ELF Fest 2016

“Welcome Home!”

It’s the first thing you’ll hear when you pull up to the Troll Booth for registration when you get to the Lothlorien Nature Sanctuary.

This is truly and absolutely Home Away From Home for me.  An abundantly serene and beautiful cut away from the world, smack dab in the middle of nowhere and totally naturally developed to follow the lay of the land.  The drive is long and gorgeous and once you start climbing the back roads and up the hills to get to the little hidden entrance you can already feel the energy building around yourself.  It is where I go to heal and recharge.

I was lucky in my youth that my Mother would bring my siblings and I to Lothlorien to attend the celebrations and festivals.  Each one centered around a Pagan holiday.  ELF Fest being the largest as it is the one that brings in the heat and bounty of Spring into Summer.  The energy of renewal and fertility.  The ability to slough off the dead of winter and once more wrap yourself in the mantle of Life.  As a kid I couldn’t really fully appreciate what all this meant and it wasn’t until I was in my late teens and many years after we had last gone that I remembered this amazing place and hitched a ride with a good friend and her family to attend a Fest and see what it had become.  I have not missed a single year since.

In fact I’ve brought my own Family of Friends along for the journey and some of my dearest and closest are now part of the annual tradition.  It is something always highly anticipated and looked forward to once the New Year hits, and I am deeply moved and cherish the way each of them have taken to it and become part of The Land themselves.  We  have gone from borrowing tents and only packing nuts and chips all the way to multi-room camping layouts with screened living room/porches and fully cooked meals.  I am madly in love with the energy and space we bring with us, and we are often complimented and commented on as to how we throw down.  If we are to live in the woods for a week we might as well do it in comfort and style!

Though in all seriousness beyond the glam and glitz of adventure and escape from the box we live in, this place is a retreat that I eagerly await each year because of what it does for my soul, my energy, my heart.  Lothlorien is a place of boundless love and respect.  There has never been anywhere in the world I have been and experienced the raw and grand scale of acceptance, joy, and passion that exists when you are on those grounds.  There is no judgement.  There is no fear.  There is no prejudice.  There is no hate.  It just doesn’t even have a chance to exist there.  You are part of one energy, one life force and you can see it in the spark of life that glows in each person who comes to be there.  It is a place of real Peace, and that is so rare and delicate.

What people have poured into the Land, the Land gives back in spades.  You can feel it fill you up when your feet hit the ground.  You can’t help but to be healed.  There are so many shrines and altars to Life and the Gods that you can seek out.  Pick any direction.  You will find plenty.  These are places of contemplation as well as action.  There are workshops and rites and rituals all throughout the days and nights and almost all are open for you to attend should you choose to.  How you spend your time and energy here is completely up to you,.

Want to shop or grab something to eat?  Well there is plenty of that too!  Vendors that set up around a round track that runs the course of the inside of the camp grounds can be found open at almost any hour, just in case you need that pumpkin soup at 2am 😉  Would you like some authentic and hand made wood sculptures?  You’ve got it.  How about fresh potted herbs?  That can be had as well.  Maybe a chain link bikini?  Yeah you can totally get into one of those as well.  Things filled with real passion.  True labors of love that want to be passed on to you.  We have even left on more than one occasion with swords in one hand and ceramic chop sticks in the other.  You can find Anything!

Don’t worry if that vegan chili burrito you had hits you funny on top of a stomach full of rum, there are natural composting toilets for you to use on either end of the grounds.  Gigantic stone teepees with stalls, toilets, and sinks.  The water in the sinks is the ground and rain water used as the same natural source they use to fill the showers.  The compost from the toilets is used to help develop the natural parts of the land and not allow the camping and festivals to do any real harm.  They are also used to help nourish the gardens and flower beds.  What electricity is available is done so through solar energy, and the hot showers are provided by a huge, cast iron, wood burning oven.  It is all as natural and non harmful as possible.  I constantly wish I could just live there year round.

Each year I go in wanting to burn away any of the negative energy of the year before and this always offers a varied experience in how I go about the Fest.  This year was probably one of the most absolutely calm and relaxing experiences I have ever had there.  Our whole group went in with a high level of cooperation and compassion, as well as a more straight forward camping set up, and it all proved to be a great boon to us this trip.  We had some really wonderful meals and shared countless bouts of laughter.  The weather held out to stunning and perfect and our camping site was well shaded and cool.  The general vibe of the fest was one of slow movement and calm energies.  Everyone seemed like they needed the same thing; Peace.  It was wonderful to be able to be part of that.

Of course the flamboyant side of me had to Lush it up and in fact this Fest in 2015 was THE reason I ended up getting into Lush Cosmetics in the first place.  The showers on the Land require you use as natural a product as you can when washing and so both my roomy and one of our best friends continually tried to get me to visit our local shop leading up to our trip last year.  I wasn’t having any of it because I had yet to find need or want for real body care in my life up til that point and was used to the store bought body wash and shampoos I would get.  Well we see where that’s led us now don’t we?

I took my “Wilderness” range of gels and lotion, being Supertramp, Karma, and Tropical Jungle.  I also loaded up on my solid scents.  I want to be clean AND smell amazing out in the middle of the woods 😉  The solid scents also served a really fun double purpose.  I had purchased colored, cloth, folding fans for each of us to help with heat or insects and in each one I rubbed in a good amount of scent for that person to enjoy.  It lasted the whole trip so that when you snapped your fan open and got yourself a nice breeze going, it was also scented with one of your favorite aroma concoctions 🙂  AND the ingredients like patchouli, mint, and lavender in the different scents helped to stave off mosquitoes which is a huge win in my book.  After showering one morning I even had a young women approach me to ask if she could try whatever I was using to wash with she could smell outside the shower.  I handed her Supertramp 😉  The Tropical Jungle worked out perfectly as a nice woodsy aroma, and the lotion kept me nourished and feeling super fresh the whole time.  They really do make Perfect camping/fest add-ons.

Have I mentioned the massive bonfire and drum circle that happen in something called Thunderdome every night?  It is the literal heartbeat of Loth.  You can find yourself swept away in it.  Imagine a MASSIVE sunken, flat sand pit.  It is ringed with tiered stone benches and covered by a 60 foot high geometric dome.  In the center is a fire pit that is about the size of ten adults standing in a circle only touching fingertips.  The fires usually go upwards of 10 feet or more. At the compass points of the circle, built into the stone tiers, are altars to the Four Corners and the Elements.  This is where magic lives.

Every night one quarter of the seating is taken up by the drum circle.  It is not ever or always the same people, and some will come and go throughout the eve, but the sound of drums will never stop until the sun is well up in the sky.  The shape of this pit and dome turn the sound of drums into the beating heart of a giant.  It plays out across the endless expanse of hills and forest and fills you up.  It is by no means distracting or overbearing if you aren’t in the dome yourself.  It just is.  It just exists.  It is it’s own living thing.  Those who join the fire and dance the ring are taking this beat into themselves and giving of themselves back to it.  The dancers, the drummers, and the fire all exist for one another for the hours that it is dark each day.  It is entrancing, enlivening, and exotic.  It can hypnotize you and take you away as you watch the endless looping of dancers around the fire and feel that pulse beating around you.  Everyone needs to have that experience.  It is this place and this thing that the energy of the Land and it’s People build up to every day.  You can feel it and see it around you as dusk approaches.  It is when everyone really Lives.  It is also how I will leave you here and now.  Keep that as your closing memory, as I do when I leave each year.  It is the thing I think of when I seek it out again the next.

LiveLove.