I’m officially missing Apogaea this year. It’s bittersweet. I’ve gone the last two years, and it’s been such a huge part of my experience.
For those of you who have never heard of Apogaea, allow me to enlighten you. It’s the local burn in Colorado. It is a camping festival, where 500-800 people get together to pitch a tent for four days, wear costumes, leave no trace, dance to LOUD techno music, enjoying gratuitous nudity in the form of nude morning jogs, observe amazingly beautiful hippies and scantily costumed men and women, appreciate strange and exotic artwork, and be part of a cult(ure) that dances and chants while encircling a burning effigy of a phoenix. It’s rather lovely, and the experience changes me each time.
I’m not going this year because I don’t want to go alone. I didn’t have the time or money, didn’t have someone to watch the dogs, didn’t have a way to get there, didn’t have a friend to go with… and really what it comes down to is that I’m not going out there without my guy.
So, I’m sad. At the same time, missing this festival is sort symbolic for me… maybe the death of a past phase in my life. Not a permanent death, because I intend to go next year– but perhaps a sort of hiccup- or burp-death that allows me to regroup who I am– apart from who I was as the woman who went the last two years.
Who I am IS a bit different now. I mean, now I have a family. I’m part of a family. I have step kids. I have a home with dogs and a lawn, and it’s MINE… and I’m not sharing my space with retarded roommates, now it’s children who are part of my family… Not to say that all of those past experiences aren’t me… because they’re part of me, but that who I was then is very different than who I am now… To have gone out there by myself this year might have possibly indicated a failure to move forward and onward with my new Self.
Or something like that.
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