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Starwood 2026 — This Is Not A Review

Starwood 2026 — This Is Not A Review

Last updated on: August 6, 2026 at 2:28 am by Tom Swiss

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Starwood 2026 — This Is Not A Review 2026-08-06T02:28:33-04:00 Tom Swiss

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The idea of me writing a review of the Starwood Festival is ridiculous. I can’t even pretend to give an unbiased review of something that I’ve been a part of, and that has been a big part of me, for over 20 years.

But I do want to take the opportunity to say a few words about this year’s edition, both for the curious (“what is this Starwood thing I keep hearing about”) and as an attempt to collect some thoughts, now that I’m back in Mundania after another week in the most transformational Temporary Autonomous Zone around.

(from the Starwood graphics team, via Facebook)

Sharing in the Magick

For many years I’ve cited Starwood’s opening ritual, led by Ian Corrigan and Liafal, as a master class in the construction of ritual. (That opening ritual — at least a long-ago version of it — also features in the opening of my book Why Buddha Touched the Earth.)

The ritual is concise yet deep, energetic yet accessible, structured but full of High Quality Slack, serious but absolutely not solemn. It just about perfectly follows the first four steps of my Five Step Model of Magical Ritual:

1.Decide what you want. (“Set intention.”)

2.Do weird stuff. (“Raise energy”)

3.Make the weird stuff connect in your mind with what you want. (“Direct energy”)

4.Seal the deal. (“Cool down”)

(The fifth step — “Get off your ass!” is, as always, up to the individual.)

Anyway, last year, I was asked at the last minute to jump in and fill a role in this opening ritual when an expected participant was running late. Which…wow. Sort of like being asked to jump on stage with your favorite band. It was an honor to be asked to do magick with some of the best.

This year, history repeated and I got to be part of it again. Yeah, I worked magick in the same ritual with Ian and Liafal and with Oberon Zell, one of the founders of the modern Neopagan movement, invoking and welcoming the East before he did the same for the West.

My life is pretty cool sometimes, I have to admit.

But that was not the coolest thing about my experience of Starwood 2026.

You see, on the very last muddy muddy day of last year’s edition, July 20 2025, (after the closing ritual, so arguably not “part” of Starwood, but in that liminal space between closing and leaving…perhaps even more magickal?), I met an astounding woman as we worked together to free a stagehand’s car from the mud.

There’s a whole “meet cute” story there, and I will be writing more about this amazing woman who is befriending my neighborhood crows, finding the four-leaf clovers in my lawn, and making dormant seeds of powerful magical roots sprout in my garden. But for the moment, the upshot is that we came back to Starwood together this year. And stayed in her camping trailer (actually a portable “tiny home”), quite a bit more comfortable than my usual tenting arrangement.

So for me, this year’s event was an extended date that went pretty well.

My lady is more internet-shy than I am, so for writing purposes I’ll just refer to her as Lady A. She had arrived at Starwood last year without knowing what to expect — by the same sort of life-changing “accident” or “coincidence” that I’ve heard several other people relate over years.

This year she got out to workshops (including mine), the Bonfire, and other things she hadn’t connected with last time.

I presented three workshops. The ones on shiatsu and self-defense were ones I’d given before, and they went over well, introducing some new people to some of my favorite topics..

But I was also asked by the very brave Koshek Swaminathan to join him for a talk about our favorite topic (*cough*) here at TZP, “cultural appropriation”. This also went well I think, and I’ll have more to say about that in a separate post; a few other topics to cover here.

The Green Man Tavern

I am of a somewhat Dionysian disposition. I’ve spent delightful hours in bars in Baltimore, Osaka, Kyoto, New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Sydney, Nelson…I’ve recognized them all as temples of that most dangerous deity.

But perhaps my favorite bar in the known universe is the Green Man Tavern, which springs into existence every year for few weeks over the summer and fall at Wisteria. Like my late lamented dive bar Leadbetters — and like my recently transformed, rising local favorite Morsberger’s Tavern — it’s a place with both beer and music, hitting notes both Apollonian and Dionysian.

Besides catching some excellent music and enjoying some fine local craft brews, Lady A and I ended up borrowing the chessboard someone had donated, and playing for the first time — she’s been playing as part of her Duolingo practice, and as a kid I used to play with my dad and my brother but rarely since then. I think Dad would very heartily approve that I’m in love with a woman who plays chess.

Heat, Smoke, and the Ordeal path

One thing that was not great about this year’s Starwood was the climate. I’m not speaking metaphorically about the social or political climate, I mean the geophysical climate. Heat was a challenge, but more than that we were subject to poor air quality from Canadian wildfire smoke. I’m more heat tolerant than average, but the bad air quality on top of the heat made it challenging even for me.

Most attendees, including my Lady A, were more sensitive to both of these factors. So there was a bit of ordeal path work going on. If you were there, friends, know this: just being there, sticking it out, not quitting and going home, charged your magickal batteries with an extra 50 mana points.

And to put the perfect cap on the weather, while it was dry most of the week, serious thunderstorms tore through on Saturday, soaking the ground and bringing back memories of last years’s mud. It was drizzling when we rendezvoused to light the Bonfire Torches for the procession.

But we persevered! The Starwood Bonfire happened. As it was lit, I had a flash of inspiration and yelled “We did it!” Which seemed in the moment the best summary of the energy: against the odds, the heat, the air, the rain…nevertheless, we persisted. And as a result, magick happened. A lesson for the times.

Starwood bonfire. Photo from www.starwoodfestival.com

The community danced and drummed. Lady A assisted me with my little ritual of handing out dark chocolate and red wine around the Bonfire. (Remember, strangers have the best candy.) She had to turn in at a reasonable hour for festival work commitments; I came back to the Bonfire for a bit, then wandered the camp and got drawn into some wonderful discussion and a four-way game of chess (bit of a theme here) at the Omphalos, then stopped in the Pawpaw grove where the dancing and drumming was still going around 5am, and went to go curl up next to my lady.

And on Sunday, Lady A and I made it a point to celebrate the anniversary of our meeting, in that liminal space between Closing Circle and departure, visiting the friends who facilitated our first meeting.

Time Flies Like An Arrow, Fruit Flies Like A Banana

I heard more than one veteran Starwoodian note how quickly the festival seemed to go by this year.

Some of it may be a matter of the mathematics of age; the older one becomes, the smaller percentage of one’s life experience a week or a month is. Summers seemed to last forever when we where ten years old and three months was 2.5% of our life; by the time we hit 50, three months are 0.5% of our life. The same calculus applies to that fraction of summer that is Starwood.

But there’s also, perhaps, a bit of FOMO (“fear of missing out”) and the faster pace of a technologically-connected life at play.

As Starwood grows, and there are more and more excellent workshops in every slot (I ended up cross-scheduled against people whose talks I wanted to go to), more things to get to (Happy Hour at the Green Man! The mojito party! Drumming and dancing at Pawpaw!), and we still feel (however inaccurately) a need to get on-line and keep checking the Black Rectangle of Distraction for updates, it’s easy to feel that there Just. Is. Not. Enough. Time.

Friends…relax. Know that part of the magick is that you are where you need to be.

So if you were at Starwood this year…know that you were in the right place at the right time.

If you were not, and reading about this makes you wish that you were…know that you were *still* in the right place. But perhaps the right place for you next year, is “a vacation in another realm…[a] cosmic resort in time and space where scientists sit with shamans and Druids dance with Deadheads”.

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