Saturday the girlfriend and I spent the day at a grass roots festival near big collegetown. It was this retro thing with long haired people wearing tie-dye, face and body painting, and listening to artsie music. They had two main stages with different groups playing and then a couple of side bands set up in tents. There were also hula hoops to play with, dance troupes, and a "peace parade".

The also had a peace circle, with a little chalked out maze in it. Me and the girlfriend walked through the maze with one of us facing backwards with our eyes closed and the other guiding. When we got to the center she wrote some strange poem and put it in a book they had left there, and I ripped the corner off from a letter in my pocket that said something about fighting cancer and left it as an offering. Like I said, very retro. Lady Moonbeam and Mister Blue Sky.

Most of the music did not work for me, except for the stuff in the dance tent. They had cajun music, 50's swing, and bluegrass. I don't dance but it was fun to watch. As I was watching the dancers' heads bob up and down, I suddenly thought about how we all carry the fossil of the Cambrian Ocean with us. When the first amphibians came onto dry land they had to bring the sea with them. Although the Ocean has become much more salty in the last few billion years, our own cells have the lower salt content of the Cambrian Ocean from which we emerged. Then I thought about the heads bobbing to the music, trees swaying in the breeze, caribou running in giant herds in North America, birds flying in flocks, and I thought about how wave-like all of it was. Living things are about 80% or so water, and the the small hundred feet or less covering of the continents with plants and other life is just an extension of the ocean: the bobbing, swaying, and flapping mirroring the waves on the sea. It is not so much that life emerged from the sea and spread over the continents, as that sea emerged and covered the land, continuing it's wave like-motion over all.

It was a cosmic moment. Yes, that's right a cosmic moment, when I suddenly felt I had tapped into a different yet profound way of looking at the world. In my last years of high school and in college there were many cosmic moments, sitting around late at night discussing philosophy and politics with my friends. However, unlike a lot of my friends, I did not require the use of mind altering substances to achieve the Cosmic point.

Yes, even without marijuana or some other brain dulling substance I was capable of believing that the most ridiculous metaphors were intense and meaningful. Rather appropriate that I conjured up one at the grass roots festival. It felt - groovy.

Made up for the fact that I still can't get a hula hoop to work.

They ought to have a 60s theme park, much like the Renaissance festivals that are all over the place. Like the Renaissance, the 60s have become a very romanticized period. We could have wandering squares and hippies, Hell's Angel's on motorcycles, black panthers, war protestors, love beads, VW bugs, alternative music. All that bizarre crap.

Doubt I'll go again. Bit too expensive at $40.00 for the day.