From August 7-12 this year, the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival will celebrate its 36th year.
http://www.michfest.com/...
Founded in 1976, the gathering was and continues to be a celebration of women, women's art, music and community. The annual gathering has been and continues to be a safe, nurturing and empowering event for thousands of women to celebrate, learn and explore. It sits outside of and away from the ordinary patriarchal constraints in which we normally live, and well outside the extraordinary all-out assaults and insults of anti-woman legislating and rhetoric we have been seeing over the past few years.
A beautiful and evolving gathering, sisters Kristie and Lisa Vogel saw a need to create a space in which women could speak, act and opine freely, without the continual low-buzz of assumptions about our "acceptable" or expected roles in our society within which we operate every day. Clothing optional, lesbian-friendly and increasingly diverse, the Festival has struggled over the years to become more welcoming to women of color and transgendered women. But the dialogue through those struggles has indeed improved and broadened its outreach and inclusion of all women.
My experience as a festie-goer has been most gratifying in that, in the words of author, playwright and priestess Carolyn Gage:
At Michfest, she can experience a degree of safety that is not available to any woman any time anywhere except at the festival. And what does that mean? It means she achieves a level of relaxation, physical, psychic, cellular, that she had never experienced before. She is free, sisters. She is free. Often for the first time in her life.
There is no way to describe what that level of freedom means or how healing it is.
So to all my Sisters heading to Michigan next week, and to all my Sisters everywhere, I celebrate you and in the words of Meg Christian, "I wish you well." I can't make the trek this time, but sure hope to see you next year!