Om Reunion Project 2015
The Healing Time
Finally on my way to yes
I bump into
all the places
where I said no
to my life
all the untended wounds
the red and purple scars
those hieroglyphs of pain
carved into my skin, my bones,
those coded messages
that send me down
the wrong street
again and again
where I find them
the old wounds
the old misdirections
and I lift them
one by one
close to my heart
and I say holy
holy.
© Pesha Joyce Gertler
Finally on my way to yes
I bump into
all the places
where I said no
to my life
all the untended wounds
the red and purple scars
those hieroglyphs of pain
carved into my skin, my bones,
those coded messages
that send me down
the wrong street
again and again
where I find them
the old wounds
the old misdirections
and I lift them
one by one
close to my heart
and I say holy
holy.
© Pesha Joyce Gertler
I have arrived back, tired and happy from Om Reunion Project. I feel a little older, a little more grounded, coming from a place where all of the extreme things I was struggling with during this last year could be brought up, anchored and released in order to move on.
This festival, out of all of the hundreds I've attended in my life, is still the one that I connect with the most. And I do not say that lightly. The people who come to this festival are some of the most attentive and present humans I have ever had the pleasure to come in contact with.
People who know what it means to let go and celebrate as an expedient to spiritual practice. People who do not pass you on the path without looking you in the eye and connecting. People, who in the midst of a party, will take the time to stand with you calmly when you need a hug, someone to hear you, or share a good cry. This festival is authentic, it is present, it stands proudly in the middle of being a crazy party that almost everyone there still refers to as "church".
I feel so grounded in this festival, that for me it is the start of my new year. Happening on the summer solstice, it is a place that I can look back over the past, and look forward and decide how I want my future to be. There is not a better place I can think of to do that, then in a place that I find the best and most ideal aspects of humanity. The connection, environmental focus, community participation, spiritual practice and tribal celebration all embody what I want the world to become.
It is the type of festival where year after year I see people being touched and changed for the better. Indeed, some of us there this year felt it so necessary to anchor in our experiences from that space, that we went through the ritualistic practice of tattooing each other to symbolize some of the things we had learned and wanted to carry forward. And just because life can never be too serious, we happened to be sitting in a giant cheese sculpture in the middle of a field. :)
Bringing the Prayer Flag Project into a space like this seems like one of the most natural things in the world. Unlike other spaces and festivals, were it is sometimes rare for people to have participatory art and sacred spaces, it in no way is foreign to people like this.
The gratefulness expressed for the space, the genuineness of the flags, and the connection of the people who entered was such a gift. This is one festival where what I receive in return for the creation of a space like this, is so nourishing in return, that it doesn't even remotely feel like work.
To each and every human who made this celebration possible through their work, their effort, their dance, their costumes, their food, their presence. Thank you. From the bottom of my heart. For all of you who have added to this project, the sincerity of your energy and love will surely be felt by others across this continent. I feel so blessed.
