May. 8th, 2010

hannah: (Stars and moon - icon_goddess)
Nearly an hour after getting back from a nighttime outing and I'm still shaking a little bit, and it's not just all the caffeine I had at dinner. Two Diet Cokes and an espresso put me into the perfect mood to head out after it got dark to check out the nighttime version of the Whole Earth Festival, and it was so worth it. Going to sleep tonight's gonna be fun.

The Festival wasn't completely empty, but nearly there. All the booths were tucked up for the night, and most of the people were hanging around the main stage listening to a music group. The rest were either wandering around, in a few small tents scattered around the lawns, or at the fire dancing. After five minutes of wandering I took my shoes off - it seemed like the right thing to do - and five minutes after that I went right back to the fire dancing. Which featured fire dancers with flaming hula hoops. Fire dancers who twirled sticks lit on both ends. Fire dancers who lit their breath straight up towards the sky. It wasn't really dancing, since nobody was moving to the music, but I don't know what else to call that sort of rhythmic, focused movement. They weren't on a stage, but there was a stage for dancing behind them, and they did their dancing on a roped-off section of a large lawn with plenty of space to move as they wished and the fire let them.

I was in the mood to look around and see everything, peer into all the booths and down all the streets, and when I watched the dancers I didn't want to be anywhere else. After a few minutes of watching, I put my camera away, and after that I walked through the crowd to sit as close to the performance area as I could, watching the dancers and the fire and the contrails, all the shapes they made in the dark. And I knew, at the same time, how dangerous the fire was, and how beautiful the dancers made it for me. They spun it around themselves, played with it, but they couldn't stay friends with it - as they spun around the fire burned out, the hottest blue flames the very last to leave. People went on and off the area as their fire went out and got lit up, and the music and dancing stayed going. One of the odder local ordinances is one for nighttime light, so there's a whole lot of dark at night, and even in the lights around the area were dim compared to what the dancers had with them.

When I left they were still going, still plenty of people watching, and that was how I wanted it: I'd have liked to stay, but didn't want to get trampled when everyone else left, and knew it'd be better to be home when I finally got tired. I kept my shoes off, biking to my home just five minutes of hard pedaling away. Being able to be in the dark has a lot of wonder in it, that sense of being so small in the rest of the world. When it's in a place I know from the day but don't see much in the dark gives me a new way to look at it, and when there's just enough light to see the dark, it lets me feel like a little kid again and the world is just as big as it used to be.

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