Sweet Melinda! 40 years ago today Weedstock hit Yasgur’s farm with a blissed-out thwack–officially drawing the curtain on the muddy 60s. It was a decade that held a crazy mix of peace, protest, riots, revolution, free expression, assassination, free love, and segregation. And it was left to Woodstock to spin a hazy hope–part possibility and part fantasy–into the 70s.

I was in grade 10 when Woodstock boiled up. I had a huge desire to go without a chance of that happening. So the following year when the movie Woodstock came to Yorkton’s drive-in theatre, we Springside-five relived all four days in two hours–and then…relived it over the next 7 or 8 years.

My Woodstock was in the 70s–this is where I lived, loved and experimented–and somehow, toward the end, surfaced.

Back to the Garden still clings to me like a tight waistcoat. Like Joni Mitchell and the song itself, we wrote ourselves in after the event. After the rain stopped and the farm dried up and the smoke cleared and everybody went home, people knew something had happened. There was a big human slurry left in the bottom of the hash pipe. We sprouted from that. We grew out of the fertile mystique of Woodstock. Part sweetness and light, part shit and gonzo. We knew that all that beauty and righteousness was mixed up with so much that was screwed up, but we plunged into the hallucination hoping for form and revelation. And mostly, we did surface–somewhat illuminated.

It’s part of me now, ingrown. Peace, love and free expression are still and always dreams to seek and hold on to. Just like back then,when the Incredible String Band played When You Find Out Who You Are, and Joan Baez sang Dylan’s I Shall be Released, we saw the connection, jumped into the Rambler and headed to the coast to go looking.

40 years hence, I’m still looking, now more often with the help of people like St. Benedict and Rumi and Patrick Kavanagh and Anne Lamont and Kathleen Norris and Cohen and Merton.

Over these decades I’ve learned that I’m ignorant of most things. Learned that yes, the "inviolable self" is part illusion, as is the "free self." And learned that, in the end, any self worth having is about a symbiosis of self-care and care of other selves.

When Hanggai join their Mongolian Plains-grass pizzicato and throat singing with the Nashville Bluegrass of the SteelDrivers, the body is cranked up on crazy swaying musical stilts. When Canada’s Pavlo and Mali’s Issa Bagayogo team up the body finds its soul rhythm.

My own body moves in jangley marionette movements, too internal, and too self-conscious to be all that healthy. But there are those, the solitary dancers on the sides of the stages, whose inhibited moves I admire, appreciate, perhaps envy, unduly. They seem to have fallen freshly in love with their own bodies, and not necessarily because they have beautiful bodies–whatever that measurement might be by our goofy cultural standards–but because their bodies are set free by rhythm. Backs arch, heads drop to the side, arms rise up and wrists follow and hands articulate. They flow. Everything flows. I watch–and in a sweet moment I’m flowing to–until my mind takes over and trips me up. Then I go back to watching again.

No matter. The music swings and sweeps and bakes and rolls us all in a conspiracy of euphonic social harmony. Music is a train, a truck, a car, a Vespa–it transports us in different ways and at various speeds and with versatile levels of comfort. And what Edmonton’s Folk-fest does best is transport us forward together toward a single universal point. (Sure, I’m a romantic) Divisions drop away and improbable things come to be. Like the violin player from Jill Barber’s band who could whistle two notes at a time–in perfect harmony.

The Folk-fest has wound down and like every year I’m left with a handful of sweet moments–musical jujubes. Like chillin’ on the hill with my son and 20,000 friends.