It’s Time for my Winter Coat . . .

. . . at the Beltania festival, where the temperature is about 45° F with rain now and again.

I spent the morning at one of the volunteer fire department’s monthly training day, helping more people become familiar with the whole process of drafting water from a  creek (hydrants? we don’t need no stinking hydrants) and pumping it into our two 2,500-gallon summer storage tanks (in case the creek goes dry).

Then off to the festival, not too far away, successfully negotiating the Pagan equivalent of the TSA. Merchants Row seemed sort of forlorn — no one was buying all the colorful gauzy garments, for some odd reason. Even those who sometimes swelter under the Colorado sun while dressed for the Scottish Highlands  were wearing extra coats today.

But once the dogs are fed we will go back for the concerts — if the rain holds off.

Pagan festivals are becoming more “tribal” in one sense: you can have people doing some kind of ritual thingie while right next to it, folks are feeding their faces, drinking wine from the bottle, braiding feathers into the air, slouching around like bored teenagers if in fact they are teenagers, and just starting into the warming fires. It’s not like you have to be all churchy and attentive.

POST-CONCERT UPDATE: M. and I had to miss some of the Saturday night music, but we did hear at times the Orpheus: the Pagan Chamber Choir of Colorado, a little of S.J Tucker, Forest of Azure, and Sharon Knight and Pandemonaeon. All good. And Pandemonaeon cleared the skies before midnight—can’t beat that.