The moment you enter Hulaween’s Spirit Lake, everything shifts. The air holds a different frequency; ambient sound changes. The moss-draped oaks that frame the festival grounds feel sentient rather than backdrop. Your nervous system registers that you’ve crossed into somewhere else entirely.
As you move deeper, you notice that nothing here feels random. It’s a carefully crafted world where every detail matters, from the positioning of a sculpture to the way light refracts through a crystal. Each piece relates to the next as you journey through the space, shifting from observation to participation to something you can’t quite name yet… even the light behaves differently here; the shadows seem to hold intention. It’s calling you to explore.
FINDING YOUR THREAD: 3 PATHS THROUGH SPIRIT LAKE
Before you dive deeper into Spirit Lake, know that there’s no single way through this space. It works for the observer and the participant, the daytime wanderer and the night-time ecstatic, the person seeking solitude and the person seeking collective euphoria. The installations don’t require a particular order, and the experiences don’t demand a particular intensity level.
The real question is: who are you in this space?
Some people move through Spirit Lake as witnesses, positioning themselves at the edges in pockets of relative stillness, absorbing the orchestrated yet naturally unfolding beauty. There’s profound medicine in bearing witness to collective artistry; your job is simply to see, feel, and let it work on you.
Others arrive as embodied participants, dancing at the stages, interacting with installations, engaging with fire and projection mapping as active players in the landscape. You’re not observing the experience; you’re co-creating it. Your presence and movement change what happens here.
Most people shift between modes throughout the weekend, moving between witness and participant based on how the moment beckons them. Both approaches are equally valid, and both lead to transformation.
So then the next question is: what draws you?
Are you magnetized by visual spectacle, immersive sound, intimate spaces, fire and primal elements, interactive play, or quiet sanctuary spaces? Spirit Lake contains multitudes. Your thread is the thing that calls to you repeatedly… that is where your medicine lives.
Nighttime at Spirit Lake becomes ceremonial. The same sculptures glow with strategic lighting, fire ignites, and projections bloom across water and forest. It’s transcendent and electric witnessing the same installations transform as day shifts to dusk to night.
Spirit Lake isn’t something you conquer, but something that works on you over time. Some of the deepest moments happen when you slow down: sitting with a single installation for twenty minutes, returning to something three times and noticing something new, allowing whatever’s moving through you (grief, joy, confusion, awe) to have space.
So the final question is: what path will you take?
PASSING THE THRESHOLD: THE JOURNEY OF TRANSFORMATION
What you encounter in Spirit Lake depends partly on your choices and partly on what chooses you. Three distinct through-lines follow, though your actual experience will likely blend across them.
PATHWAY ONE: THE GROUNDED WITNESS
You’re drawn to observation, finding the perfect vantage point beside the crowd rather than embedded in it. Your medicine lives in bearing witness, seeing deeply, and allowing the artwork to work on you over time.
This path begins with the iconic sculptures that define Spirit Lake’s mythology and anchor the entire experience.
The Witch meets you first, a towering figure by Paul Kuhn that commands attention through sheer presence. She’s powerful without threatening, wise without aloofness. Standing before her, you understand: this is the figure society feared and tried to exile, and here she stands, unshaken. She offers permission: be the version of yourself that the world tried to convince you was dangerous.
The Ferryman carries a different story, guiding you deeper into the mythology. He helps you cross thresholds you couldn’t cross alone, and in a festival built around transformation, his presence feels essential and ancestral, like he’s been waiting eternally for you. The Rock Hands and Ogres ground everything in elemental playfulness; they’re ancient and whimsical simultaneously, reminding you that mythological power doesn’t require seriousness, only imagination.
The Spider, crafted by Thomas Dambo, is a weaver and creator, a patient architect of beauty that’s both functional and stunning. Paired with the collaborative Eggs installation by SLOPS, the web extends across multiple art pieces, with growth and generation beyond any single artist’s vision. The web expands, the story evolves, with new elements waiting to be born. At one edge, it touches the Birdhouse Village by Duende Builds, where each hand-crafted home is sourced from local materials, reminding you of nature’s serene interconnection.
Moving through Ania Amador’s Mural Maze filled with contemplative art, you understand the deeper pattern. You’re not just observing. Your body moving through the spiral becomes part of the artwork. Your navigation IS contribution. You’re the blood that flows between parts, and the breath that sustains its life.
The sculptures hold space for you to discover this yourself; foundational pieces that feel like they’ve always been here, with years of blood and breath, the motion of observation and interaction, keeping them alive. The dance between the known and the mysterious is what grounds us so we can travel deeper. This is The Radiant Veil: the recognition that light and what shadow are partners, not opposites. You need both to see clearly.
As you return to The Witch multiple times across the weekend, you notice new details: the way light catches her face at different hours, and how she evokes different feelings each time you encounter her. She’s teaching you that nothing is static, the shadows hold different truths as they interact with the light.
