After our
morning yoga and a little work, I leave Timber Ridge around noon each day, and
each day it is a little bit different. Today, the day before the Frendly
Gathering, this place is wild with energy, color, bodies and movement. Everyone
has a place to be, a tool to wield, an area to clean or decorate or transform
for festivity.
Drinks are
piled into coolers and bins for the volunteer staff, and vendors start rolling
in, their bright wares swinging from hooks and shelves in vans, or stuffed into
hatchbacks. Tents are being erected left and right, and the sound crew arrives
to start preparing for the parade of bands that will grace these stages
starting with the pre-party tonight.
The Burton
crew is busy preparing their ‘lodge,’ which looks like a teepee with two long
awnings sprawling away from its central structure. Camera crews move among the
workers, documenting each interaction Jack and Danny have: someone needs a
screw gun over at the skate ramp. Did the Beats Antique merchandise arrive?
Where is the yellow tape measure? That toilet in the men’s bathroom is clogged
again. It’s less than glamorous, to say the least.
And yet,
Jack and Danny thrive on it. This is their karma,
it seems, the work that they offer up to the world to create this amazing
three-day festival. Gray clouds, swollen with rain, threaten to open themselves
and dowse us all, as they have every day, but never mind. There are things to
do. “Everything’s better with mud,” someone quips cheerfully. Jack tugs at the
hair protruding from beneath his hat and reminds himself to breathe. It’s
stressful, running all this, and he and Danny have watched this thing double
each year. Anticipating over 2,000 festival-goers this time around, they
bolster themselves for numbers but not chaos.
The
Frendly Gathering is just that: it’s Frendly. More and more people are coming
to understand exactly what that means. The adjective “Frendly” denotes anything
that cultivates a positive, peaceful, nonjudgmental exchange among people. That
exchange involves mutual respect and revelry in equal parts, and in my
experience over these past three years, it just might be a magic combination.
“The boys” work tirelessly, as do their female counterparts in charge of every
administrative detail, and each night they play. Hard.
And in the
morning, as the sun begins to warm the hill that is the backdrop for the
Frendly Gathering, they face that hill and do a little yoga. Their commitment
to mindfulness and entering each day with positivity and intention is evident
in the discipline they have to show up here on their mats first thing every
morning. They choose yoga over an extra hour of much needed sleep, and I watch
the tension and the sleep, still tangled in their hair, unravel and spill away
from them with each asana, each “long, slow exhalation.” Their bodies uncoil
from their couple of hours of restless sleep and open into the Frendly vibe
that gave rise to this whole thing in the first place. As they move, stretch,
balance, they remember. It is good.
“The day
has been officially launched,” is the closing comment that someone always
makes, Jack or Danny or Luke, and it’s true. From there we flow out onto the
landscape of Timber Ridge and engage in the karma that will yield an entire
festival of this Frendly feeling.
Everyone
will feel it, for sure, because it comes from such a real place. These guys are
the real deal, and the people they have garnered to them to help launch this
thing, they’re the real deal, too. I am honored to be even a small part of this
thing and to watch as it grows…to birth not just a three-day party, which it
certainly is, but also a movement. The Frendly Movement.
Smile. Breathe. Connect. Hug someone. As one walks through the archway from the Main Stage area
up toward the Woods Stage and the mini-ramp, they are reminded to do all of
these things. Each Frendly action is prompted by a hand-painted sign that
punctuates the colorful field of feathers and mobiles hanging from above. This
ornate archway framed by branches ushers one into the next enchanted realm of
the Frendly space….in the direction of the VewDew Board demos, Wellfleet
oysters, the Frendly skate ramp and yes, the DJ Nest. Ah. It’s time.
The Frendly
Gathering is about to be launched. I’ll see you at
Timber Ridge, Frends!
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