It has been a few days now since the women’s bohemian festival folded its canvas wings and exhaled us back into the world.
I go every year with my mum. It is our ritual — a soft rebellion against ordinary life. Camping with Mum is easy laughter and shared flasks of tea. It is one of the purest joys I know.
But this year the land was different. A new location. A different pulse beneath the soil. The energy hummed at a frequency I couldn’t quite tune into. Instead of coming home refilled, I came home tired — as though something had been rearranged inside me without my permission.
On the second night, the sky split open.
Thunder cracked like ancient drums. Lightning stitched wild seams across the dark. The wind clawed at tent pegs and sent canopies tumbling. Rain came in sheets — fierce, unapologetic. Some women packed up and fled, wheels spinning in the mud.
I stayed.
I sat cross-legged in my tent, rain thrashing the canvas above me, eating popcorn as if I had front-row seats to the theatre of the gods.
There were beautiful sessions, powerful speakers, words that shimmered with truth. There were breakthroughs — the kind that arrive like sunlight — and others that cut like glass. Joy rose in me; so did grief. One healer, eyes deep as wells, told me I had “broken my sharker.” I’m still not sure what that means. A chakra? A shield? A story I had been telling myself?
Perhaps something did crack open.
I wanted rejuvenation. Instead, I received revelation.
Now, days later, I turn the experience over in my hands like a stone smoothed by water. Maybe the energy wasn’t what I wanted — but it was what I needed. Maybe the storm outside was only mirroring the one gathering quietly within me, asking to be witnessed rather than avoided.
Not all medicine tastes sweet.
There were small mercies too — the 50% sale on the final day, treasure gathered at half price like a wink from the universe. Shared meals that tasted better because we were muddy and tired. Good food, warm tea, my mum beside me.
Gratitude does not cancel disappointment.
It sits beside it.
Perhaps festivals are not always about being filled. Perhaps sometimes they are about being emptied — shaken by thunder, rinsed by rain — so that something truer can take root.
A storm passed over that field.
And maybe one is still brewing in me.
But I am learning this:
Even in exhaustion, there is wisdom.
Even in disruption, there is gift.
And even in the wildest weather,
I am still grateful to be under the same sky as my mother.
