organic ecstasy

one week at Waking Life festival

Sober on the dance floor, I’m the only thing in stillness. My body upright, resisting—not stiff, but stood at attention, with conviction. Resigned to observe what happens when I don’t give in to the automatic urge to move with the music, how it feels to reject the demand of when a beat lands and tries to seize me.

I know that the current wants to have its way with me, as it has with everyone else. I know it wants me to join them. The bassline pleads for my surrender. Get over it, in a drumkick: my fundamental separateness. Cease to be the observer and integrate into something greater.

But what if this is my way there?

I disappeared for a week into the Portuguese desert to go to a music festival that is so much more than that.

Waking Life is a world beyond the world, somehow more real than the one going on outside it. It is a micro-society, really: a civilization-simulation cultivated on a plot of land near Crato, Portugal. An eco-restoration project and a party all at once: equipping its attendees with a litter prevention kit and a booklet that states the rules of the fest, protecting the rites of the grounds it is held at.

Of course, music is at the forefront of the event. What brings people to the middle of the desert with their tents and campervans is a shared love for dubs, deep house, and the nicher adjectives for sound that music-heads nerd out about.

The ethos is interconnected with these origins: born from the desire to unearth the underground. Weirdness is a prerequisite to normalcy, and attendees are encouraged to engage in an embrace of the strange, birthing an experience that feels equal parts like a temporary utopia and a group psychosis.

For a week, we lived like humans do: pooping into compost toilets, chatting by the communal showers naked, swimming in the lake. All on a landscape that was designed with us in mind: our leisure, wellbeing, amazement. Plenty of places to lay: level with the earth and misted cool at the stages, shaded away from the sun.

We were given a vision of not just how things could be, but how they really are, before our eyes: imagination enlivened. Life-affirming interactions erupted on the dancefloor, waiting in line for water, or at a workshop where you massaged a stranger with the utmost consideration before even knowing their name.

The air was thick with serendipity: encounters abound across stages, sound, self and other. Social contract dissolved like sugar on the tongue: trading a pinch of tobacco for a strip of sour candy.

For a short time, we were granted a reprieve from daily society. Our cell service blissfully relinquished, we were relieved to be out of reach. Yet still, however, responsible for something. Not ignorant to the issues of the world but more intimately confronted with them. Connected vividly with the demands and dynamics of our contained civilization, and ushered back to basics: being fed and showered and hydrated, helping our neighbors.

There was an undeniable need to pace oneself amid the crowds and climate, comedowns and containment within a 40-hectare space. We owed it to each other to facilitate it.

During the day, everyone would day-trip and laze by the lake: levitating in the UFO by the Floresta stage or taking group naps at Mimo.

At night, we would come alive into the LED-lit wild. Watch movies on the Moonscreen when our limbs went jelly. Wander through the wooded maze between stages, fatefully guided from art installations to abandoned hammocks then back to dance floor to start the time-loop all over again.

Fueled by a natural euphoria, I was delirious in a delicious way, fighting off sleep deprivation with a stubborn aliveness— ultimately, a desire to be present for all of it.

Of course, most people were on drugs. I would be lying if I said I didn’t dabble, too. But my consciousness was altered most ardently by the small witnessings: like that patchwork curtain in the wind. The one that was strung up between the trees, barely moving, as if breathing. A mesmerizing textile, organically trippy.

I felt gently overwhelmed by it, taking deep breaths under the crescent moon, thinking about magic, as is. Unaugmented, and a given.

Already, senstivite to so much intensity in my body: the gracious weight of bass in my chest while watching Upsammy x Gyrofield shred it at 5am, the hazy trance of CocoMaria playing Brazilian classics like Balanca Pema between the trees, the heartwarming weight of collective responsibility.

I felt so high from it: the kind of mutual trust we often don’t extend so far outside of our immediate circle, towards strangers who we live to witness sharing the same states: ecstasy, distress, exhaustion, exaltation. I felt grimy in a gorgeous way. Shiny from sweat. Tunes looping, bodies moving— tired and inspired. Overcome by nothing beyond what was immediate: awake and alive.

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* It feels imperative to mention that on the closing day of the festival, a young woman died on site. I had already hitch-hiked back to Lisbon when it happened, and did not witness anything first-hand, but also recognize that I cannot write about this experience—its intensity, its demands, its collective responsibility— without mentioning it. May she rest in peace.