After I graduated from Northwestern University, I floundered. Like many other Super Over Achievers, I had been so committed, focused, and intense during my four years that when all that structure suddenly evaporated, I was lost. I was a multi-passionate person, and I didn’t know where to start. So I did bits of a lot of things. I acted, told stories, worked in a health food store, and assisted a mural painter for a minute. None of it grabbed hold of me and said, “This is where you belong.”
I guess I was looking for “It” (with a capital I): My north star, a sense of purpose, a mission, or direction. I wasn’t finding it. I had accepted a job as a teacher’s aide… but my heart knew that wasn’t it either.
My boyfriend at the time was (and still is) a professional storyteller and magician. He was about to leave for 9 months of travel on the Renaissance Faire circuit. When he asked me to join him, a war immediately began within me. The Super Responsible Hero could never go. But another part – the one that had been sublimated and obedient during the hard four years of school – wanted to squirm out from under the Super Responsible Hero and scream, “YES! This is crazy! This is insane! It’s perfect!”
A few weeks later, my Pontiac station wagon was packed to the hilt – including my rose pink corset, a pink hat, and a big brown skirt – and I was on the road for a tour that took me to Wisconsin, Ohio, North Carolina, and Texas.
If you know Renaissance Faires, you likely know the local side of things – the folks who dress up and play for a few weekends out of every year. The committed traveling Rennies are a whole other universe; they are a subculture within our culture. I remember a few days into the journey in Ohio, I was sitting around a fire with the most eclectic and unique group of people I had ever met. None of them found a home in conventional societal zones. Each of them wanted freedom to create and live their lives authentically. I found them charming, dynamic, wacky, and frequently dysfunctional but lovable nonetheless.
But the most strange thing about being with this group of people was the feeling that we had all done this before. I was haunted by how familiar many of them were to me, even though we had never met before. Many times, I would meet a Rennie and instantly feel like I knew them deeply, even though I knew zero details about their actual lives. Sitting around the fire under the stars, I wondered if we had all lived in the same town somewhere, hundreds of years ago, and had joined the Rennie Circus just to find each other again.
We stood out like sore thumbs in the small towns where we traveled. I have a vivid memory of walking into a small town diner in North Carolina with one of my friends, and every single person turned around to stare at us like we were aliens from another planet. And maybe we were. Or from another time or dimension, at least. We dressed like rumpled hippies who lived in campgrounds (because we did). We clearly didn’t have the same values that the locals did, and you could tell by how we walked. We didn’t give a hoot what the rest of the world thought of us. We were living in a world of our own, and we were, for the most part, happy there.
Rennies taught me so much, probably the most significant of which was non-attachment. They trust that if we need to meet up again, we will. And if we don’t, we won’t. They have few possessions, and they care very little about owning too many objects or fancy houses. They travel light in so many ways, especially physically and relationally. Without realizing it at the time, this was an important lesson that prepared me later for practicing Buddhism.
In addition to non-attachment, they also taught me about connection, specifically communal living and fluid relationships. It was the first place I was exposed to polyamorous relationships. Though I frequently had a front row seat to their dramas, I occasionally saw some poly relationships that seemed to work.
Living in a campground all together, I learned about being up in everyone else’s business, but also the sweetness of cooking for a crowd and sharing meals. No matter how dysfunctional a community, there was always someone there to help out, offer a ride, provide a distraction, or inspire a laugh.
Being part of a Renaissance Faire is inherently playful, and I think back on those 9 months as a period of relaxed play. During school, I could get super playful and silly with my friends, but then I would swing dramatically to the opposite extreme and bury my head in mountains of school work or healing from trauma. My time with the Rennie Circus was a detox from too much seriousness and heaviness.
I didn’t get a pass on healing and doing my inner work or spiritual practice, though. My determination dictated that all that continued, but in a more spacious environment. I had country landscapes to gaze upon and long days without anything to do. I could journal to my heart’s content; explore altered states in meditation; dive into my emotional vulnerability and messiness, and untangle the stories.
It was a kind of freedom – living with just a few commitments and responsibilities, working for two days and hanging out the other five, not bound to others but open to receiving their companionship whenever it happened. I needed this freedom at that time. Though I didn’t know it then, another craving was stirring, a desire for a more mysterious experience of freedom – the freedom of spiritual liberation. It was the next piece of my healing and growth journey. It was that wordless, mysterious, unconscious call that ultimately motivated me to disembark from my grand Rennie adventure and start a new one.
