Indigo Dying (Photo by Susan Priest)
I’m in the woods. I don’t mean that figuratively. I mean it literally. There are massive trees all around me and ferns encircling me and the trees and covering the ground like a protective blanket.
I’m staying in a tent, surrounded by other tents filled with women, because I have traveled from Texas to Michigan for one week in late July/early August, as has become my tradition, beginning four years ago.
I’m living on The Land. It’s the place where Michigan Womyn’s Festival was held for 40 years before ending in 2015. I am here for Big Mouth Girl, a festival founded by the revelatory musician Nedra Johnson — whose very existence invokes love and joy — to celebrate women and music and her birthday.
I’m overwhelmed with a kind of joy that I have only known in the community of women in spaces that seem destined by design to hold space for us in a world that rarely does, especially these days.
I’m learning to Indigo Dye. I’m emceeing a couple of nights and sharing funny stories with an audience that is open and generous and kind and willing. I am staying up late to talk with my Festie Bestie about the world and how to move through it consciously, safely, joyfully and ferociously.
I’m listening to music and musicians, some familiar and some all together new, from young women to crones to everything in between.
I’m beading friendship bracelets for my fellow festival goers in my camp chair at the table my Festie Bestie has set up for our coolers and snacks, which she ties down meticulously so the racoons are not the ones who get to enjoy our strange and wonderful mix of sustenance for the week.
I’m listening to the strains of rhythmic drumming enmeshed with the sounds of wind and trees and birds in the branches all day long and into the night. I can hear singing and laughter and hushed conversations among friends. old and new.
I’m sharing a week with the woods and the women, and I am getting back to myself. I am remembering myself and how much I love open stretches of daylight and night skies with few plans and many possibilities.
I’m wandering the roads and paths. And I am moving my body more than I ever do or even can in my “normal” life. I feel stronger and safer in the woods. I feel closer to my human roots.
I’m watching the femme parade and the butch parade and the chocolate parade. I am watching women living unfettered by social constraints and norms. I’m seeing how we all fit together and how the only true divisions are those created by those who seek to control.
I’m giving up creature comforts for soulful comforts. I don’t mind showering outside and using the Port-a-Janes and constantly losing everything in my tent if it means being with these people, being in this place.
I’m sitting under a giant tree we call Grandmother Oak and looking up at a sky full of stars and planets and the Milky Way. And I am with my Festie Besite, and we are sharing the things the world does not want us to think or share or say.
I’m listening to the founder of Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, Lisa Vogel, read from her book — impeccably, aptly named We Can Live Like This — and share stories of building the festival from nothing with nothing amongst women who have been on this land since the start, some in utero.
I’m remembering that we can live like this. And for this one week I do.
I live on The Land, which the We Want the Land Coalition now owns. For women. For girls. Forever.
I live with all women, all the same goal: to hear the music, to feel The Land, to reclaim ourselves and to revel in community.
I’m restoring my brain to factory settings. I’m reminding myself that truth and kindness and grace and humility and joy and generosity and peace are the reality, and all the rest, all of things in opposition to those things, are the making of a society that serves the few at the expense of the many.
I’m exhaling. I’m breathing out the noise, and I’m breathing in what is actually meant to be mine as a human, as a human, as Jenny – serenity, truth and love.
It’s a deep inhale. It has to be. It has to be because it has to last me a whole year until once again:
I’m in the woods. I’m on The Land. I am with my sisters. I am remembering: We can live like this.