Check out this report on the festival at: http://blogs.mygc.com.au/hush-hush-biz/woodford-folk-festival-report/
Scottish strains infuse the air as the lightning flashes and the rain comes down, a passerby is captured by the urge to jig as she gambols along the path. Jalapeno pepper still warming my belly and my lips, thinking of my lover as a young couple canoodle in the shelter of the awning. One moment of so many and not quite even halfway through, so many riches to draw upon, legs still a bit sore from last night’s dancing. Another world, another time, family and community all wrapped up in one, world music, social issues, fun and frivolity, from the sacred to the profane it’s a well sauced sandwich that satisfies the soul.
As I settle into the Woodford groove that is the magical merging of so much diversity, I find myself doing the strange etherial shuffle between no-time and the time that says that Ohm Shanti is doing their thing at the Blue Lotus, or the candle lighting ceremony at the Sacred Labyrinth is on at 6.30pm. I move in and out of varying threads from which I weave the tapestry of an experience too complex for just one image to encompass, it’s more like a film, the kind you can watch over and over again and still see new detail.
And then there is the address of my campsite, I am between Route 66 and Your own crazy way, just down from Absolutely the wrong way! To get there you go along the Long and winding road, it really is another world and one I would like to live in all the time. I am reminded of a Swiss woman who came into our stall when mum and I used to sell clothes and party stuff at the festival, she had been picked up from the airport by friends and brought straight to Woodford. It was her first experience of being in Australia and she was wide-eyed with wonder, she turned to us and said, “Is it like this everywhere?” We smiled and said, “Oh, how we wish it was!”
That is my wish, that all the world may wake up to the beauty and wonder that is life on this planet, the diversity amongst peoples, plants, animals and everything else is quite astounding and fills my heart and soul with such joy!
Ohm Shanti, shanti, shanti…………peace, peace, peace.
I often speak rather disparagingly of the attitudes within the current culture, the way in which nature is seen as a commodity and even human lives treated as having no value. But there are of course Peoples living upon the Earth who know better than that, Indigenous folk who have not lost their connection to the land and to all that lives and breathes upon it. Labelled as primitive by so-called Modern Man they have much deeper understanding of this world which is so much more than just the physical tangible dimension.
This song has the feeling of a chant about it, you could imagine Kinnie’s Mohawk ancestors singing like this in sacred ceremony. It is a plea really to see what is being done to the waters of the planet, and a reminder that those waters are all connected, just as we are to everything around us.
Through the Vortex 