Pitch Music & Arts 2020
Pitch is a 4-day Music and Arts festival held at the foot of the Grampians.
By music - it’s Techno - thumping, intricate, layered, melodic, primal, vibrating techno - there’s so many sub-genres within Electronic music that it can be confusing as to what rhythms and patterns are called what - Techno, House, Tech House, Acid, Industrial, Disco, Hardcore, Minimal. Anyway, there’s always a solid lineup.
The property and the surrounding area is home to some giant, ancient Gum trees. Just down the road the Djab Wurrung Traditional Owners are fighting to protect a number of sacred trees from being bulldozed to make way for a new highway.
Read more here: https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/article/2019/08/22/no-trees-no-treaty-protesters-continue-amass-djab-wurrung-site
For ways to support and keep up to date, check out the Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/Dwembassy/
One of the main reasons I’ve kept coming back is to wander amongst them for a few days…
A sign of the times
I wasn’t sure whether or not to throw my two cents in, but the scene is definitely an outlet for exploration and expression which obviously comes with it’s challenges and dangers. A great opportunity to practice respect for oneself, each other and the land we dance upon. Boundaries of experience will be pushed and telling younger generations to ‘Just say no’ only demonstrates the divide in understanding between. Education is key, as is individual responsibility. Organisers, police, medical staff and DanceWize all do an excellent job.
Every time I go past this wall in Northcote, Melbourne, I’m reminded of a quote by Alan Watts…
“Psychedelic experience is only a glimpse of genuine mystical insight, but a glimpse which can be matured and deepened by the various ways of meditation in which drugs are no longer necessary or useful…”
“When you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope; he goes away and works on what he has seen.”
- Alan Watts, The Joyous Cosmology
“It’s bound to happen, if you stretch the intellect past a certain point you will crack up, you will definitely crack up” - Sadhguru on the Power of Thoughts
Street art photo taken in Berlin
And when it all gets a bit much, one can always go and sit with the giant old Gums, watching over the land for generations, holding deep connections to the past.
I find it curious, and rather telling, watching crowds of people walking by these trees, barely giving them any notice, except maybe when they take a pee on them. The age, the size, the weight. The birds that live in them. All of them distinct and unique.
To create a society, and an economic system, where these living beings and their ecosystems are valued equal to a human life. What would that look like…? Where their growth, nurturing and protection are of the highest importance, and in exchange for taking care of these living systems, the people are looked after with all the resources they need for a fulfilling life…
“I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time - a rare, complicated and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling and multi-coloured drops that gleam for a moment only to vanish forever.
“Under such conditioning it seems impossible and even absurd to realize that myself does not reside in the drop alone, but in the whole surge of energy which ranges from the galaxies to the nuclear fields in my body.
“At this level of existence, “I” am immeasuurably old; my forms are infinite and their comings and goings are simply the pulses or vibrations of a single and eternal flow of energy.”
- Alan Watts - The taboo against knowing who you are