It’s definite: I will not be going to Free Spirit this year.
I saw my foot doctor this evening. I’d asked my friends on Facebook for some healing energy, and evidently it worked: The doctor initially thought that the situation was more dire than it turned out to be after he worked on my foot for a while.
I’ve known my podiastrist since 1995. He knew how important going to FSG was to me (though not the specific reasons). He hated to have to tell me this, but he said directly: “Don’t go.”
I’m not certain what caused this latest problem. One possibility is a test set-up of my tent I did last Thursday, to check that the tent was OK and that my physical stamina was up to the task. It might be that problem occurred when I worked with that tent, but I didn’t notice it at the time.
If so, it might be a blessing in disguise. If I’d set up my tent for the first time at FSG, and had the same injury, by the end of the festival my foot would have been much, much worse than it presently is. The folks at FSG’s Healers Hut, as good as they are, could not have handled it. There would have been an ambulance, a hospital, the inevitable mis-diagnosis (this happened to me in England in 1996), and much drama.
To be frank, when I look at the FSG programming for this year, I don’t see much that I’m interested in; those workshops that I’d be most likely to go to are for things I don’t have to go to a festival to do (star-gazing, gaming).
The reason why I wanted to go to FSG was the people.
I wanted to be at Trent’s adulthood ceremony. That was the reason I committed to go to FSG in the first place.
I wanted to interview Nybor and Elspeth for my biography of Isaac Bonewits.
Most of all, I wanted to hang out with my favorite people in the world: Sabrina, Michael, Vann, Joyce. Maybe we could have all sat around a fire and just let ourselves Be.
This cannot happen, at least this year. Next year… given the circumstances, I simply have to say that I don’t know. It may be that, like LARPing, outdoor festivals are something that I can longer do in my life. But that decision can wait until later.
Right now, my main goal is not to feel angry. And to let my foot heal. And to greet Trent as a man the next time I see him.
Originally published at Argothald. You can comment here or there.