MWMF: The Quiet Before The Storm

There is a quiet about this place. Not just a quiet but a silence. Maybe that’s just because I’m still feeling very much like an outsider, a spy. I watch everyone and everything with a close eye while trying to go unnoticed. I suppose that’s the rhythm of figuring a place out.

Breakfast was smooth this morning, a small crowd ignoring the roped off maze that waits for more womyn. They have everything finely tuned and ordered. I camped not that far from the kitchen, right on the edge of Bush Gardens and Crone Heights. I am surrounded by other tents and tall trees. Forest. It is raining now but the leaves catch most of the moisture before it ever meets my tent. Still the air is humid and everything is damp. This morning Anna helped me put a tarp up over my tent, doing my best to prepare for the thunderstorms we’re to expect later today.

I’m lonely here. Maybe just for today. But I am tired of doing alone. Putting the tent up alone. Wandering alone. Last night after getting my tent set up I walked through the dark, sauntering past tents of topless women some of whom sat entirely nude on plastic folding chairs. That image stayed with me. A womyn’s pussy against plastic as night fell in the middle of nowhere Michigan. I was supposed to be meeting friends but I’d gotten in late and missed our scheduled time. There is no electricity or phones, so that was as close to a plan as we were gonna get. Instead I was left wandering through a sea of woods and women, wondering how I would ever find anyone.

But it is true how they say that there is magic here or maybe it’s just grace. Because as I rounded the corner of Lois Lane to the sounds of a drum circle, I met my limit. I had driven several stressful hours to this unfamiliar space and now darkness and drums were swirling around me and I was alone. It was too much. I stopped and whispered aloud, GOD PLEEEASE. And 30 seconds later I was wrapped in the arms of 3 friends from San Francisco who were waiting just around that bend.

I wanna say that everything eased in that moment. In the realization that I had asked for what I needed and it was given. But instead my body still pulsed quietly with stress and uncertainty as we sat under stars with hundreds of other womyn and watched a movie about the ever attractive and inspiring Topp Twins.

That pulse is still steady now as I move into my first afternoon here. As if I am waiting for something to come. A person, a fight, a prophecy or maybe just this storm.