Fire event

I spent a good part of the first day of the year asleep in the ham­mock under the tree. I struggled out of it to make my way to Singing up the Women, then wandered down to Lisa’s stall to chat, then to Spir­itual Sen­sa­tions to talk to the witches and wish them happy new year and finally up the long road to the amphi­theatre and dress rehearsal.

That all went well, although I should have real­ised then how little of the fire event I would see since we were actu­ally on the stage instead of in front of it as usual.

After­wards, I went up the hill and rang Matt, had a much calmer con­ver­sa­tion, went into ‘town’ for sushi and coffee with Jonathan S then back up to the amphi­theatre ready for the main event. 

This year was all about the cosmos: sun, stars, moon. It began with “hope and inspir­a­tion, let it flow”, which is one of those lovely songs I like to sing the chorus to, and hadn’t noticed how much of the verse related to the theme. One of the tra­di­tional owners star­ted the fire very quickly, stick twirl­ing swiftly under deft fin­gers, smoke rap­idly appear­ing, then taking the leaves into his hands and blow­ing until orange flame appeared to rap­tur­ous applause. (Sup­posedly there were about 30,000 in the audi­ence this year.)

A man lit a brand from that and then lit a fire­work that went off over­head while Kristina Olsen sang that “from a dis­tance, there is har­mony” song. The lan­tern parade did its thing, little kids with their hand-painted cre­ations, and then we went up on the stage and hardly got to see a thing from there. I know there were fire dan­cers on the hill, and I really liked singing the chorus to this Celtic song (could­n’t tell you what the verses were about because they were in Gaelic, but I’m guess­ing we were trans­lat­ing the chorus because she would sing her Gaelic line and then we sang “Listen to the old ones” and then she sang a Gaelic line and we sang “Listen to the old ways”) and there was did­jeridu accom­pa­ny­ing this too, which was a lovely way of music­ally unit­ing both the old ways of the white and black cul­tures of this land. While we sang our song about Mother Earth, I saw a pro­ces­sion of an enorm­ous turtle lan­tern and a huge whale and dol­phins and fish­ies swim by under an enorm­ous helium-filled Earth bal­loon which was amazing. 

Then the Spooky Men’s Chor­ale sang their song about rais­ing the rafters which I’m sure would have pissed off a lot of Chris­ti­ans because one of the lines is “no mes­siah, hearts on fire” and “what we sing is what we are”. I love the “raise the rafters, raise the rafters, we don’t care, if the roof’s beyond repair”. I also loved our bit of that, which was the final verse and the coda: over hills and over val­leys, over moun­tains, over seas, nations shall sing unto nations, until nations cease to be.

Then there was crazy fid­dling as the old man with the brand approached a treb­uchet and lit a flare that was flung with great gusto into the pyr­amid of stars. We hur­riedly were moved off the stage so we could see and got back to the hill­side just in time to see the huge Cath­er­ine Wheel spin­ning on the front of it and then it went up in con­flag­ra­tion, the wild fid­dling began in earn­est and we all danced on the sand in front of the stage. I went and stood near the bon­fire after it col­lapsed, com­mun­ing with the flame a little, talk­ing with an Eng­lish woman I’d made friends with during one of the belly­dan­cing classes. Then went down to the Big Top to dance to Red Eyes again and from there to one last chai tent fling, a Linsey Pol­lack jam to beat all jams, marimba and djembe and other instru­ments weav­ing around each other. 

And then to bed! A lovely night but not mind-blow­ing in the way that pre­vi­ous years have been, mostly I think because I could­n’t see what was happening.
All in all a won­der­ful Wood­ford, though. Another year of music and lovely people, light and love. Happy New Year!