Connection

People seek connection in a lot of ways. Rituals, both spiritual and secular, intimate or large-scale are an inherent human trait, evident since days long past. Things like shared worship, shared labour, hardship, or frivolity can all forge those bonds, not only to each other but to humanity as a whole. They can grow slowly with strangers, or they may form easily amongst those people with whom you’ve been through the trenches. They can take the form of the wholesome and the seedy, the laudably chaste or the… less ‘family friendly’.*

*Even if those means are, well, how you create a family.

               The ability to plug in and mix your own essence into the greater humanity surrounding you is an essential part of being a social animal. It’s not so much a need for validation, or approval but a confirmation of that which you already know, inherently, on some level: that you are human. That you belong. That regardless of whether you qualify for membership of the more elite and exclusive cliques and circles, you still have an innate worth and value that supersedes anything else, and that you have a place in the society, the world where you live.

               There are many things that alienate the spirit of the human animal in this modern world. Borders; the social, the political, the economical, the religious. The grind. The hustle. The endless drudgery of treading the wheel, a duty which can’t be shirked – not if you like to eat food and live indoors. That which takes up fully half of our waking lives can forcibly remove elements of our mind, body and soul. It can harden our heart and close our minds, because it robs us of the luxury, the necessity of time. To borrow from Mike Skinner, ‘I ain’t helping you climb your ladder. I’m busy climbing mine. That’s how it’s been since the dawn of time’.

               More than that, we are consciously separated and segregated also – there are powerful forces in society that divide us. I’m not talking about Lizard people or the Illuminati, nothing so esoteric as all that. I’m simply talking about corporations, trendsetters, tastemakers. I’m talking about classists and elitists. I’m talking about bigots. They divide us into haves and have-not’s. Into Us and Them. ‘Do you have the latest iPhone? How expensive are your shoes? Did you hear about so-and-so’s plastic surgery? Are you good enough to hang out with my son? Are you worthy to date my daughter? We don’t want her to work here with us – I’m not a racist, mind, but our clients will have a problem with one of them. I have nothing against your kind, but, you know, stay away from my kids, yeah?’

               If you’ve ever worked in hospitality or retail, you also will have seen the uglier side of people. The entitlement and the stratification – the ‘I am the customer and you are the one who serves me’ attitude. The way that the façade can fall away after a minor inconvenience, a few too many drinks, a rebuff from the pretty girl who just wants to be left alone with her friends.

               If you’ve ever been a cyclist, you will have encountered the shocking force of hate that some motorists have for cyclists. ‘Cockroaches on wheels’ as Derryn Hynch used to exhort his legion of fuckwits to refer to us. You may have had someone deliberately sideswipe at you, or cut you off and hit the brakes, whether just to mess with you or to deliberately try to agitate or even harm you. Even on the more genteel side, you may have had your life endangered by someone who simply didn’t think to look out for you, to hold space for someone like you in their version of society. Who turned across you without looking or indicating. Who opened their door onto the bike lane without so much as a backwards glance.

               And though I don’t wish to speak for anyone, my understanding is that if you’re a woman, if you’re an ethnic minority, if you’re LGBT+, you will have experienced any number of things that just add a little dark smudge to your soul. An encounter that made or makes you fear for your health and well-being, some reason to worry about whether you are indeed as safe as you deserve to be. Someone whose entitlement makes them think it is perfectly ok to Other you, to subsume you, to push you down and diminish you. That they have a right and a claim that is somehow worth more than anything you could possibly possess.

               Hell, even if you are a cis-het white male, aged 18-45 and you live in a world built by and for you, you will still find other people who want to grind you down for their own ends. Someone who wants to get into your face, who wants to fight you, who wants what you have, who wants to show you that they are better than you, how dare you think anything different! Whoever you are, the modern world will put someone in your path who thinks that their opinion is worth the same as your expertise, that their experience eclipses yours.

