QuestOutsideTent
The Red Tent at Quest

Given that my last post (way back in February!) was about the Wood Sisters Winter Festival, which raised funds for our Red Tent project, it seems right that this next post finally gets written following our first outing with the finished Red Tent to the Quest Natural Health Show.
As I write now, I can look out of my bedroom window at the Vicarage and see the blackbirds feasting on ripe rowan berries and the first golden leaves just appearing on the birches in our sacred grove of a garden. In the fields around Dartington the barley is being harvested and all these wonders bring home to me that this is Lammastide and a good time to be celebrating early harvests and first fruits.

The Wood Sisters will be gathering this Sunday for our Lammas/Lughnasadh Celebration 2012 and it was at this same celebration last year, as we worked with Biblical stories about Rachel and Leah and their ancestral stories and reflected on the harvests of our first cycle together as Wood Sisters, that we sifted out the seed idea of creating our own Red Tent in the form of an Northern Iranian nomadic tent called an alachig.

Wood Sisters grinding barley (and dreaming up the Red Tent!) at Lammas 2011

A year on, reflecting back again, this seems like an even more wonderful and even more mad idea than it did at the time! I never imagined that fifty women would get involved with this incredible tent making journey and that the Wood Sisters community would grow to over a hundred women. I never imagined just how much work goes into making a tent! I never imagined how beautiful (or how much like a giant red breast!) the final tent would be or just how profound it would feel to finally gather for mythic storytelling, meditation, natural crafts and ceremony in our completed travelling Sanctuary at Quest.
To see the full story, of the Tent and our time at Quest, as it unfolded and with many photos (I do love stories with pictures!) please do visit the Wood Sisters journal So I’ll just give the briefest overview here… to the tune of John Barley Corn!

There were fifty women gathered here 
A Red Tent for to build
And these brave women made a solemn vow
They’d work till the tent was filled, they’d work till the tent was filled.
 
So they travelled to the Killerton Estate
Cut ash poles in the wood
They sawed and dragged and carried trees home
And knew those trees were good, they knew those trees were good.
 
They worked with draw knives over days
Set shave horses on the lawn
As the bark fell down and the poles were shaped
An alachig was born, an alachig was born
 
They raised a fire and built a box
And filled it full of steam
They bent those poles and roped them down
Worked hard as a wonderful team, worked hard as a wonderful team
 
So the poles were done, and red canvas sewn
And they set off on their Quest
And all who came were amazed to see
A beautiful great red breast, a beautiful great red breast!
 
Fa la la la, it’s a lovely day
Sing fa la la lay o
Fa la Fa la, it’s a lovely day
Sing fa la Fa la lay o!