Agnihotra at Freeform Arts Festival

We received the following story from Josh Maltby:

Freeform Arts Festival was founded in order to tie together the vast East Coast creative arts community and increase diversity in our local artistic landscape.

Freeform Arts is intended to serve as a connection point and a meeting place for the numerous cells and pockets of East Coast creative arts communities to unite and interact with each other. The goal is to create a more tightly knit, well-connected culture across the region.

The festival was held in Schuylkill Haven, Pennsylvania, from June 12-16th. Dozens of workshops were held on numerous topics, from the practical, the creative, the spiritual to the bizarre. Agnihotra seemed a good fit.

However, the official workshop scheduled for Thursday night got rained out, and so did the reschedule the following evening.

I had found a nice, secluded nature spot for doing Agnihotra with a few interested friends, at the far end of the festival grounds. But time has a way of slipping away from you at these events and normally, while walking to this nice spot to perform it, I’d realize we only had a few minutes until Agnihotra and thus were forced to plop down and perform it wherever we were.

The picture shows one such example. A few friends and I were rushing to that beautiful spot for Saturday sunrise Agnihotra. As we were power-walking there I looked at the time and knew we would never make it. Our rushing and earnestness attracted the attention of the curious ‘hanger outers,’ medics and rangers on duty who offered us all rides on their golf carts, but even with rides there was just too little time to spare. We plopped down and did the fire in front of the festival head-quarters, with a nice crowd of about fifteen or twenty people.

Very little explanation was required, and they all just seemed to get it. I heard a few comments afterwards like, “I’ve been looking for this,” and “That was just what I needed.”

Over the five days, I had about three of these on-the-spot public demos which all seemed very much appreciated by the various people who noticed and joined in.