Krishna Color Festival

Before

Me, a few friends, and 15,000 other people turned out to the Sri Sri Radha Krishna Temple to bring in spring with the Color Festival. Someone there said it was the largest gathering in the US this year. I can't quantify that statement though.

There's an article in the SL Trib about the event. http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_12021504
Pretty good youtube coverage. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8EUDMRvRaE
Or you can read up on the festival on Wiki. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holi

For the Spanish Fork festival, there were musicians and dancers to start. The temple is a very beautiful structure. Most people who see it call it a little Taj Mahal. I got separated from most of my group right before the color throwing started because it was a sea of bodies and I'm so short all I could see were chests.

Apparently at about 5:45ish they burned the demon effigy. I didn't see it but all of a sudden there was an explosion of colored chalk in the air. It was actually really pretty once you got used to breathing the chalk dust. There were pink clouds and purple clouds and green clouds. More like colored fog.

It had a faint aromatic scent so the experience was multi-sensory. Everyone was just throwing the colors into the air and at each other. At first I felt a little naughty throwing colored chalk on people but then you just let go and get into it and it's so fun.

After

I did find my peoples again. We stood up by the elephant and threw chalk on new people that were clean. Hahaha. So fun. If you don't want to get dirty, don't go to this festival.

Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare

The chalk actually came of for the most part with some thorough patting and shaking. Apparently my trying to shake it out of my hair caused a great deal of amusement for my friends and many of the carloads of people driving past us. Your all welcome for the show.

"Harder, shake it harder" (as heard from the passing white sedan)

It's a day later and I'm still cleaning pink, orange, and purple colors out of my ears. One of the fun things about the festival was how it brought people together. Not just physical proximity, but everyone is throwing colors and each other even if you don't know each other. Also there is something very equalizing in all being covered in colors. You can't really judge anyone on appearances anymore so you don't. We were just judging people by how awesome their color covering was. People were even being mostly nice to each other as about 10,000 tried to pull out of Spanish Fork at the same time. Lots of good Karma going round.