And that’s what you finally come understand: bearing witness isn’t passive. It’s a deep, internal form of participation. Every time you return to an installation, you let yourself be moved by what you see. You’re not consuming art; you’re in relationship with it. That’s the medicine of this path: the recognition that presence itself is generative. You don’t need to dance or interact or surrender to something larger. You just need to see, feel, and let the work integrate to transform you. That’s more than enough – it’s everything.
PATHWAY TWO: THE PARTICIPATORY EXPLORER
You’re drawn to interaction, and spaces where the boundary between observer and participant dissolves entirely. Your medicine lives in embodied exploration, recognizing yourself as a co-creating force.
Your journey begins at the SYNTHesthesia Crystals by Fox Light Labs, a shimmering cluster of infinity mirrors infused with responsive sound. You move, and the crystals respond. You make sound, and they reflect and multiply vibration back to you. The first time you encounter these infinite reflections of yourself, you’re reminded: I am not separate from this experience, but part of it.
The LumaVoid Theatre, featuring shadow puppet performances by Rabbit Foot Puppetry and Dragon Box Theatre, echoes this same truth through a different lens. Here, two-dimensional shadows create three-dimensional emotional experiences, inviting you into the space between the tangible and the translucent. Both installations teach you the foundational lesson: your presence is generative. Whether you’re influencing sound or bearing witness and emoting, you’re activating the experience.
The TeeterMAZE by PDA Woodwork deepens your understanding. Four players at a time rock a massive pinball maze together, with collaborative momentum charting the path. It’s a physical metaphor made tangible: you cannot navigate this alone, and the navigation itself is the entire point.
The House of Lost by Lost Creations operates on this same principle, with interactions of a more cryptic, gothic variety. There you’ll find eclectic artists, mysterious pop-up rituals, and the return of Midnight Mass, where authentic self-expression is a shared language. You’re invited to confession, communion, and permission to be witnessed.
The OFF LIMITS stage is where this becomes undeniable. A 360-degree immersive environment where sound surrounds you completely; your body becomes the center rather than the audience. Odd Mob, Conducta, Alex Wann, BLOND:ISH, and surprise sets from headlining artists rotate through the weekend. The performers understand the assignment: they’re not performing at you. They’re orchestrating an atmosphere that only exists because you’re in it.
You step into this space and realize you’re no longer watching music happen. You’re activating it. Your presence is the essential ingredient. Your body’s response, movement, and energy become part of the sound itself. The performers are reading you as much as you’re receiving them.
Cory Glenn’s Incendia and Jasper and Shelby Mosher’s Electric Dream Machine amplify this immersive wonder into transcendence. Incendia’s geodesic steel temples alive with fire surround the stage, with the fire moving in ways you can’t predict, primal and alive. The boundary between controlled performance and raw elemental power blurs. Electric Dream Machine transforms forest structures into moving narratives of light through projection mapping. What was static shifts, breathes, tells stories through illumination alone. You move through the forest and they evolve, changing based on your position or choice of where to stand. You’re literally authoring the experience as you move through it.
Now, you understand what The Radiant Veil means. For you, It’s about recognizing yourself as creative force. The light and shadow aren’t just in the environment… they’re within you. How you choose to engage with this landscape, your desire to sculpt and your openness to being sculpted, changes everything around you.
That’s the medicine of this path: the recognition that you’ve never been separate from the magic. You’ve always been the one making it.
PATHWAY THREE: THE NOCTURNAL SEEKER
You’re drawn to the liminal thresholds; the moments when day releases and night reveals everything that was once in the shadows. You find yourself gathering there each night to hear the collective gasp when first projections illuminate water and watch the ceremonial quality of thousands of people standing together in darkness.
Your medicine lives in shadow work, initiation, and the recognition that wholeness emerges when we gather our darkness together. We stop hiding what we fear, and instead stand beside others who carry their shadows too, and it is there that we find unity and collective consciousness.
You start at the Wandering Lion Tea Sanctuary, grounding yourself before you move further into the grounds. This quiet threshold teaches you a foundational truth: before you can belong to something larger, you must first know yourself, including the parts you’ve learned to hide. You sit with other seekers, all of you intentionally choosing stillness in a festival built on stimulation. Here, you remember who you are beneath the performance, the brightness you show the world. This is where you acknowledge your own shadows before the collective calls you in.
As you move toward the lake, where thousands converge carrying their own hidden truths, you see the first of the nightly holographic light shows projected over the water. The nightly spectacles are carefully choreographed narrative journeys by a projection team that understands how both technical innovation and mythological storytelling. Thursday’s “From Light” emerges as a visual representation of awakening and first illumination. Friday’s “Into Shadow” deepens the conversation as projections move to darker tones and more complex geometries, inviting you into comfort with shadow. Saturday brings “The Radiant Veil” to center stage, the thesis statement as light and shadow dance together in perfect balance. Sunday’s “The Dance of Light and Shadow” cycles toward integration and gentle release.
You stand at the water’s edge watching the lake become a canvas, shoulder to shoulder with strangers witnessing the unfolding together, knowing you’re not alone in this moment of awe, or your own complexity.
