We composted the music festival
Inside every ending is a new beginning.
We embrace death as the site of new growth.
We are a small collective of people based largely in the Pacific Northwest and beyond. For over 15 years, we’ve created dozens of ephemeral villages that imagined a human thriving compatible with all life. Now we are ready to leverage this experience to support the emergence of a more lasting village.
As stewards of 700 acres of land in Southwest Washington, our focus now is on cultivating a relationship with land and community that is deeper and more long term than a joyous festival once a year could ever have been. We are working with the lessons of the past, the realities of the present, and with the more than human world, collaboratively dreaming of a beautiful future, in order to inform the choices in front of us now.
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Beloved Festival, an annual 4-day music festival, built community and culture in the boreal rainforests of Coastal Oregon from 2008-2019.
In a space that mixed tenderness, reverence, playfulness, and thoughtfulness, the festival presented artists and teachers from around the world whose work could speak across boundaries, who could bridge broad divides yet keep an incisive edge. Participants co-created a somatic ritual to cultivate vulnerability, belonging, and liberation.
Yet explorationation of spiritual heights became insufficient on its own. For Beloved and the community it fostered have been grappling for years with the realization they need to address the soul, the deeper core of each person, that must be in contact with the depths of the struggles of humanity and the aspect of our being that is always enmeshed with nature.
Early iterations of the festival served to elevate and expand, as well as to heal and foster spiritual connection. Yet explorationation of spiritual heights was insufficient on its own. As the festival has matured, it chose to go deeper, to be willing to have difficult conversations and to be engaged in the world.
A reckoning with the violence and ongoing pain of colonization on the people and land of this continent, and the recognition of the responsibility of those who benefit from unearned privilege, resulted in the biggest decision for the festival.
photo by Jess Stewart Maize
Though we honor the insight, connection, and inspiration from our gatherings that continue to nourish so many even now, we let the last Beloved Festival be the last Beloved Festival for the following reasons:
1.
We can’t treat land we love that way anymore. That many cars and people are not good for the delicate forest.
2.
The move beyond “land acknowledgement,” and into deeper relationships with indigenous leadership and native communities means slowing way down from hosting large gatherings.
3.
Festival culture is not meeting the needs of the world in which we find ourselves today.
With gratitude beyond words for all that Beloved has been, for all the learning, loving, dancing, and grieving we did together, and for all of you who made it all possible — thank you.
May our memories of Beloved Festival be a blessing.
May we move now from a place of deep care for how precious and fragile the web of life is from human impact.
May we soften into the soil of our ongoing return.
Beloved is Dead!
Long Live the Beloved Dead!
Beloved Emergence is a community-activated ecological restoration land project where the soil itself is generated from human bodies.
Yes, you read that correctly.
This is the story of how a festival will regenerate a forest, a story of how humans working gently, slowly, and humbly, can bring life and love back to degraded land.
With nearly a dozen state, local, and federal partners, we have already begun several restoration projects on 700 acres in Washington on the lands of the Cowlitz using composted humans as soil amendments.
