For most of us Stanford mortals, Synergy is a word heavily shrouded by implications, associations, and perhaps even a certain appeal. We have classified co-op people as a specific sort, and are not quick to change these stock images. In the same way, we have established notions of Greek-lifers, athletes, CS majors, and cultural groups; we are only human after all. Cue this weekend’s Synergy event, Beltane: A celebration of love and life that utterly transcended labels and worked hard to create a world in which these divisions are irrelevant.
Beltane is a 24-hour party, the origins and contents of which Stanford students love to speculate about. Prior to my attendance at the event, I had heard a multitude of implausible and exciting possibilities for the day’s festivities. However, when I finally arrived at Synergy, I was struck by how little it resembled what I had come to expect from college parties. Rather than stomped-on cases of Natty Light, overturned beer pong tables, and tipsy dancing, circles of people milled about on the lawn wearing homemade flower crowns and face-paint. Moving through the house to get up to the roof, I stumbled into friends and strangers drinking tea and putting on face-jewels. The light was diffused and nearly everyone was barefoot. A girl wearing a butterfly dress danced alone on top of the porch’s wrap-around railing. Gone was the usual press of drunk bodies, the overbearing sexual energy, and the sense that memories weren’t being made, but forgotten. Instead, creative energy and communal joy abounded, spurred on by the bliss of intimacy and careless self-expression. The ecstatic comfort I had always imagined to be rare and nearly impossible to cultivate rose up like perfume and settled upon everyone in attendance.
The next few hours were spent lazing next to a bubble machine, looking down upon the ever evolving crowd gathering to love one another. Couches, fuzzy pink carpets, and chairs made their way to the lawn, seats from which to watch the ceremony. The culmination of all this love was a shotgun wedding between a gay angel and his best friend, officiated by a fly girl in a yarmulke. After this exchange of vows, spit, kisses, and tears, flowers and rice rained down on the happy couple and everyone shared in the first dance of spring, Abba’s “Dancing Queen.” I have never felt so carried away on the deep and true love of strangers. Here I was, looking down on two people I had never met doing something I couldn’t imagine or understand. All of my notions of marriage and intimacy were being challenged, and I found myself wondering, “Who’s to say you can’t marry your best friend in front of a mass of friends, strangers, and curious souls?” Grasping the hand of my best friend in all the world, I cried fat, soppy tears and relished in the truly glorious sensations of warmth and freedom surrounding me. And all this was before the Maypole had even begun.
Mere moments after “Dancing Queen” wound down to an end, naked bodies emerged from the woods surrounding the house. Their spiraling, spinning bodies turned around and around one another, pulling brightly colored Maypole ribbons so that they tied four people up against the pole itself. A tin pot full of red beets appeared from somewhere, and the bodies involved were soon covered in beet juice sap. Hands up and legs out, they moved through the crowd in a flurry of voices. Whereas voyeurism of this sort should have felt disrespectful or at least consumptive, it registered instead as intimate, a celebration of the human body and a means of participating in the coming of spring.
I can’t express enough how grateful I am to have witnessed the immense love and wonder that was Beltane. I look forward to experimenting for many years to come with the ways of being that I was exposed and treated to during the course of my time spent amongst this energy. This is where we all belong.
Contact Hannah Broderick at inbloom ‘at’ stanford.edu.