Wild Zen Fest Recap

There is a particular kind of ritual I’ve come to treasure: the ritual of returning.

Every summer, I load the van with finished pieces, trays and 150 activated dyes and drive back to Smiling Acres in Trufant for Wild Zen Yoga Fest. And every summer, the moment I pull in, it starts: the hugs, the “you’re back!”, the faces I photographed spinning in scarves the year before running up to show me how their colors have lived a whole year of life with them.

Some rituals mark a single sacred moment, like a wedding or a baptism. Others are sacred because they repeat. Returning to this land, these people and this golden weekend is mine.

What Wild Zen is

Wild Zen Yoga Fest is a three-day celebration of yoga, music, movement and connection under the open Michigan sky. It was founded by Carrie Labarge (RYT 500, E-RYT), who holds that yoga is more than a practice. It is a way of living with presence, balance and authenticity.

The schedule is a transcendence buffet. Cacao meditation at sunrise. Qigong in the grass. Somatic play. Yoga nidra and breathwork. Harmonic flow that melts into ecstatic dance, and drumming around the fire. A Sunday sound bath and a closing circle. Long golden evenings, lush green everything and the kind of community where strangers become witnesses to each other’s becoming.

For dates, tickets and the current schedule, visit wildzenyoga.com.

What I bring

My booth is two invitations in one.

Take home a finished piece. I bring hand-dyed scarves, wraps and apparel, each one dyed in silence, in music, in grief or in prayer. They are fabrics that hold a hundred moods, waiting for the person whose body lights up when they wrap themselves in one. Come find your color story. Ask me about your season. Spin in something.

Or make your own. This is the part I love most. I dash dye live all weekend, and you can dye something you brought from home: a shirt that needs a second life, a pillowcase, a bandana, anything natural-fiber and ready for transformation. Blanks are available at the booth if you come empty-handed.

I always tell people: you can watch me dye all day, and I’d love the company. But watching isn’t the transformation. The moment your hands scatter the dye and the water starts pulling color through the fibers, with wind, gravity and time collaborating on something completely and unrepeatably yours, that is when it happens. You don’t come home from Wild Zen with a souvenir. You come home wearing evidence of who you were that weekend.

The ceremony of being seen

What keeps me coming back isn’t the vending. It’s the witnessing.

At Wild Zen, transformation isn’t private. It is held. You breathe next to strangers at dawn and dance beside them at dusk, and somewhere in between, everyone stops pretending. When someone dyes a piece at my table surrounded by friends cheering their color choices, it becomes a small ceremony. The circle makes it real, the way vows are made real by the people who hear them.

I’ve spent years catching those unguarded flickers with my camera: the spin, the wobble, the giggle, the body remembering how to feel. People step just outside the crowd, the wind catches their clothes and the weight of performance drops away. It is some of my favorite work.

Bring your people

Bring the friend who’s been called “too much” her whole life. Bring the one who swears he isn’t creative. Bring something soft and white and full of potential. Come as you are, and leave more grounded, radiant and whole, wearing the proof.

I’ll be there, camera nearby, dyes ready, asking my favorite question: will you dance with me?