Here’s to the Festival Producers, splayed out on a couch at 2PM on a Saturday afternoon. Though the music thumps from just beyond the trailer, the need for sleep reigns supreme.

Here’s to the Festival Producers, reminding one another that you have to take care of yourself before you can take care of others. Still, stretching themselves to the brink of exhaustion, sleeping with one lucid ear listening to the chitter chatter on walkie talkie squackboxes.

Here’s to the Festival Producers, stewards of land and guardians of initation. In celebration and ceremony, they stand at attention around spires of flame, at box office gates, at information booths, reverential with obligation.

Here’s to the Festival Producers, engaged but not engulfed in emotional readiness, never completely consumed by the swirling energies, always grounding, grounding, grounding and searching for consensus.

Here’s to the Festival Producers, the first on-site and the last to go to bed on Sunday night, when the magnitude of success and failure come rumbling through backstages. For those few sets that you catch, for those few dance moves which burst from your tired limbs with singularity and expression. For those moments where time stands stills and the glowing crowd, unaware of so much sacrifice, gives off the deepest expressions of gratitude to no one and everyone at once.

Here’s to the Festival Producers, golf carts stuck in mud!

Here’s to the Festival Producers, plummers and electricians none! But you are today! You have leveled up so long as you have not become submerged in slosh or shocked!

Here’s to the Festival Producers, for today you have been a Parking Attendant, Healer, Cook, Negotiator, Security Guard, Sound Tech, Janitor, Volunteer Coordinator, Vendor, Artist, Flow Master, Jedi and Trembling Scared Up To Your Neck Tears Streaming From Every Pore While You Make The Hardest Call Of Your Life That Only You Can Make. All before 11:00 AM and you didn’t even have time for coffee.

Photo by Curious Josh — www.curiousjosh.com — At the Lucidity Festival Gate

Here’s to the Festival Producers, champions of sleep deprivation, self-flagellating with responsibility and somehow sustaining a sacred vessel capable of modeling a new future of community and creativity.

Here’s to the Festival Producers, who, when the morning light comes streaming in, get up and do it again. Amen.