[FESTIVAL/PHOTO RECAP] How Lucidity: Crossroads Raised The Collective Vibe Of The Tribe

[FESTIVAL/PHOTO RECAP] How Lucidity: Crossroads Raised The Collective Vibe Of The Tribe

[FESTIVAL/PHOTO RECAP] How Lucidity: Crossroads Raised The Collective Vibe Of The Tribe

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What is it about a music festival that makes you buy a ticket?

We wait eagerly all year, optimistically praising every social tweet, share, and hashtag from our favorite festivals while carefully planning out our social and work lives figuring out how we can make it to every one of them. Facebook groups are created, Twitter hashtags engaged, and plans written on digital walls emerge all over the social landscape. BFF’s recounting nostalgic stories with strangers, the recently announced headliner, meeting your new significant other while dancing in the rain, a tear-jerking acoustic set by your favorite band. Community. Artists. Community. Artists. Community.

Which one leaves a lasting impression on you? Was it the song being played or the people you were with?

LucidityCrossroads_2016_TheSightsAndSounds_KrisKish-18Full photo album below.

Music festivals have undergone a paradigm shift in the way they have to interact with their audience. These events are no longer just once a year news opportunities that are only gossiped about during their extended weekend stays. There’s no way an event could support itself on that antiquated model. Instead, the festival timeline now runs 365 days a year, continuously working to build an engaged and loyal audience through every digital and analog means available. Marketers call this keeping your brand “top-of-mind awareness”. But (waaaaay) more importantly, festival organizers have finally come to understand the true power behind a community – especially a community that is built around a set of moral and/or sustainable principles.

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LucidityCrossroads_2016_TheSightsAndSounds_KrisKish-30Full photo album below.

Intro and photos by: Kris Kish
The following contributed by: Kaylie ‘Violet’ Starkey of Violet Visions

Since its birth five years ago, Lucidity Festival has recognized and embraced the power of community, creating a remarkable container for its attendees to explore the meaning of self amongst a wider human (and non-human) family on this planet. Lucidity Festival follows a six year story of awakening, each year’s theme taking shape around a chapter of the story designed to symbolize the mythic journey we are on. This container encourages oneness with all beings, while nurturing the discovery of the unique soul purpose each individual was sent to Earth to live.

This year’s festival explored our place at “the Crossroads,” the place we currently stand as a planet and species, in between two worlds, on the cusp of change. Lucidity presented us with an invitation — an invitation to gaze upon where we are in all our beauty and bliss, chaos and destruction, and either accept our present fate, or generate the ideas, systems, and momentum to catalyze the shift we need to see in order to thrive on our rapidly declining planet.

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LucidityCrossroads_2016_TheSightsAndSounds_KrisKish-45Full photo album below.

The community that showed up at Crossroads from around the world showed up in their fullest: eager to learn, eager to teach, eager to play, express, love, grow, and paint a dream into lucid reality. The birth of Lucid University, a 3-day intensive workshop the weekdays before the festival, opened the floodgates for diverse, ancient, and modern wisdom to flow through, laying a foundation of strong and sacred intention for those joining over the weekend to walk upon. With a safe container of 20-30 engaged individuals per workshop, the Lucid University students opened up their minds and hearts to intimate learning and healing experiences. Individuals less likely to connect on the dance floor found themselves engaged with full presence and compassion in support of the shedding of each other’s inhibitions and the birth of each other’s dreams.

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LucidityCrossroads_2016_TheSightsAndSounds_KrisKish-19Full photo album below.

This entanglement of diverse yet deeply unified beings reveals the compelling distinction between the audience at transformational gatherings and other local music festivals. In a space like Lucidity, circles have the tendency to form more around soul expression than physical expression.

This essence is palpable the moment one steps foot on the grounds of their first transformational festival, as these smaller, more conscious, diverse, and rounded gatherings generate a sense of harmony foreign to most other music festivals or events. At Lucidity, intention serves as the glue holding all the diverse elements of the gathering together. Under the collective intention of Unity, dancers, yogis, musicians, poets, entrepreneurs, builders, chefs, travelers — all beings alike — may find resonance. Amidst friends and strangers, small talk is often transcended, penetrated by a collective foundational understanding established amongst those who enter the realm. Individuals activate a sense of heightened awareness, and information finds ways to transfer through additional mediums other than words. The mind seemingly has no choice but to open and expand as a plethora of new ideas from all cultures and backgrounds pour in. Students become teachers and teachers students, as they engage in a cycle of ingesting, adopting and transferring ideas.

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LucidityCrossroads_2016_TheSightsAndSounds_KrisKish-28Full photo album below.

Though the festival flows around a schedule of selected artists and speakers, each being in attendance carries the respons-Ability to co-create the experience by bringing their unique gifts, expression, and teachings of their own. The festival both invites and encourages this, and the Lucid dreamers responded to that call. Upward came an emergence of the self reborn, blossoming into unique individual essence amongst a network of passionately supportive and connected beings. The Lucidity festival staff wove right into the collective, and artists danced on level ground with fans. The structure dissolved and abundance emerged, as each individual sought out alignment with their utmost contribution to the collective. Work became play as we all rose in our intention. The question was no longer “What can I do for me?” but “What can I do for us?” Boundaries evaporated as the frame of mind shifted from the unit to the whole.

In this emergence, a Lucid family was born. As we closed in ceremony on Sunday, we realized suddenly that we were standing on the other side of the Crossroads. There we were in the New World, with our arms around each others’ backs, swaying in perfect harmony.

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Kris Hi there! Founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Sights and Sounds. Been doing this music writing thing for most my life in one way or another and loving every opportunity it's brought along. Shoot me an email if you have any suggestions for the website, comments, or if you just want to chat. Cheers!