               So, what do you do? You face them where you can, and you weather them where you must. And how do you get beyond that, to really reconnect with your humanity? Well, you need to scrub clean your soul. You must wash yourself in the river. And how you do that, well, the methods are myriad. There are as many ways to do that as there are people. There are churches – hundreds of them. Thousands. I’ve written before, more than once, about the importance not only of community – the inner circle of your family and friends and also the wider circle of your greater community – but also of the Third Place.

               How do I spiritually revivify? Honestly, it’s a single music festival, once a year. It cleans me and renews me. It takes me, weary and angry and alone, and it dusts me off and sets me back on my feet among the people. It gives me music. It gives me dancing. It gives me intense time with my friends, and space within a larger group to bond with and love them, but also it gives me time to be with myself. It gives me banter and so much laughter. It gives me nourishing food. It gives me new scenery, it gives me nature, and many, many steps through it. It gives me familiarity. It gives me a greater community of relatively like-minded people, who I see helping each other, looking out for each other, loving each other, and for nothing other than the reward of that. It gives me a place for a breadth of experience that I don’t have access to at home.

               It gives me a place where people compliment me and want nothing in return. They compliment me on my silly outfit, my poor dancing, my stupid facial hair, whatever it may be, and they aren’t trying to sell me anything. They don’t need a favour from me. They want nothing from me. They just want to pass a little kindness along because they’re just so goddamn happy! It’s a place where people find debit cards on the ground – wallets, expensive phones, cameras, bags – and they hand them in to lost and found, or they keep an eye on them until their owner comes back seeking them. Where you can leave your stuff on your seats and wander off for an hour to check out the band, head back to camp, find something to eat and still reasonably expect to find it still sitting there when you get back. If someone has overindulged, if someone has under-hydrated, if someone is freaking out, if someone needs help – people help them. In the city, you may literally see people stepping over someone passed out on the side of the road, here strangers rally and get them the help that they need.

               It’s a place where people are creative and beautiful and there just to have fun. Some people spend hours; weeks, months getting their outfits together, their camp, their doof sticks so their friends can find them in the crowd. Eskys, hell, even some of the toilets are fabulously decorated, believe it or not, by people who had a silly idea at home and brought all the material to transform an eco-composting long-drop into something a little bit special. The people are diverse – they’re here for the techno, they’re here for the metal, the rock, the disco, the funk. There are kids, and oldies like me, and people way older than me. They’re wearing work gear, op-shop chic, hand sewn garments, full costumes. They are dressed practically, or aesthetically. They sparkle. They are chic, inner-city latte sipping leftie elites, scummy bogans, hippies, country folk. They are straight, white, queer, blak and everything else besides. And they are gorgeous.

               It’s a festival where the people who run it aren’t trying to squeeze every penny out of their user base. It began as a party for them, their friends and their friends’ mates, and that vibe carries over. The tickets are not cheap, sure. But I can bring my own booze and food, and anything I need to have a good time – provided I don’t bring anything to endanger the people or the sheep that use the land for the rest of the year. I don’t have to line up for an hour to buy tokens, just to join a different queue for an hour to buy the beers, sorry love, limit of 2 per person, you’ll have to come back. They don’t have corporate sponsorship. I don’t have billboards and banners and fucking advertising blocking the natural beauty of the site. I don’t have a lack of choice because one company bought the exclusive rights to supply their product and their product alone to a captive audience.

               I mean, it is a privilege. I’m fully aware of that. Not everyone has access to this like I do. But goddamnit, I am so lucky to have this privilege and I will appreciate it for all that it is worth. I will renew my faith in people, cleanse the smut from my soul, and plug my vibrating consciousness into the grid of thousands of others who are there just to share a beautiful, vibrant and energetic exchange of everything that it means to be human – really human, not just a person in a society, a rat running a race through an urban maze. I’m here for the joy, the creation, the expression of individuality and the fierce pride of tribes. Not an output, not a product, not a dollar sign or a value. Real humanity. That’s what renews my faith in people.