Lucidity Fest Recap: Spirituality and Spontaneity in Santa Barbara
Nestled between exposed cliff faces and canopied by a network of twisting limbs among the Los Padres wilderness, camp Live Oak hosted the seventh annual celebration known as Lucidity.
Guests embarked on a three day experience of live music, workshops, art and expression in forms both imaginable and unimaginable.
Lively and rejuvenating all the same, this gathering marked new beginnings—a “rising dawn”—with themes of community, identity and transformation woven into the festival’s silken fibers.
Free from external obligation and with the contentment found purely in the present moment, attendees were invited to channel the child within—a jovial zest that seemed to be continuously exhaled and released into the festival atmosphere.
Lucidity hosted an impressive lineup of names from a unique blend of genres; performances offered a taste for everyone with a collaborative experience between artist and spectator.
Grooving to the authentic rhythms of Afrolicious, thumping to the downtempo of Mark Farina’s Dream Machine, or jiving to an intimate jam and gamble within the frontiers of the Dusty Barrel, visitors feasted upon tapas of melodious realms.
As a collection of distinct individuals, it was the festival populace themselves in an interplay of character that generated the chords, beats and rhythms of a headlining act.
Arthur O’Shaughnessy’s Ode whispered under colorful awnings in open conversation:
We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;—
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.
With an intricate and uncharted expanse of crafted architecture, finding oneself lost in the moment was commonplace and spontaneity was encouraged; it seemed to be the unexpected pauses that held the experience together and brought light to the art of the bigger picture.
For us, our time at Lucidity continues to remind us how we find contentment, laughter, understanding and acceptance in our day-to-day lives.
Whitney Engelmann is KCPR’s creative director and a Cal Poly Graphic Design senior. Hana Shiozaki is a KCPR DJ and a Graphic Design fourth year. Whitney wrote the article, Hana took the photographs, and both attended the fest down in Santa Barbara.
