Boom Festival 2022: A Synthesis and Brain Dump from 8 Days in the Portuguese Countryside
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We cannot be fully human alone.
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The best way I can describe the BOOM experience is, for a brief moment in time, being slung out of the orbit of normal everyday waking consciousness, and being thrust into the outer layer of existence, floating, contemplating and feeling the actuality of the NOW, in all Her beauty, fragility and complexity.
This act of leaving the rat race to pursue absurdity for a brief period of time is so rare. We must protect this sacred fireside act that has been with our species for millennia like we protect the forests or the wildlands or the crystal clear blue oceans.
Boom was like AfrikaBurn (Burning Man’s infamous African cousin) but better: there was water for starters, in the form of the majestic lake Idhana-a-Nova, and there was a plethora of psychedelic trance/techno (not that AfrikaBurn or Burning Man doesn’t have the latter qualities — they both do in abundance: but there is a special kind of feeling that sinks in when 40,000 people from across the world are united around one genre of music).
It is a Psychedelic Music Festival
Astrix and Captain Hook, two of my favourite producers/artists, played the best sets I’ve ever heard. Both these giants at the top of their craft and devotion to pure artistry put into words what I am struggling with at the moment:
Festivals like Burning Man and AfrikaBurn stress that they are in fact NOT music festivals. But Boom is different: Boom owns the fact that the beat is what got it started — but there is more to it.
Boom is like a trojan horse: using the sweet smell of the beautiful honey that is the best psychedelic trance and techno to attract the buzzing crowd from all over the globe, and at the same time, it fuses a beautiful message of oneness, peace, love and sustainability. There tons of workshops to heal the body, mind and spirit. There are compost toilets that were in excellent condition throughout the festival.
The only thing that unsurprisingly bothered me was their shift towards a more vegan-centric food system. There was not many options for a meat-eating enthusiast like myself to get a decent plate of daily protein. The Boom team needs to be kept up to date with the actual science and power of Regenerative Agriculture and its the power to heal the planet — Big Food vegan agenda is infiltrating every system on the planet. If anything, I would love to be involved in giving a talk at the next Boom addition on how Regenerative Agriculture and sustainable meat can not only save the planet, but heal the mind, body and spirit.
As I write this, I’m left feeling a little empty. I do wish I had explored more and taken in the various artist installations, workshops and surrounding nature more. However, it was hard. And I can only be kind to myself for not getting to experience everything there was — I was like a kid in a candy store looking at the line-up of producers each day; producers I’ve been waiting for years to see. Maybe in the next addition, I will take time to soak up the entire experience a little more instead of stomping on the Dance Temple day after day.
‘Hold Onto The Gold’
One of the best pieces of advice I got was to ‘hold onto the gold.’ When you experience something profound in life, try your hardest not to interpret it or understand it immediately — instead, try to live the question itself. While this is not a full account of my amazing experience at Boom, it is an attempt at synthesising some of the insights I gained while turning on, tuning in and dropping out of the normal everyday struggle of existence.
At Boom, one is taken out of the perpetual proving, probing and striving, and gently (and sometimes not so gently) walked into the land of oneness and non-ego. In crude terms, you either get bitch-slapped out of the consciousness where you feel compelled to create yourself or you get carried on a floating carpet into the Eternal Sunshine with layers of bliss penetrating your sensory organs.
In a world of curation and creation, it’s easy to feel compelled to constantly document an experience (this is coming from somebody who makes a living off documenting experience in some form or another, either through the camera lens or the keyboard). But there is only one creation: that of Being. The fact that you are reading this is living proof you are alive on this planet and part of existence itself.
In the Dance Temple, your ego is non-existent. You are everything and nothing simultaneously. And that’s the paradox of spiritual awakening: you are, as Maslow interpreted, simultaneously a God and worm — you are all of existence and non at all. The way you live between these extremes determines the quality of your life.
Make Good Art
The antidote to the disparity of existence is art. Boom is proliferated with art as big as corporate buildings and equally art that is only noticeable with the keen sense of awe and belonging that comes with the rarest resource at your disposal — attention.
This blog and the content I create have always been a form of art. I never want to be sucked into the latest trends or market products that I don’t wholeheartedly believe in. Gaiman’s famous words played on repeat in my head throughout the festival: “Make Good Art.” Art is the act of sculpting your suffering into pain and eventually into a source of profound joy and understanding. Art demands you to be naked — art requires the precondition of Radical Acceptance and authenticity.
Resist the urge to make sense or name an experience to early. Live the questions. Live the questions with the openness and oneness of Trusting, Letting Go and Being Open. You have something to give. And you never have to fret about becoming famous for it.
Your Joy is Your Sorrow Unmasked
The best experiences in life give you an equal measure of joy and sorrow. The best movies, books, relationships, festivals, and ideas all create an equal experience of joy and sorrow in an ecstatically vivid and real way. ‘Joy is’, as Kahlil Gibran interpreted, ‘is your sorrow unmasked.’
Joy and sorrow should never frighten you. Only anger should. Anger is the emotion of attachment and regret: of not being heard by yourself. Anger is the action of non-gratitude. It’s impossible to be angry and grateful simultaneously.
Disconnect to Connect: Unplug to Plug Back In
After all the galavanting and pondering and absurdity, nudity and negligence, what was most profound was something so simple yet so hard to achieve in today’s world: disconnecting.
“Unplug to connect” is what the Boomers call it. It’s one of — and still is — my favourite things about festivals. There is a part of me that has always longed for a deeper connection amongst things. Even at the pubs back when all I cared for was throwing up my beer in the nearest garbage bin, I would be compelled to talk about more than just old school stories or about people; I was, and still am, compelled to talk about existence. To talk about the joys and sorrows that come with living an examined life; a life that is predicated on being a better human for those around you, and mostly, yourself.
As a professional photographer/filmmaker, the hardest part of the Boom experience was leaving my camera behind. I guess that is not entirely true. I decided to bring my trusty Canon G7X vlog camera, which fired my content creation curiosity back in 2017. This was a great way to scratch my artistic itch while remaining in the moment. So even when I’m compelled to capture the moment, it’s still a moment in the moment; not a moment for the moment of Instagram— the immediate compulsion to share the experience.
The camera itself still possesses the properties of delayed gratification — which, as an artist, is essential. Especially in the world of getting immediate feedback from an Instagram Story or TikTok; the feedback of the camera itself is less so — it is more a form of capturing the moment that still requires a post-processing brain.
If you’ve made it this far, congratulations. This is not so much a blog post as a brain dump. And maybe I’m a person that is searching for meaning where there simply is none. But that is the beauty of Boom: you get to be whomever you want to be without judgment.
Boom served as the ultimate resetting of the proverbial HDD — a clearing of the backed-up cache in the mind, especially after the 4 interesting preceding years since.
You cannot do anything worthwhile alone. Even if you could, it would never be worth it. Because the greatest joys in life are shared joys. It does not get more simple than that.
Obrigado.
I urge you to watch this documentary that was released in 2018 after Boom had successfully been operating for 20 years. I watched it the night previous to releasing this blog post and it served as the cherry on top to finish this without hesitation.