This year, something unprecedented arrives: The Oracle of Spirit Lake, a top-secret installation that transforms the entire lakefront show into participatory experience. Each night, the Oracle shifts, and you become part of the unfolding narrative rather than just witness to it. The specifics remain mysterious (and should), but standing in that threshold with thousands of others, you feel it: the Oracle invites you into the same sacred unknowing, all of you finally allowed to stop performing control and admit what you cannot understand.
Fiddlehead, by Justin Bolognino and RÜTS, built by Hoodie Salinas and the Majestix Design team, premieres as a massive Fibonacci fern sculpture – a mathematical expression of how nature grows, spirals, expands infinitely from a single point. At night, projection mapping brings the Fibonacci spiral to life with light and shadows dancing across its geometric form, blending science fiction with lush natural fantasy. Suddenly, it feels both futuristic and ancient, technological and organic. It’s a visualization of consciousness itself, spiraling from existence of one, into collective complexity and interconnection. It feels like nature’s code, a map for your own expansion.
Blood Ov Babalon, an evocative ode to the Great Goddess by Matt Bosch, brings the divine feminine into sharp focus with a sculptural form that embodies power and sensuality simultaneously. Far from objectifying imagery, the sculpture is a reminder that creative power, generative force, and sacred sexuality are an inseparable part of our wholeness. The primal aspects of the divine feminine are part of all beings, and ours to honor and integrate.
When you stop performing brightness and allow yourself to be seen in your darkness, something shifts. You came alone, carrying secrets. You’re leaving having realized you were never alone at all, and your shadows were never meant to be carried in isolation.
Standing in darkness watching light and shadow dance across water, you realize; you cannot know yourself without acknowledging your shadows, and you cannot truly belong until you stop hiding them. The parts of you that are hidden, dark, mysterious, complicated, contradictory, and afraid are the other half that makes you whole. When you stop performing brightness and allow yourself to be seen in your darkness, you find your integration with the light.
You came feeling like your shadows made you separate, like the parts of you that don’t fit were barriers to belonging. You leave understanding that everyone here carries darkness they thought made them untouchable. In that shared rawness, you finally felt actually seen.
The medicine of this path isn’t internal reflection or external activation. It’s the recognition that shadow work is not solitary work; it’s communal work. Wholeness isn’t achieved by transcending your darkness, but by integrating it, standing beside others who are doing the same. It’s what becomes possible when thousands of people gather in darkness and collectively say: I’m here, I’m whole, shadows and all. That collective acknowledgment of our shared humanity and complexity, is what helps transmute our darkness into light.
WHAT YOU CARRY FORWARD
When you leave Spirit Lake on November 2nd, you carry more than memories.
If you came as a witness, you carry images that became your internal guides. The Witch’s defiance. The Ferryman’s ancestral knowing. The Rock Hands’ playfulness. Months later, you’ll catch yourself thinking about them unexpectedly, and something in your nervous system will settle. You learned that transformation doesn’t require your active participation. Sometimes it requires your presence and willingness to stand still and let beauty reshape what you understand about yourself and belonging.
If you came as an embodied participant, you carry the knowledge of your own generative power. Your body learned what it feels like to move through a space where every element has been designed with consciousness in mind. Your nervous system experienced being held by artistic vision and thousands of people engaged in the same exploration. You realized you weren’t consuming art, but were birthing it in co-creation. Every movement mattered, and your exploration activated what surrounded you. You learned that magic emerges from the playful dance between individual choice and the forces of the world around you.
If you came as a nocturnal seeker, you carry the dissolution itself. You found permission to move through shadow, and the recognition that your darkness is the very ground where authentic connection happens. Your body learned what happens when you stop performing brightness, and instead stand in collective witness to shared complexity. You learned that wholeness is achieved not by transcending your shadows, but by integrating them, and standing beside others who are doing the same.
These three medicines converge into a single truth: the installation isn’t the sculptures, projections, or stages. The installation is you. The transformed version that walks out when the weekend ends, the expanded capacity you’ve developed, and the permission you’ve given yourself to be fully alive, expressed, and part of something larger than yourself. That’s what you carry forward, and what makes you part of the HulaFam permanently, whether this is your first year or your thirteenth.
THE INVITATION
Spirit Lake doesn’t exist to impress you, though it likely will. It exists to change you.
It shows you what becomes possible when visionary artists, intentional design, live music, fire, projection, shadow play, and thousands of people gather with openness to transformation. It reminds you that you’re part of a community that values creative expression, playful intentionality, and collective magic. It gives you permission to be the fullest, most authentic version of yourself.
If you’re not yet sure which medicine calls to you, that’s the point. Come and find it; as witness, participant, seeker, or all three across the weekend. Discover what your nervous system needs to remember about creation, belonging, and your own wholeness.
October 30 til November 2, 2025. Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park, Live Oak, Florida.
Join us in the Radiant Veil.
Limited tickets remain available at hulaween.com
