Turning the Tide 2024 Recap

Turning the Tide is a small, pagan festival that occurs each year in Miami, FL. It’s put on by the great folks at Everglades Moon Local Council and has been happening since 1997! Selene and I have been attending for the past few years. This year was Tides #17 and the theme was “Crafting the Magick.”

It’s kind of strange to think about camping in the middle of Miami, right? But Camp Greynolds, the festival’s location, is kind of like an isolated sanctuary of land right next to the Oleta River. Sure, it’s flanked on two sides by highways and sometimes you’ll hear the sound of a loud motorcycle or car stereo zooming by, but most of the time you actually forget that you’re not totally in the middle of the woods.

Workshops

There are always numerous workshops put on by Tides attendees. This year included…

• Plarning
• Harnessing the Eclipse Moon
• The Magick of Cold Process Soap Making
• Past/Future Transits
• Make Your Own Besom Workshop
• Getting Crafty with Fluid Condensers
• Connecting with Brigid using the Ogham
• The Magick, History, and Practice of Sourdough
• Wood Burning Basics

The Experience

Friday Night

Selene and I arrived on Friday sometime around 6:30. It’s pretty rare that we ever arrive anywhere early enough to set up camp while there’s still daylight… and this was no exception. No worries, we’ve gotten pretty good at doing it in the dark.

We had things mostly complete when it was time to start Opening Ritual, so we headed over to the fire circle to participate. A number of spirits were called — the genius loci, elementals, and deities by many names — and an intention was set to create sacred space in the land for the duration of the festival.

After opening ritual, we went to the Hekate Devotional. This is a beautiful ritual that’s held every year… it just wouldn’t be Tides without it! Prayers, offerings, and even a little flute music were given to honor Hekate. We received little crystal skull tokens for our attendance.

Friday night is also movie night. A big outdoor projection screen is set up and people sit around to watch. I actually can’t remember what movie was being shown… we usually just hang out and finish setting up our camp.

I did take a moment to snap a few late-night pics of the empty Great Hall.

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The Great Hall looked incredible. It was decorated by The Grove and there were crochet creatures all over the place — Opal Luna makes these and you can find more about them through Fiber Magick.

It’s a little hard to see, but there are baskets on each table filled with goodies. We were told they were gifts from Minerva and that we should enjoy them! There were lots of crafty items, like woven or knotted cords, and I believe I also saw some paint, tiny canvases, coloring book pages, and colored pencils.

Hmm… there was a nice little picture of Selene and I sitting outside the Great Hall. I thought it was floating around Facebook, but I can’t seem to find it. Perhaps instead, you can just imagine us candidly chatting with our friends. After hanging out for a while, we decided to go to bed. The next day was going to be a long one!

Saturday

Breakfast at Tides is like a big buffet of simple foods and everyone in attendance is highly encouraged to bring something to share. Selene and I brought a bunch of bananas (technically, a bunch of bunches), but there were also muffins, bagels, hardboiled eggs, coffee, cereal, oatmeal, pastries, toast… you get the idea. We’re grateful for the kitchen witches (volunteers) who wake up extra early and make sure all of this is sorted and available for the rest of us. For me, it was just a cup of coffee and a muffin, then it was off to the first workshop of the day.

I’ve had a very passing fascination with soap making for a while, so “The Magick of Cold Process Soap Making” workshop by Rayna Templebee proved extra interesting. I actually thought I knew a little about the process beforehand. Turns out, I knew absolutely nothing. Cold process is like… the legitimate method of making soap from scratch with lye and fat. The other methods, like where you buy ingredients from a craft store, typically just have you melting soap that was pre-made and shaping it with cute little molds. In my head, I had it backwards, for some reason thinking craft store soap was the authentic process by which our ancestors had made soap — clearly not one of my more well thought out lines of thinking.

Together, we made a soap with river water, lye, goats milk, clay, orange oil, shea butter, and I think a touch of almond oil. I added a few cranberry seeds to mine for decoration.

