Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival
2015
Today, as all over the continent, womyns’ pussy cats are ignoring them and locals in the Midwest are mistaking dykes for men, while traveling dykes are mistaking men for cute butches in truck stops and airports. As bags are dragged up the stairs and dirty laundry dumped and fabulous prizes unpacked and we miss it so much we can’t wait for next August, Now, homo again, safe from the road, I sing the praises of womyn.
Michigan is just us together, is the first safe place we’ve known, is an experiment in truth and fantasy, is the one place where I feel conservative, is culture like they don’t let us make it if we could make it out there in the real world. If. Michigan is a breathing pulsating IF. It’s an in-your-face THIS. It’s a fizzy, giddy, all-consuming and costumed NOW. If. This. Now.
Michigan is girls who look more like boys than boys do. It’s lesbo sluts, baby dykes, square dykes, s/m dykes, hippie dykes, daddy dykes, recovering dykes, and granny dykes. Michigan is a rainbow going to dance at the end of the rainbow, a week-long pot of gold. It’s oak forests, giant ferns, ancient sacred land covered in tents and banners, and prayers for revolution and for healing. It’s 6,000 womyn in line for lunch. It’s fisting workshops next to goddess chanting workshops; it’s 200 womyn on African drums following Ubaka back in time. It’s prophesy, it’s archetypal memory, it’s a jukebox of dreams and projections. Michigan is hacking the sac to the setting sun naked, and rocking our beautiful perfect bodies to the rising moon. Bring your chair, your plate, your spoon. It’s tarps and porta janes and foot traffic through the wonderous green forest passing neighborhoods of hammocks and coolers and womyn. Michigan is tattoos and piercings, high erotic costumes, and female creativity, claimed and reclaimed everywhere you look.
And do you ever look! Michigan is all about looking. You look at her. Look at her! She looks at you. She looked at me! Womyn pass each other in lines of looking, we turn, look back in longing. Look at that outfit, that painted body, that ass! Look at that hairdo, that tattoo, those eyes. Look at me, look at me! Womyn know better than anybody how to awaken hearts and pussies through elaborate images. Look.
Workshopping in the tall ferns.
And it’s about listening. Strange, familiar voices grab at your ears for attention. Womyn roar like wildcats, howl like wolves, scream in The Twilight Zone (b.d.s.m. space) all day long. Womyn drum, sing, teach, come, laugh, deal, shop. We tell the stories of our lives or we make up other lives for just this week. We speak truth to power in our actions and the green world holds us, the call-and-return to circles within spirals.
We feed ancient spirits with the theater of our lives, with imagination and un-bottomed invocation; we feed ourselves to unedited future-worlds as we dream up them in our power Now. We bow to the liveliest possibilities, and expand activism as we engorge desire. Here we’re connected by flesh, metaphor, and politics, and by our hunger to change the world we’ve been given. In the forests and meadows, the invisible world leans close—the ancestors, the future unborn beings, watching and listening with us— to what do we offer ourselves?
We breathe through shifting veils of light, we break through membranes of law and judgement, we open to magic. The air crackling with womyns’ visions—our passions bearing, our pulses sparking, flaming life into our new story. ‘Cos we need this. We need this story.
Because of this need and this now, imaginations dance to join our souls to time. We are sacred beings, endlessly branching like trees in the forest. We are a tribal stomp tickling someone’s gods to forgiveness of gorgeous potential humanity. We make the holes holy and the battered sacred. We are the beauty and beast of it. The guiltless facts surround us and we swoon. We are all angels and demons and the world is both dying and perfect. We are all that we have, all that we need, it fills us to our brims and we make art out of that overflow.
Clouds shade the sun, sun breaks free to dazzle all our colors and sounds. My boss’s breasts, the parade of puppets, parade of redheads, parade of femmes, The Butch Strut. Stilt-walking workshops, addictions meetings, womyn-of-color-sanctuary, weight lifting, female ejaculation, stone healing, babies and dildoes everywhere you look. Warriors and vibrators, butches and femmes of kaleidoscopic definitions. A thousand naked womyn walking slowly, proudly in procession.
Three stages revolve in a kaleidoscope of music and theater. Ferron, Tribe 8, Ferron with Tribe 8, Amy Ray with the Butchies, Rhiannon, Edwina Lee Tyler, Marga Gomez. The Dance Brigade sliding through all that genderfuck on sheets of water, naked. Holly Hughes, Holly Near, Ullali. Chem-Free, Chem-Manadatory, too many cigarettes and vehicle exhaust on the wind in RV parking, too much fun to complain, girl anarchy, these trees! Over-40’s, over-50’s, over-stimulated. More hacking, more food lines, more schlepping ridiculous amounts of stuff through the forest, Leather dykes on some eternal patrol, midwestern dykes watching football, joggers from not-here, wheelchair-bound dykes from everywhere, more deaf womyn than any deaf womin has ever seen, partying down. The sign-language interpreters stealing every show, the brilliant girl children being Free, the quilt, the nipples, the raffles. We mine each other, harvest each other, provide for each other. We are all-out and sacred. We have, we shall endure. We shall, we do fly. And we fuck, you bet we do—we rescue the good words. We rescue the good world held hostage to manhood. We open the doors, receive the temple of ever was and ever shall be.
We’re snaking through the forest, past big striped tents and stages in meadows. We bear what is essential to us and carry our dreams on our heads. We say what is essential, we author our dreams. Look at her! Home two days and it’s still all there inside my head. Femmes turn butch before my eyes and butches turn to men. Fuck the society that would deny us these images! We transform gender modes and blow open unbounded potentials of identity. This tribe with our brave core spinning and sinning, so fluid, so endurant. This dance claimed. And this one, and this—we move through the smorgasbord of the possible human woman, womin, womoon, wimmin, womyn. Move insatiable and limitless through themes and genres, through regions, syndromes, diagnoses, we Be, spun into possibility,and the lies fall away from our skins and we breathe deeply. We lie in the sun, in the rain, in the stars, on the earth.
Me, bare-assed and kicking the sac at Festival in the early 80’s
The pivot, the fulcrum, the still point only and always is Love. Love is the quiet consciousness presiding over the chaos with patient attention.We are The Amazon Love Army. Urban, suburban, cuntree dykes together imagining Love into form, imagining and so creating acceptance, honor and grace. Imagining and so creating beauty, desire, permission. Imagining and so creating freedom and stories and cosmic applause for the glorious she’s-been-waiting-so-long Action that changes everything. This herstoric effort, the heroic devotion to our own final perfection. Devoted to the satisfaction and the hunger of our lives—lives no one has seen before.
Here’s a toast to our changes, our adventures, our labile fertility. To our shapeshifting selves. To our perverse and persistent yearning to be Real. To be free. To seeing you next year in August. This is our fairy tale, blaze up the old fire, Now. Taste this sweet howling drumming wet satin rooted indestructible YES! Let it carry you through.
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