My Second Glastonbury Festival - 2019

I don't post here often. In fact, the last time was two years ago, but I thought that mentioning the goings on at my second Glastonbury festival would be a good thing. After all, there are some events on your bucket list, that once you have been there, they go back up onto the bucket list as a return experience. The Glastonbury Festival is one of those events.

I arrived on Monday to help set up the little hole in the ground with the Iona Community in the same place I camped two years ago at the last Glastonbury Festival. We got to work building steps down into the little vale, and preparing seating and a fire pit for the people who would be using the space as a place to chill out during the heat, cold, and/or rain of the festival. And come they did.

a bit o' sing-a-long in the Iona Community space

On one of the first evenings, our little group traveled up the hill to the stone circle to watch the epic Somerset sunset over Worthy Farm.

This year was less about the music and more about the people. Even though it has been two years since the last festival (Glastonbury takes a "Fallow Year" every so often), it still felt like coming home, and many people remembered meeting me at the Iona Community space two years ago. The festival world proved itself to be a small world as well. I bumped into people from How the Light Gets In, Focus Wales, the Hay Festival, and Burning Nest.

As a full time traveler, these settings have become temporary homes to me, and offer a sense of community better than most neighborhoods in the US. Our team sat around the fire by night, and in the cool shade during the day and spent time talking with people and creating a place of respite from the hectic noisy festival. Everyone was amazing, and Debbie our illustrious organizer, Ben the Swedish Candle fire master, Miriam who nervously waited for her school test results, and Jenie were all returners from the previous festival. Added newly to the group were Suzanne the Vicar and Darryl the vicar's secretary, and Isaac and Tom who hailed from a new monastic community in Leicester. This was even a better year at the fire circle than the previous event, and everyone did such a great job making people feel welcome.

Okay, there was some music to be had. Tankus the Henge, The Burning Hell, and The Cure were my favs. And here is my FB live feed from the opening of The Cure to prove I was there. :-)