Michfest 1995

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

Impermanence

I apologize for these very lengthy blog entries. I do know that people don't have infinite time to sit around and read a huge entry, but... I seem to keep doing it anyway. Onward:

I got back from the Festival last night. I can't help but notice this particular Truth, the truth of impermanence, writ large on much of the experience. This time I spend with my favorite women friends in the iridescent bubble of an incredible and improbable community we all create there seems to slip by faster and faster. I know this is a cliche, and that as we age, we begin to understand this more, but most of my friends agreed, that this year went by fast. Faster than ever before. The joy that we experience at Festival is so fleeting.
These feelings of joy were punctuated by some painful events as well. Let me preface this by saying that these things are not really comparable, other than the fact that they are all evidence of impermanence. Which is kind of like comparing three very different items that exist on earth, and saying that what they have in common is that they are subject to the law of gravity. I would not want this to come off as minimizing anyone's suffering, just because I am mentioning them in the same thread. These things just happened to be painful--some more, some less-- and I noticed that remembering impermanence did reduce the suffering of that somewhat.

On Tuesday August 5th, one of the shuttles, a full van bound for the Festival from the Grand Rapids Airport, blew out a tire, crashed and rolled, killing one woman and injuring many others, some quite severely. We heard the news of this on Wednesday, mainly because one of our friends was not on that shuttle, due only to her random decision to delay her trip one more day.
There is a thread on the Festival Forum discussing this tragedy here, and someone was kind enough to find and share the woman's obituary. Her name was Lynn J. Marshall. Here is her obituary:

Lynn J. MARSHALL - Lake Tapps, WA Lynn J. Marshall beloved wife, mother and amateur Rambler mechanic died August 5, 2008 in a traffic accident on US 31 near Muskegon Michigan. She is survived by her husband Francis, her son Chet, her daughter Comedy Jane and her two sisters Kristen Mauritson, and Susan Martin. Lynn graduated from Kimball High School in Royal Oak MI. She served in the USAF between 1973-1978 at Clark AB in the Philippines as well as stateside at Cambria radar station in CA and Homestead AFB FL. She was the first woman to graduate from the USAF school of diesel mechanics and power production. She was currently employed by the Boeing Company in Seattle WA. She graduated from Seattle Central Community College's architectural photography program and enjoyed photography her entire life. Her unique love and special interest was always her old Ramblers. She was a member of both the Cascade and Rainer Rambler automobile clubs. She was also a member of the Nash car club of America. Her favorite car "Camille" will now be maintained without the love and special care Lynn provided to all who shared her life. We will all miss her zestful pursuit of life; the moon hole will be shut and the wall crank turned off. A Memorial Service will be held at 1:00 p.m., Sunday, August 17, 2008 at the Saltwater Unitarian Universalist Church, 25701 14th Place South, Des Moines, WA. 98198, (253) 839-5200.

We send our love and wishes for peace to her friends and family. We had just spoken to Lynn's sister, who is a member of the Shuttle Crew, the day before this happened. It was just a bland and friendly everyday conversation. It is shocking to see how fast life can change. Our hearts go out to Lynn, Susan, and to all of their loved ones.
Additionally, on the return trip from Festival, Amy P. got word from her partner Dusty that their home had been broken into and burglarized on Monday the 4th. Nobody was home, their cat, Maps, was fine, and nobody was hurt. This had happened early in the week, and Dusty had wisely and compassionately declined to let Amy know until after the Festival. There was nothing she could have done. He had handled everything, though understandably continues to experience the loss of a sense of security in their home. Her brand new and powerful little laptop computer was stolen. She conducted all of her business on this little computer. Thousands of dollars' worth of Dusty's recording equipment was also taken. She will return home in a day or two to take inventory of any other losses, and to find out just how recently her information had been backed up.
Oddly, Amy had shared with me on Wednesday morning, a dream she had the night before about her computer being stolen.

She found out about the break-in early in our 6-hour car ride from Festival to her mom's house in Cleveland. In observing her process through a trauma like that, for her, the physical losses were less upsetting than the sense of violation. Also living with not-knowing. Not knowing what the thief's intentions are with her computer -- to quickly erase it and sell it? To find and profit from any personal information? The mind fills in the blanks with great frightening detail.

We were grateful to have made the drive safely to Cleveland to Amy's mom's house, which has been re-named the "Festival Transitional Center." Though Amy had a much more fitful and difficult night, the other three travelers fell into welcome sleep on actual beds and couches, hot food in our bellies.
Then, yesterday morning, having been awake for about a half an hour, in a quiet house full of sleeping friends, I took the opportunity to review all my photographs from the Festival, deleting any obviously blurry or unflattering shots. I used two memory cards this year, 2GB each (I had about 350 pictures on each) and switched them about midway through the week, just to make sure not to lose any great shots due to a full memory card, and "just in case" something happened to one of the cards. This is kind of silly, because I probably had room for about 300 more shots on each card. I was looking through the features of my camera to find out if and how it could tell me much memory I had left on a card. I found the feature, and it also said something about "formatting." Not thinking very clearly, I chose "OK" instead of "Cancel" and watched helplessly as the camera began to reformat, and erased the entirety of the memory card in about three seconds.

