Reflections on North Star Camp Out

North Star campout happened a month ago in Skamokawa Valley, on a little farm named Elkenmist.

It’s been hard to talk about it because it feels so different from most experiences I have had.

Yes, it was a campout, there was sleeping in tents and campfire songs and peeing in the woods and all the things you’d expect. But I was there with 50 people, and everyone brought their own special brand of practicing astrology and magic.

There were folks from all over the country there, all coming together because we wanted to be around people who felt similar ways and wanted to celebrate that by being out in the woods together.

By looking at the stars together.

By being in ritual spaces together.

In a way I’m wondering if this is the thing I have always wished church could have been.

We talked about the gods and spirits. We made altars to Apollo, Dionysus, Nix, Venus.

We meditated together, we played music for each other.

I felt very much like I was a kid at camp. I made friends and did crafts and shared snacks and ate all my meals in an outdoor dining hall. Went on walks and named the plants. Climbed into the most gorgeous sprawling Maple I think I’ve ever seen in my life. Looked at bugs in the creek. Saw a few snakes.

I listened, entirely enthralled, to Aidan Watcher speak about his experiences of working with spirits throughout his life. I fell into a trance as Diana Rose Harper guided all of us through a meditation on Jupiter and Venus, pacing around to feed us saffron and blueberries as we laid on the ground and watched the Maple wave in the wind. I listened to Eric Purdue discuss his own approach to spirituality in astrological work, giving us so many practical lessons while he struggled to keep a cigar lit—apparently the cigar “gets him in the mood” to share. Very old school professorial vibes.

On the last morning there, ZamboniFunk shared a breathwork practice with us, and as it ended I felt the connection between all these teachings appear gently but solidly in my mind.

Later that same day Zamboni sat down with us to give a talk, but it ended up being a whole bunch of questions, and as a group we all answered the questions with more questions. Which was great, because the first thing he had to say to us was that we needed to be asking better questions.

As a side note, Zamboni is such a sweet human. I think I chatted with him the most of all the speakers. At the end of the weekend he thanked ME for bringing the vibes! Now that’s a compliment.

On the way back to Seattle I gave a ride to Zacchary Powell, who had volunteered for the weekend. Because he was one of the last to leave, I stuck around for the ending ritual, which was essentially everyone standing in a circle and saying how grateful they are. I placed a charm that I had been gifted that weekend onto the table along with everyone else’s little talismans, and as the incense burned and we all said our big Thank-You's, we imbued a whole bunch of gratitude into our various objects. I’ve been wearing that little butterfly charm every day since.

And it was such a treat to ride with Zacc! We got to share with each other how it had all gone for us, which was very cool because he had been too busy to attend a single talk, but had been at all the sunrise rituals that I hadn’t and got to know all the folks who live there on the farm. I feel like we got to have a one-on-one wrap-up session for the weekend. I had the audacity to hand him a copy of my chart, and he shared with me some lessons he had been learning about Vedic Astrology.

And then I was home again, which felt jarring. I am grateful that I had already planned to immediately go right back out to the peninsula to camp for three nights with Danny, because I needed so much more green time to let all of what I had experienced soak into me.

Still, weeks later, the group chat of North Star is full of chatter almost every day, sometimes a few times a day. We keep sharing art, thoughts, wishes, plans. We ask each other for guidance and interpretation. It fills me with joy. I hope I see them all again soon.

Something that a few of us have expressed is the opening that we have experienced in life since the campout. We seem to feel as though what we’ve been waiting for has finally come to pass. Some are talking about moving away from Florida and Texas. Now that they have experienced being around people who feel the same way as them, being alone in these places now feels less tolerable.

More meetups are happening, mostly in Portland so far, but it’s clear that there will be ripples of gatherings around the country because of what we made together in Skamokawa Valley.

If you want to hear updates about events that get into the planning phase, reach out to me and I can keep you updated. I would love to be a conduit to help continue the creation of this community.

Thanks for reading, friend!