In the wake of five friends committing suicide during the Great Recession and my own dark night of the soul, I became curious about the concept of “social wellness,” how a community supports the health of its people through rituals and revelry. At a time when I was going through deep uncertainty just before age fifty, I made a list of experiences I’d had in the past couple years that enlivened me and found that many of them involved experiencing communal joy.
I researched the modern events and festivals industry and found that it was growing twice as fast as the overall global economy. This led to my creation of the website, Fest300, that chronicled the 300 best festivals globally each year. Starting in December 2012 and for the next year, I traveled to 36 festivals in 16 countries in order to earn the title, in some media, as the world’s leading expert on festivals.
As someone who’d spent my life creating epic gatherings, I now could observe the magic as a participant. From the largest gathering of humanity in history, Maha Kumbh Mela in India, to a bizarre Pagan-Catholic annual festival, El Colacho (in which drunk devils jump over mattresses of babies all day long), in a tiny Spanish village that’s been going on for four centuries, I witnessed the intangible, poignant value of community ritual.
My Journey of Joy
My sojourn began in Tahrir Square in Cairo when a political gathering melted down and I had to take shelter in a basement for the night (“communal terror” rather than joy). I was on my way to whirling with dervishes at the ancient Turkish festival commemorating the poet Rumi. So began my year-long journey, I was nearly gored by a bull in Pamplona, braved 30 degrees below zero (Fahrenheit) weather to marvel at the Harbin Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival in China, and studied the daily community celebrations in Bali.
One of my key lessons from that year is how these gatherings bond a community and create a touchstone for unity and connection, societal qualities that are especially needed today. By experiencing South by Southwest in Austin, Bottlerock in Napa, the Telluride Film Festival, the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras or the Chinese New Year in Hong Kong, I was able to see how many locals open their homes to not just family and friends during these celebrations, but to the festive pilgrims – like me – as well. Let me tell you a couple personal stories.
Connecting with Community
At the New Orleans for the Jazz and Heritage Festival 2013, I really appreciated the variety of music (this is not solely a jazz fest) and found myself hanging out in the gospel music tent much of the time. I kept smiling at an older woman, Beatrice, whose family had lived in New Orleans for five generations. She invited me to walk her home one evening after a particularly inspiring show. We sat and had tea for an hour in her kitchen as she regaled me of past Jazz Fest family stories.
It was barely two months later that I traveled to Siena, Italy for their twice-annual, 400-year tradition, Il Palio, the bareback horseback race. I was now only using Airbnb for my festival sojourn and I chose an older woman host whose stately flat was just two blocks from one of the entrances to the piazza. Since this celebration pits Siena’s seventeen neighborhoods against each other, my host took me on a private tour of her childhood neighborhood where we spent an evening having dinner in the streets with her friends, toasting their local jockey and horse, and drinking way too much Italian red wine. I learned so much about Italian culture.
Over the past few years, I’ve had the good fortune of experiencing the festive Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) in Oaxaca, San Miguel de Allende, and Todos Santos, Mexico. But, in 2013, this was a fitting end to my year-long journey as I experienced this celebration in my longtime home, San Francisco’s Mission District. This proved to me that you don’t have to travel around the world to experience these life-affirming (and, in this case, death-affirming) rituals.
Based upon this once-in-a-lifetime experience of visiting, on average, three festivals a month all over the world in a one-year period, here are some of my observations on why we gather:
1. Festivals Often Ritualize Cycles.
It could be harvest season or a rite of passage in someone’s life. Life transitions are doorways, inviting us to pass into another space. Rituals are like keys that unlock these doors and facilitate crossing the thresholds. And, being with a community means you don’t have to do it alone. This is why it’s tragic that celebrations like graduation ceremonies have gotten lost amidst the pandemic.
2. Festivals Can Redefine “Vacation.”
Too many of us “vacate” ourselves during our precious time away from work, trading in the couch and a beer for a beach lounger and a colorful cocktail dressed-up with a tiny umbrella. We’ve been ritualized into taking vacations that lack discovery because we think the antidote to burnout is passing out by the pool. We need to retire the words “occupation” for our work and “vacation” for our play. Our breaks from our regular routine can be transformational.
3. Cultural Curiosity = A More Robust Life + A More Peaceful Planet.
In the next forty years, the world’s population will explode from 7 to 10 billion people. The security landscape has changed in the past decade, and the 24/7 barrage of negative media about “the other” can induce fear at the thought of breaking out of what’s comfortable, or beyond what we know. Festivals are natural barrier disintegrators. Cultural curiosity is a mindset that opens a window into “the other” and into ourselves. When you celebrate with a different culture, you fall in love with that culture.
4. Festivals Allow Birds to Flock.
Sure, you can go online 24/7 and find people to chat with about common interests. But that doesn’t compare with the intensity of being with them in person, whether the focus is on yoginis at a Wanderlust festival or bikers at the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota. Also, a festival’s power of attraction can help define your feathers. You may not have ever known what type of bird you were until you felt the power and pull of flying with the flock. Festivals offer an organizing principle for societal niches.
5. Festivals Can Offer the Highest Expression of the Human Spirit.
Later in his life, psychologist Abraham Maslow expanded on his iconic hierarchy of five human needs with the addition of two more levels, aesthetics and transcendence, at the peak. Art transcends cultural barriers. Feeling a part of something bigger than you is palpable at many festivals. Nowhere have I experienced this more deeply than in the midst of tens of thousands of people – from all over the world – writing their hopes and dreams on large paper lamps that become luminescent spiritual torches in the mountains above Taiwan at the Pingxi Sky Lantern Festival. And, then, letting them lift off into the sky simultaneously. Feeling unified through spectacle has been with us since prehistoric villages blessed the gods for the change of seasons.
If you want to know more about my year of festivals, I wrote more than 100 articles about the experience.
I started this post with Emile Durkheim and I’ll finish as well as he wrote this passage in his book “The Elementary Forms of Religious Life” exactly one hundred years (1912) before I started my festival journey,
“No society can exist that does not feel the need at regular intervals to sustain and reaffirm the collective feelings and ideas that constitute its unity and personality…by means of meetings, assemblies, or congregations in which individuals, brought into close contact, reaffirm in common their common feelings.”