For the next block of workshops, it was my turn to present, so I gave a talk called “Getting Crafty with Fluid Condensers” which attempted to explain fluid condensers within the context of Tides’ “crafty” theme. We had a great discussion and prepared an easy condenser recipe as a group. I got distracted by talking and seriously burned the herbs, which filled the Great Hall with a very strange aroma, but I’m sure this is a blunder that all alchemists have made at least once. As a side note for future me, it’s really hard to monitor something cooking and teach at the same time.

For my workshop tokens, I filled tiny little bottles of the “Super Charged Musical Holy Water” (it’s a working title) that I made on stage at my FPG concert. I don’t know how many people were there, but I made 20 bottles and only had a few left at the end. Overall, I’m think I’m pretty happy with how the workshop presentation went. Some of the things we discussed will be expanded upon at the end of my fluid condenser series here, but I’ll be giving a similar presentation in a few months at Summer Magick 2024!

There was a short break for lunch… so we left the grounds and hit up a tasty Peruvian restaurant nearby.

I skipped the final block of workshops because I needed a bit of time to run through my set list. I just sat in our tent and quietly practiced for about an hour.

At 3:30PM it was time for a “coming of age” ritual. I’ve never attended one of these before and had no idea what to expect, but was very pleasantly surprised by how awesome it was. Janus was called and a jestful “blood sacrifice” was made to him with an ear piercing. Seriously. It was awesome.

And then all of a sudden, it was time to get ready for my concert! Selene helped me lug a PA, cables, speaker stands, and all the rest of my equipment up to the Great Hall and I started setting up.

A couple obligatory pics of me rocking out…

When I started played IO Pan, much to my surprise, it seemed like everyone was clapping or stomping along to the beat. As a performer, that’s truly an inspiring moment and really pushes you to give every last bit of energy you have. Amongst some of my other original music, I also played a few well-known pagan songs, like We All Come from the Goddess, Air I Am, Witch’s Reel, and The River is Flowing. I’ve linked the songs that I can, but I haven’t recorded them all yet… which means I’d better get back to the studio!

It was really an honor to play in such a beautifully decorated room with a crowd of people who were willing to participate when I asked them to sing along or just otherwise get weird with me. But all of those songs worked up quite an appetite! So it’s a good thing that the next thing on the schedule is dinner.

Tides dinner is a magickal experience. You almost wonder how it happens, but then you realize it’s just from a tireless effort on the part of the kitchen witches. It isn’t just a potluck, there’s also a mulligan stew.

Alright, let me explain the mulligan stew because I had never heard of something like that prior to attending Tides. Basically everyone is asked to bring an ingredient — got some peppers sitting in your kitchen? Maybe an onion? Cool, bring them. Got a pack of chicken in your fridge? Cool, bring it. Honestly, if I was just imagining the end result of 50 people randomly bringing a hodgepodge of stew ingredients, I would think the end result would be disastrous. And I guess that’s where the kitchen magick comes in… because everything at Tides is delicious.

And it’s good that it’s delicious! Because we all needed to fill up before Main Ritual, which was a lovely affair that centered around the idea of weaving. There was a corresponding chant and a giant spool of thread to raise energy.

After ritual was drumming and dancing around the fire. That always ends a little too early, I suppose due to a noise ordinance or something, but I kind of wish we could have gone all night. I didn’t have a drum, but luckily a friend brought extras! Even though the drumming had to eventually stop, we still stayed and talked for hours.

Sunday Morning

The goal is to be packed up, cleaned up, and off site by about noon. We checked the weather the night before and it revealed a giant rainstorm coming between 10 and 1. Packing up camp in the rain isn’t fun, so we made sure to wake up a little early and were finished by about 10am. We also behooved the weather spirits to please let us wrap up the festival first! And they did. Immediately after closing ritual, the skies opened up and it started pouring. Luckily, all we had to do at that point was walk to the car and drive away!

Bonus Pics – Buddhist Temple

On the way home, Selene found an awesome Buddhist Temple. The people there were so very nice… they invited us back to celebrate the new year and even offered us food.

They were decorating for the new year, so there are prayer flags, flowers, and other decorations everywhere. We had a lovely walk around the grounds and left a small offering to Kwan Yin.

Please enjoy some of the pictures. Click on any of them to make them bigger!

Conclusions

The only conclusion here is this: I can’t wait for Tides 18!

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