Raining Solutions

I knew, before it started, what the first day of the Wild Goose Festival would be like. Wide open. That’s way Papa Dave called it when he was working hard all day in the warehouse at MANNA. With all of the sponsors moving in, I would need to be on top of getting them to their spots and meeting their needs. I was underneath it at some points, but everyone was accommodating and my fellow festival staffers helped me work it out.

But by the end of the day, I was a mess. Tired and reeking of a combination of sweat and citronella, I wandered around the Hot Springs Campground trying to unwind before bed. Although it had not rained all day, the threat was imminent. I was not sure if I would be more dry under my hot rain jacket or under the cool evening rain.

My perambulations brought me down to the main stage, where a performer I had followed off and on over the years was about to go on. “3 years, 5 months & 2 Days in the Life of Arrested Development” came out at a time when I was starting to seek out some sort of spiritual path. Their expressions of justice, ecology, joy, pain, wonder, and faith were like road signs on my early journey.

20 years down the road, I had not listened to the band in a while. Speech put out a record, “Hoopla”, that I got into a few years back. But as I shuffled down to the Wild Goose Main Stage, I was only vaguely aware of why it was that I needed to see Speech perform.

Then he took the stage.

The words of those Arrested Development songs came back to me as if I had been listening to the record that morning. He talked about being in relationship to the people around us, seeing each other for who we are, not just what we look like. The music tapped into a well of energy that got me dancing and sweating all over again.

And then the rain came.

It poured down on us as the music kept playing. It poured down on us as Speech launched into “Raining Revolution.” There, at a camp meeting in the wooded mountains of far Appalachia, Speech took me to church and talked about faith and redemption, about failing and about grace. I knew that I had not left the road that Arrested Development and I had started down 20 years ago, and I was overjoyed that our paths had crossed again.