When my Dungeons and Dragon-ing brother Kory texted me a few weeks back that he wanted to take his girls to the Colorado Renaissance Festival, and asked if Sunny and Stelly and I wanted to join, I was secretly excited. (Ok, maybe it wasn’t a secret – I’ve never been great at hiding my dorky hobbies and interests.) I had never been to one before, and though I generally was skeptical about a bunch of strange people fetishizing a time period 600 years ago, I was curious to experience it in person. Plus, I enjoy any excuse to join humans who stop their routines to do unnecessary things. Music festivals? Absolutely. Pretending to need to survive in the wilderness in only what we tote in with us [camping]? Yes, please. Gathering the whole town to celebrate one of any number of strange things that 600 festivals in Colorado celebrate each year? I’m there. Life is short – you gotta have fun, right? 

But I also felt a little squeamish about it. Like, are we trying to emulate serfdom, and nasty hundreds of years-long wars, medieval torture, lack of sanitation, bubonic plague, and extreme inequality? (Sorry if I’m mixing time periods, history nerds!) It also evokes lots of nausea around other historic re-enactors who fetishize wars, evil people who glorify periods of American history where white supremacy was blatant and upheld through law and culture, and nastiness like a current Department of Homeland Security Facebook post, which displays a photo of John Gast’s painting, American Progress, with the caption, “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending”. (If you don’t understand the concept of manifest destiny and it’s justification in genocide, go read some books. Oh yeah, and stop banning critical race theory.) In other words, there are tons of terrible people out there who celebrate time periods, ideals, and systems that blatantly elevate some human life above others… and to those who enjoy celebrating that, stay the fuck away from me, thank you very much. 

And before everyone gets upset, I understand that Renaissance Festivals are meant for entertainment and fun. And that we get to wear costumes and eat giant turkey legs and see people do fun things like pretend to knock each other off horses with big sticks. And maybe it’s long enough ago where joking around about bubonic plague killing 50 million people is funny? (“Bring out your dead!”… ok, Monty Python’s rendition of it was definitely funny.) The point is, fetishizing history is a risky business, because history is full of all sorts of nastiness. 

Now while I don’t propose a real solution to the nastiness of many parts of many humans’ histories around the globe, I have been thinking of some other, more positive parts of the experience. And to illustrate it, I’ll tell you that lately, on the advice of a dating book, I’ve been noting down “things that give me pangs”. You know, pangs in your heart… it may be moments when something brings you to emotions, makes your heart ache, stirs a deep wish, etc. (Read Deeper Dating by Ken Page for more). My list – the things that have given me pangs in the last few months – includes:

• Hauntingfly beautiful flow fiddle – celtic music
• Early mornings in a village-like setting, with smoke and fog and the smell of campfire
• Communicating with animals
• The idea of living in a greenhouse (or other dwelling well-integrated into the landscape)
• Tiny habitats – imagining little microverses under plants, little creatures living there, etc
• Timelapses of plants growing
• Freely sharing love – talking deeply about it, getting to the heart of emotions and connections. 
• Vulnerability 

And yes, I already said that I was a dork. 

And I’ve been thinking that one of the reasons that Renaissance Festivals may feel enjoyable and natural to some people is that it feels GOOD to exist together in a simpler state of being. Many of us like to gather, prepare and eat food, make music, play games, entertain each other, hang out with animals, and imagine times when we didn’t all go sit in front of sparky boxes all day hitting our fingers on pieces of plastic, and stare at smaller sparky boxes in our pockets for much of the rest of the time. 

And some cultures maintain closeness to these wonderful, human activities better than others. I’ve experienced the same kind of things-that-give-me-pangs at pow wows and various Native ceremonies in the US, family gatherings at overflowing-with-summer-fruits country houses in Armenia, camping trips with my sisters and friends, and in gatherings to visit temples with schoolmates and friends in India. But I think my heart tells me that deep down, I long to ride a little pony around in the Irish countryside and collect plants and hunt small game and drink homemade wines and ciders around a fire while singing and dancing and practicing magic. And why does that seem so out of reach? 

And then, there are the RenFest folks. I have to admit that it feels a bit sad to me that, rather than keeping activities that make us feel more human thriving in our daily lives, we resort to visiting a circus-like tourist attraction once a year, buy cheaply-made goods that likely were made in China, and buy shirts that say “wenches love me”. Like our humanity is only ok to celebrate when it is made into a bit of a joke. 

While chewing on all of this (and chewing through my 3lb turkey leg), I haven’t quite come up with any solutions, except to say that maybe the answer for me lays with less go-to-the-renaissance-faire, and more gathering with friends, building fires, practicing collecting plants and making good food and drinks, making merry or haunting music with others, and… oh yeah, getting a little pony to ride around the countryside.