Woodford blew the lid off my cell.
The container I have been living within — the mental and spiritual enclosure I once mistook for safety — has been shattered by an awareness of an extraordinary world outside the echo chamber. A world populated by diverse, inclusive people: some weird, some strange, some boring, some just ordinary — all incredible in their particular ways, gifts, talents, and presence.
For me, Woodford was the experience Thomas Merton described when he found himself suddenly overwhelmed with love for strangers in Louisville: “I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realisation that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs… It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world.”
That phrase — waking from a dream of separateness — is the closest I can come to naming what has happened to me.
For too long I have lived in conflict with “these people,” with all people. Not because I wanted to, but because I was trained into a posture of suspicion and defence. I protected myself from the perceived danger “out there” by remaining within the prison of the colonial church — an institution that promised to protect me from the barbarians at the door.
But here is the truth I am only now willing to say plainly: the prison did not protect me. It contained me. It kept me from becoming fully incarnated into a beautiful world full of wonder and incredible people. It offered safety as control. It offered belonging as compliance. It offered salvation as separation.
Woodford interrupted that lie.
In the midst of this festival — held in Country, threaded with trees and water, filled with conversation, music, children, and difference — I felt something loosen. People weren’t asking me to shrink. They weren’t managing me, correcting me, or turning my presence into symbolism. They were simply present. They listened. They spoke honestly. They made space. I found myself not defending my humanity but inhabiting it.
Merton wrote that this liberation from illusory difference was such joy that he almost laughed out loud. I understand that now. Because when the false story breaks — the story that the world is dangerous, that strangers are threats, that belonging must be controlled — what remains is the sheer relief of being human among humans.
Merton said, “There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.” I saw that shining at Woodford — not as sentimentality, but as reality. The festival did not erase difference. It held difference without fear. It made room for people to be fully themselves, and that made room for me to remember who I am outside the chamber.
I’m not naïve. There are dangers in the world. There are systems that harm. But the colonial church taught me to fear the wrong thing. It taught me to fear the outside while asking me to accept captivity inside. It taught me to mistrust the human world while training me to endure an institution that kept me small.
Woodford has changed that.
The lid is off. The cell is broken. And the echo chamber will never be the same.