We spent six days at Wild Goose Festival, which we heard about when we were in South America and decided to volunteer at. Wild Goose is a festival of music, spirituality, art and justice…described by some as like a Christian Woodstock and held at a beautiful forest site in North Carolina. Their own website describes it better than I can… Wild Goose Festival .

We decided to volunteer and this wound up being such an awesome way to meet other people and really capture the feeling of the festival before it started. We spent most of our time in set up and pack down, preparing the site and tents and then cleaning up once the 2000 people had left.  This was great as it meant throughout the festival we had time to go and hear speakers and musicians…lots of links coming here as there are so many awesome, inspiring people that were part of this!

We learned about music we love…some of the highlights were Over the Rhine (go and listen on their website…the most beautiful music), Josh Garrels, Jennifer Knapp, David Crowder, Agents of Future, Derek Webb (who we have listened to for a long time) and Phil Madeira.

We sung hymns in the beer tent…mugs of beer and classic hymns made a mix that was beautiful, powerful and real.  Check it out here.

Karen got to experience movement and dance as prayer with Ginny Going and June Wink.

We loved hearing the “Down Under” quota – extremely talented Aussie slam poet Joel McKerrow and incredibly funny Kiwi speaker Pete Majendie.

We listened to amazing speakers…Shaine Claiborne shared about his journeys to Iraq, Dave Andrews spoke about his experiences of community, Justin Lee spoke about being a Christian and identifying as gay, Joy Carroll Wallis talked about being the real vicar of Dibley, Brian McLaren talked about interfaith dialogue, we heard Jim Wallis and Alexia Salvatierra, William Barber and Karla Yaconelli…our heads were spinning at the end of it trying to process everything we had heard.  We also spent time talking to different organisations and thinking about community, hunger, justice, poverty, food taxes and more.

We got to have fun and meet awesome people while volunteering. This was one of the highlights – just meeting other people and hearing their fascinating stories about what they are doing in the world.

What does it mean to be at Wild Goose? To be at Wild Goose is to be hot, sticky, humid, with sweat pouring off your face. To see dirt on your feet, your hands, your neck, your face – and to not care because you are so caught up in the magic and in the wonder and in the busy being and doing and creating and dancing and sensing the Wild Goose in flight. To be tired, and challenged, and to have your thoughts so provoked that at the end you aren’t sure which way you are going – but you know you will be dancing that way with hundreds of others.  It is to experience joy and freedom, port a loos and ticks, beer and hymns, the sacred and the everyday colliding in a beautiful, sensational parade.