All of my photos from about Friday afternoon until Sunday evening -- gone. I had also taken some video of some of the performances, the hundred or so photos of the parade that my friends spent hours preparing their outfits for, the topical photos I taken since we had gotten our assigned "themes" for our annual Michfest Calendar, the shots of our campsite on the last morning... gone. After a litany of swearing, and pacing around quietly groaning while holding my belly, and the repeated internal echo of this statement from one of our friends we camp near:

"I'm not really taking any pictures this year, because I know I'm getting the giant CD of pictures from Laura..."

After that flood of thoughts through my mind, I was able to also touch into the knowing that it really was okay. I mean, it was just pictures, for God's sake! And another lesson in impermanence.

I recalled an e-mail I sent to Ryushin, one of the monks at the Monastery, noticing a weeklong workshop I had been looking forward to was no longer on the Monastery calendar. Ryushin, described why it had been canceled, and then closed by saying, "Yeah, sometimes that impermanence is a stinker!" Though I have to admit, that the word "stinker" was not the word in my mind.
Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse, in his book, What Makes You NOT a Buddhist? describes one of the four "seals" or truths of Buddhism: All compounded things are impermanent.

By "compounded," he means something that has been assembled out of other things. He describes that after a long period of contemplation, the Buddha realized that

"all form, including our flesh and bones, and all our emotions and perceptions, are assembled--they are the product of two or more things coming together. When any two components or more come together, a new phenomenon emerges -- nails and wood become a table; water and leaves become tea; fear, devotion and a savior become God. This end product doesn't have an existence independent of its parts. Believing it truly exists independently is the greatest deception. Meanwhile the parts have undergone a change. Just by meeting, their character has changed, and together, they have become something else -- they are "compounded."
He realized that this applies not only to the human experience, but to all matter, the entire world, the universe -- because everything is interdependent, everything is subject to change. Not one component in all creation exists in an autonomous, permanent, pure state. Not the book you are holding (or the computer you are looking at), not atoms, not even the gods. So long as something exists within reach of our mind, even in our imagination, such as a man with four arms, then it depends on the existence of something else. Thus, the Buddha discovered that impermanence does not mean death, as we usually think, it means change. Anything that changes in relation to another thing: even the slightest shift, is subject to the laws of impermanence.
Through these realizations, the Buddha found a way around the suffering of mortality after all. He accepted that change is inevitable and that death is just a part of this cycle. Furthermore, he realized that there was no almighty power who could reverse the path to death; therefore there was also no hope to trap him. If there is no blind hope, there is also no disappointment. If one knows that everything is impermanent, one does not grasp, and if one does not grasp, one will not think in terms of having or lacking, and therefore one lives fully."

And that, after this long-winded post, is the discovery with impermanence, again and again. It is the appreciation of this temporary visit to this life, each day, each moment. Remembering how fragile and how complex and how miraculous it all is, we can't help but live more fully and more kindly. Many of the women on the Festival Bulletin Boards were remarking about how this sad event increased their appreciation of one another this year. The break-in really underlined the power of one person's actions. One person can make so much difference in another person's life -- to harm or to heal, and we can appreciate all the loving, healing acts that happen to us all the time every day. All the digital photographs in the whole world will someday be all gone. It is simply a matter of time. Was I actually experiencing the moment I took them? The joy of being with my young and healthy friends will recede into something else.

From the entries in her guestbook, it seemed to me that Lynn Marshall appreciated this life, and lived it quite fully.

I need so much reminding! So I keep the Five Remembrances on my bathroom mirror:

I am of the nature to grow old.
There is no way to escape growing old.

I am of the nature to have ill health.
There is no way to escape ill health.

I am of the nature to die.
There is no way to escape death.

All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change.
There is no way to escape being separated from them.

My actions are my only true belongings.
I cannot escape the consequences of my actions.
My actions are the ground upon which I stand.

See You In August!

It is that time of year. I consider it the last hurrah of summer. Harvest Time. the true end of the season for productivity, the beginning of the time for introspection. Time to get together and celebrate, reflect, and gather the seeds of the future. A New Year's Eve of sorts. The rhythm of my life marks time with this event.

When a womyn's thoughts turn to the Midwest, and tent seam sealer is applied!

I am leaving for Cleveland tomorrow. A flurry of excited packing and errands all day today. Then we caravan from Cleveland to the Festival. My 16th consecutive Festival is this year. Festival is becoming just a more elaborate backdrop for this "Family Reunion" with the best girlfriends a woman could ever have. These are the women I will live with like the Golden Girls when that time comes.

I'll be back mid-August, all relaxed and refreshed. The energy I usually spend with my car keys between my knuckes and checking to see if my doors are locked will be spent laughing. You'd be amazed how much energy that is. It's like a big gear shift from caution to joy, and I simply refuse to do without it for a single year.

Travel safely my sistahs!

The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival