Blossom by Blossom...

LET ME TRY TO DESCRIBE the four seasons of the annual Cornerstone Festival program year.

The first season really begins the week after New Years, when we come back to work and make new blank schedule grids and stare at them for what weeks on end wondering how they will ever be filled. How they do get filled is always a blur, and that’s what makes it a bit intimidating to face that blank page again. But the possibilities gather and build up and generate electricity until finally the lightning strikes.

The second season is happening right now, right this moment, as the artists lay out the finished schedule page-by-page. I go through the proof sheets marveling at how what seemed so contingent and hypothetical for the past three months is now Set in Stone (or as much as anything connected to this festival can be): it looks so REAL. Everyone will be happy to know that it looks like another genuine, classic Cornerstone Festival after all. That is to say, it looks great on paper. Now we have three more months to turn it into 3D reality.

The third season is at the festival, when I’m running around like everyone else with a printed program in my back pocket, trying to make sure my part of the festival goes as much as possible as planned. There I sometimes pause and marvel for a different reason: I feel like I’m riding the Blade of Time itself as I watch moment-by-moment as what had been so long been future events proceed to present then past.

Finally, there is the Morning After, when the Cornerstone Festival program transforms into the status of historical artifact, like the others in my file cabinet. Eventually, a new blank grid will await…

But I get ahead of myself; let’s hop back up on that Blade of Time and try to live in the moment here. As of today, this morning, the 2007 Cornerstone Festival program is nearly ready to send to the printer and mailed in April. Before then, we’ll continue to post bits online. The main seminar program and speakers are listed at cstoneXchange, and yesterday I posted the film schedule for Flickerings. Stay tuned for further blossoming of yet another Cornerstone Spring…