Re-enchantment
Given the long running telenovela we all seem to have been starring in recently it’s hardly surprising we’ve been experiencing a tiny bit of disenchantment. So it is time for those of us who still get to walk the earth beneath our feet (for now) to look again at how sunlight plays on water, how the trees dispense their oxygen in the forest, how we are capable of giving and being stopped in our tracks by kindness, by beauty, by love. It is all enchantingly there We just need to let it all enchant us. To help ALSO23’s theme is of one of re-enchantment and invites you to step into our place of awe and action to let the wilds of ALSO immerse you in ideas, and nature and beauty…
We have reached our decade, and how has everything changed in that chunk of time? I turned of course to books, but first to those written in 1970s about the future. I wanted to know what we could we learn about looking back at the past and their relationship with the future. What worried us then? We worried about our future, our toxic relationship with technology, our diminishing creativity and our wilful destruction of life. I go back another hundred years, then two hundred years, the language changes the worries don’t. We have been on this path for hundreds years and yet we retain that divine spark and have never had so many ways to use our power, soft, hard or yet to be defined. For many of us we have never had so much life, so much health, so much happiness within reach, we have overwhelmed ourselves with choice and with technology and we need some re-enchantment. We’re here to help….
Does it help to know ALSO’s was moulded from the earth to enchant, designed by Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown to resemble heaven, or at least how he imagined it. But how could one person know what heaven was like, I hear you ask? He turned to the epic poetry of classic writers like Homer or Virgil who’s poetry described how they thought the perfect landscape should look. But how did they know? We hear they had heard homesick travellers from our island describe that perfect day they had once in early summer in a county near you. Do you feel awe when you look at the majesty of the lake. Careful you are being manipulated. You see we are already in a place of enchantment comprised of earth and trees and projection of ideas, or memory, of misremembered ideas of ideas that have travelled the globe and changed and altered and been made to deliver what people needed of them for the challenges they were facing. ALSO sits in a place of extreme beauty, of creativity, of design that makes you feel emotion, yet history happens and ideas and needs changed and the ALSO land has been farmed for 60 years and this is where the magic happens, where we are forced to let the chaos in, you will see wildness has begun to reclaim it, wild life has made its home here and that includes us, re-enchanting and reclaiming the space for what we need it to be for us now - so relax in the knowledge that we are truly the place to come to for re-enchantment, and allow it all to help you explore ideas in the wild.
Enjoy our 14 stages some more wild than others and our 300 events, and allow our natural back drop of a tree framed half mile wide lake, our site that is designed to help you feel awe, and enchantment and relaxation we offer the chance for a truly transcendent weekend, with bands on the main stage and audio adventures throughout the site, with choirs a-singing, and clever comedy, transcendent DJ sets deep in the woods, and rum based dance venue at the banks of the lake, with lights on water, and disco balls in trees and fire in the sky, and safe wild swimming in a half wide lake. By reclaiming the deep past to be the past we need it to be. With camping and glamping on site and with so many options for you to curate your day for whoever is in your gang – they will find there way to the things that enchant them.
