@festivalofyes

A 3 day electronic dance music and community-fueled campout under the Perseid meteor shower.

Location pin: Mt Baker Forest, Washington State, USA

This is a special announcement for the Between2Clouds community, we are expanding. This expansion involves bringing in additional curators of unique social, art, music, and other creative expression projects. Thus far, every event in the Between2Clouds realm has been the idea and curation of @2dreamagain, but Between2Clouds was always meant to be more.

A close friend of ours for years now, Alex Chmiel(@gocrikeygo), is bringing his festival idea bird baby to life a second time, and we are here for it. Also known as the Yes-man for his eagerness to accept and say yes to any challenge of growth or opportunity to explore, Alex is a multi-talented, hyper adventurous metaphorically (and sometimes literally) winged creature that has travelled the country and beyond dancing, ice climbing, and diving into the unknown. His occasional email, A Sip of Stoke is a deeply vulnerable expression of his journey through his flight, learnings, and what inspires him to leave the nest each day. He inspires others to step beyond their comfort zones, to try new activities, and to take a moment to stop flapping your feathers and breathe so we can recognize the beauty around us both in the enormous magnitude of life as well as the subtle moments amongst friends. 

Festival of Yes is a culmination of everything which Alex is and aspires to be, as well as his desire to find his flock, those that migrate and move through life similarly to himself. 

If you have not caught on yet, Alex loves birds, and we love Alex.

There are many things we could say about what makes this festival special. Here are some of those details:

• The people. Holy moly. First off, just how many great folks we met. Wonderful personalities, extremely sweet demeanors, and truly unique flavors of life. Adventurers, poets, artists, appreciators, dancers, movers, shakers, everyone. People flew and drove in from Hawaii, New York, California, Canada, other countries, Montana, Wyoming, Oregon, North Carolina (us lol), Arizona, and the wildest one, a couple just finished an expedition in Pakistan attempting to summit one of the tallest mountains in the world and flew directly to the festival before going home.

• This is an intimate underground festival, so to have that kind of excitement and diversity was incredible.

• Conscious commitment to building healthy community, shown through the various roles, workshops, and ideas behind the scenes.

• Top notch audio experience with a powerful high fidelity, custom-built sound system.

• Location location location. It is breathtaking being up in the mountains east of Seattle. There is a fresh water river that is close to the event location that we spent time in each day before the festivities last year. It was deeply refreshing!

• Super talented underground dance music artists with a vibrant camaraderie amongst all artists

• We have access to the behind the scenes of this whole thing + have had a large influence in how this festival has been built. We have used our 300+ events worth of experience to help guide this idea to be something substantial, and it is.

• Building something special from nothing. This is a grassroots festival. Alex made the event free for everyone the first year and paid for the entire thing out of pocket. Thousands of dollars spent of his own money just so people could come together and share meaningful moments under the stars, dancing, conversing, meeting, and melding. Between2Clouds is and has always been grassroots too and we paid for nearly everything out of our pockets when we first started (and for awhile, and most of the time). Our first events were in our living room. We lost money for years to build it, because of how much we believed in our ideas and saw the impact of bringing us all together. Any resources we ended up having invested into the project also came from friends and close supporters too. Festival of Yes naturally has many of the same core values of why we started. It is not about partying, it is about togetherness and building a sense of “us”. It is also a deeply fun party too, of course :)

Our friends, family, community, appreciators, fans, and onlookers, if you have been to several events of ours and they have resonated something deep within you, it is easy to say that this festival will do the same. Alex is someone we trust enough to give a huge stamp of approval to his projects, and hope we can continue to integrate his ideas into our world.

For more info, please make your way over to their instagram page listed at the top of this post

and to the website: festivalofyes.com

Be good to yourselves. Be kind to your world. Do what you can to make your life a bit more beautiful today.

Let’s explore this happier, dancer, flappier place.

With genuine love, and a bit of bird,

• The Between2Clouds team <3