Mon 17 Jan 2022 • Ella Wroath
Becoming the Circus
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Winter 2020 | Wild Fronteirs
Sitting here in our London flat, gearing up for an English Christmas and New Year, it’s easy to forget the wild ride that ended for us a few months back. This time last year, I was living on a deserted beach in Panama, with very little power or electricity, no schooling for my kids and absolutely no internet!
We’d boarded a plane a month before to embark on a Central American Adventure after testing the waters by living in France and Spain for a year. The thing that struck me as I walked through those boarding gates was just how incredibly resilient and strong the human spirit can be when driven by a vision and idea of a better life. We had no idea what we were in for - Roman is terrified of snakes, I of spiders, my kids had on their little backpacks looking heartbreakingly cute as they walked through the narrow corridor leading us onto the giant bird. As always, we had followed our instincts, a few signs, synchronicities, and our sense of adventure to begin yet another new chapter, to find out who we were and just how much we could withstand before the safety of home called us back.
Landing in Panama was a shock after the grace and decadence of the South of France. As we travelled to the house we were ‘sitting’ for 3 months, the taxi driver regaled us with tales of all the poisonous snakes and spiders we would encounter. I remember dozing off in the back of the cab next to my kids and coming to an hour later thinking ‘good god, I just had the most awful dream that I was on my way to a house in Panama where I would encounter my greatest fears.’ To then wake up fully and realise that it was not in fact a dream but reality and I’m not sure I have ever been that scared in my whole life.
Upon arriving to our new home, all four of us crawled into one bed for safety with Roman and I spending the night awake, watching over our two boys convinced a giant tarantula was going to crawl into our bed and kill us all!
Nonetheless, we survived! I home-schooled our boys on an empty Pacific beach each day, we caught and cooked our own fish, and we trekked through jungles and drove over treacherous terrains to find internet to continue running our business. Every day our power would fail, our shower stopped working, and we washed up in the sea bathed in dreamy pink sunsets. At night we kept watch as local Columbians moored up on our beach, up to God knows what and woke up every morning to pelicans floating across the calm ocean as the sun rose to yet another day in this crazy, beautiful place.
Those 3 months changed us all forever. We unplugged from the world of screens, advertising, shops, and life as we knew it. In those three months, we tuned into something that was far more powerful. That place quite literally broke us open and rebuilt us into different humans, capable of so much more than we had ever realised.
The inspiration for Soul Circus 2019 was built out of that year we spent in the jungle. The connection to the earth, to each other, and to our own inner intelligence was something I wanted to bring back to safe little England where the insects are small and our horizons smaller.
The need for more us to open up a little more to what this existence actually offers us. We’re all busy staring at screens and at other people’s lives, as if we’ll see something that will suddenly inspire us or change our own lives. To really make something happen, you need to drag yourself very drastically out of your comfort zone and level up to what you were put on this earth to do.
Running a festival for 5 years has taught me a lot about believing in a vision that no one else can see yet. Working on an event for a year and creating a weekend like no other whist not really knowing what will happen means that when it finally arrives nerves of steel and a great deal of wine are required!
Our first festival in 2016 we did just 6 weeks after our 2nd son Niko was born. We wanted to strike while the iron was hot and knew that as a business we could not wait around. Queue me strapping a newborn to my chest and directing a festival in the pouring rain! This was the first of many moments when I would realise that the only thing that will ever hold you back is yourself.
It would have been very easy to chicken out of that first year. I didn’t know what kind of birth I would have and I definitely had no idea how to run a festival! But by god, I’m so grateful for my naivety at that time, because Soul Circus is my proudest and greatest achievement. Born out of sheer belief in an idea and absolute brute strength of character from myself and my husband that we could achieve something that had never been done.
The message my heart wants to share through Soul Circus is that we are all amazing human beings with such beautiful and unique gifts that can literally light up the world. We often shy away from the real work, scared of breaking, being vulnerable or making a mistake. The real work is breaking, it is falling, it is losing everything and starting all over. It requires you to prove only to yourself what it is that you are capable of.
We are living in times when it is absolutely necessary to rise up and be the person you put on this earth to be. Your shining light, your blessing to this earth is part of something much much greater that will contribute to the infinite grace and beauty of our future.
The only way to stay true to this path is to stay true to yourself. Treat yourself like you were the most precious child of the universe because you are. No more talking down to yourself or doubting your abilities, you are made for so much more than that.
Be open to the power of possibility and change, manifest the absolute shit out of the life you would love to lead and march towards it like that is the only direction there is to go, because it is.
Share your heart with the world and the world will share its heart with you.
