If you’ve ever wanted to be a fly on the wall at the 3-day Imagine Festival that happens in Doe Bay in September, as I decided to be this year (Sept 5-7), here’s your chance.
Overall thoughts on the festival:
- There was fantastic organization, especially considering that Doe Bay is not a large place. Organizing all of this was a ton of work!
- There are so many dedicated volunteers who believe in giving back because they love the Imagine Festival.
- It was my first time camping without backpacking miles to a tent site, so that was lovely! I thoroughly enjoyed lying in a tent during the day right next to the main stage area and vendors, eating out of a cooler, and looking up at the sky for extended periods of time.
- I recommend setting up a tent the first day, even if you are local and don’t plan to sleep there overnight – camping comes with your ticket, and it’s great to have a little home base in which to hang out, eat, and just relax now and then.
- It is lovely to be in immediate community with a thousand people whose intentions are peaceful and kind.
- All kinds of people are there, not just one “type.”
- I was definitely in the minority of people who don’t smoke pot, but I knew that would be the case going in and that’s what kept me from going in the past. But I decided it would be interesting in a cultural anthropology kind of way to be a fly on the wall this year.
- My favorite forms of music played involved instruments rather than continuous electronic beats that lasted 90+ minutes. But there was a good variety of all kinds of music throughout the weekend.
- Certain talks by guest speakers whose credentials I might question seemed to be a bit fashionably overspiritualized and “deep.” Depth is a wonderful thing, but there is a big movement these days of individuals engaging in entrepreneurship by branding themselves as pseudo-gurus for enlightenment they feel is marketable in particular spiritual disciplines, and while they may use words and phrases that sound profound, my red flag went up (just now and then) even if those who were speaking may have felt every ounce of authenticity. Then again, that is going to happen in any gathering where spiritual things are discussed. It’s the same thing I might feel if I went to a church and someone was authentically talking about truths they feel they have the wisdom to speak authoritatively about, but some of those truths may not feel true to me at all. We are all in settings at times when people who speak of spiritual things fully believe they have the life experience or authority to speak on them, but a sense of caution can rise in us as a guard. I think humans are intrinsically hungry for meaning and spirituality, and I think that is especially so for many of the Imagine Festival-goers. As with anything in life, discernment and gut instincts will be the guide toward what is truly wisdom and love. How someone feels during a talk, during a music performance, at the festival in general, or anywhere in life for that matter, is all based on an individual, personal gauge of what feels right, what feels safe, and what feels trustworthy. Plenty of people come away from the festival refreshed simply from all the spontaneous conversations they’ve had with others they met – interactions that turned out to be very impactful, just as in any gathering in life. After a 3-day weekend of having had time to rest, detach from obligation, explore, relate with others, talk about important inner topics or perhaps not talk at all, and experience new revelations large or small, the festival is a respite as well as a spark in many ways for many people.
- This is definitely a place people can come and be purely themselves without judgment – they can dress, talk, walk, dance, be, and commune in ways that don’t fall into any societal norm. You can feel how palpably refreshing that is for many of the people who attend. A place without judgment is quite a thing.
Thank you to all the people who made the festival happen, which is an understatement! Make sure to read Darrell Kirk’s article in this week’s Islands’ Sounder about it.
And now for a vicarious visual experience of the weekend…
Each day had multiple musical groups playing on various stages, and performers were scheduled all through the night until 4:30 AM both nights. I didn’t plan to stay up all night, although I would’ve liked to just to see how many people actually stayed awake until the witching hour. While I slept in my tent the first night since no one needed me at home due to a birthday sleepover that my son attended after school on Friday, I planned to go home Saturday night because he would be home. In imagining leaving the festival for the night and coming back in the morning, I was a little disappointed that I would miss out on that part of the experience – that it would cause a little disconnect in the immersive aspect of it all. Not so in reality! I don’t think I’ve loved my bed so much! I was saying audible prayers of gratefulness as my head hit the pillow and I drifted into deep sleep.
The next morning, I knew my son had plans with friends for the day, so I got on the road again around 10 AM headed for Doe Bay, with a stop at the store for an egg and potato burrito for breakfast. It was a warm, welcome change from the food sitting in my cooler in the tent – peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, watermelon, orange juice, Pop Corners, potato chips, and some additional forgettable items.
After being at the festival all day Friday and Saturday, it was nagging at me that there needed to be a vendor of sweets, namely cookies. While you could buy Johanna’s burritos, Karma Kafe food, salmon plates and garlic fries, cacao waffles, and Poutine dishes, there was nothing under $12 to satisfy a sweet tooth, at least that I could find. A cookie vendor would make a mint at the Imagine Festival. Everyone needs a good cookie now and then. I know I do. Make 2,000 cookies (averaging 2 cookies per person in a crowd of 1,000 people over that 3-day period), sell them for $5 each, and you bring in $10,000. I would have eaten 2 cookies over the weekend, easily.
So imagine my sheer joy in seeing a bake sale in front of Island Market on my way back to the festival! I love this town!
I loaded up on cookies and a few cupcakes. Thank you volleyball team! What perfect timing. (I have a cookie radar. I realized many years ago that I’m just not interested in any other dessert. I tend to save it up for homemade cookies.)
Okay, moving on from cookie talk and back to the festival…
Thank you Edee, both for the commentary and for the photos. I’d been curious but not sufficiently motivated to inquire. The degree of organization is amazing – including the conscious intent to learn from each year’s experience. I appreciate you! Molly