Here is a note I sent to the Floodland mailing list, thanking everyone who helped make it happen. No sense rewriting it when it sums my feelings up pretty clearly:

I have yet to start unpacking my car, but I’ve had a shower, a good night’s sleep in my own bed, and just now I’ve had a chance to upload some pictures:

Floodland 2014 on Flickr

I don’t know how to describe the experience I had this weekend without gushing. Not only did you all pick up the Floodland vision and run with it, but you took it off in a bunch of other directions I’d never expected, and you did it all with a smooth, comfortable competence that left me feeling like I shouldn’t have spent quite so much energy worrying about the details.

But I wasn’t just watching the kind of well-oiled machine that a close-knit crew can become: while many of us have worked on each other’s projects before, one of the big reasons for creating a new event is to welcome new people in, giving them a platform to explore their own ideas and develop their own skills along with us old-timers. I was happy to see good friends at Floodland but I was also glad that I got to make some new friends too.

We had beautiful weather, and even the little bursts of rain were welcome; we had the most consistently gorgeous sunsets I can ever remember seeing; we had lovely spaces to relax and to dance, we had art and costumes and performances and fire. It was all there. Everywhere you could see the potential hanging in the air, and everyone I talked to expressed enthusiasm about coming back and doing it again next year.

If all we accomplished was a proof-of-concept camping trip, that’d have still been success: but we went far beyond that and actually threw ourselves a full-on burn event. Thank you for all the energy you put into this, the good attitudes and adaptable creativity you brought to the various obstacles we encountered. Thank you for trusting me when I came to you with this crazy plan in the first place, and thank you for the honest, thoughtful, enthusiastic feedback so many of you shared as we all started to imagine what next year’s festival can be.