Attending the Vashon Island Red Tent Gathering became an unexpected encounter with a kind of community Lindy West had expected to mock. Sent by The Stranger to cover a women’s circle centered on menstrual cycles, she arrived doubtful of its spiritual language and uneasy with its intimacy. What changed was not her skepticism so much as her sense of what skepticism permitted: she could question the group’s beliefs without treating its members’ sincerity as something to punish.

Invitation and reluctance

In August 2010, The Stranger received an email from Vashon Red Tent advertising the arrival of a Red Tent Temple Sisterhood on Vashon Island, accessible by ferry from Seattle. The organization described a movement that would bring women of different ages together regularly to share stories, support one another, and honor monthly menstrual cycles. West, who knew little about the movement beyond her college roommate’s enthusiasm for Anita Diamant’s novel The Red Tent, found the prospect alien and faintly alarming. Her newspaper nevertheless assigned the story to her.

West brought her friend Jenny and nearly missed the ferry. During the trip, she noticed a woman wearing high-waisted jeans and a T-shirt decorated with cats in sunglasses playing saxophones. The sight prompted West to write that there were many ways to be a woman, a thought that quietly anticipated the gathering’s challenge to narrow expectations of femininity. Although they were running late, West and Jenny stopped at a grocery store for boxed wine and jelly beans. They ate the sweets in the parking lot and drank as much wine as the limited time allowed, using humor and small rituals of their own to manage their nerves.

West had almost turned back. She described herself as clinical, like her mother, and said she preferred magic as escapism; treating supernatural claims as real made their distance from ordinary reality more apparent to her. Before going in, she texted her sister, who loved ritual, for advice. Her sister urged her to remain open. West and Jenny then removed their shoes and joined the women sitting on pillows beneath a canopy of homemade red scarves inside a community center. It was less a formal tent than a pillow fort, but the improvised room became the setting for the gathering.

Inside the circle

The women were talking about chocolate. Their speculation ranged from the idea of a chocolate goddess to a suggestion that chocolate’s unusual molecular structure might mean it came from another planet. One participant passed a Hershey’s bar around the circle, treating the shared handling of it as a reason it tasted better. The humor and earnestness coexisted: West recognized the scene as a cliché, yet found herself immediately fond of the women. There was also chanting, and the group listened as Isla, the circle’s leader, spoke about an astrological configuration called the Cardinal Cross. Isla said the configuration had not occurred since the time of Jesus and described local angel healers as occupied with holding its energy.

West did not take the group’s spiritual explanations as fact. Her sister later made a playful connection between angels and aliens, including the possibility that they had brought the chocolate. That response echoed the gathering’s blend of cosmic claims and ordinary pleasure without resolving West’s doubts. The difference was that the circle did not require her to settle those doubts before she could participate.

The most direct exercise came when the women went around the circle and shared intentions for the coming moon cycle. Many spoke in terms of balance, rhythm, and manifestation, language West did not fully understand. One woman named ending rape as her intention; West chose organizing her apartment and felt that her own aim sounded mundane. The other women approved rather than judging the difference. Their acceptance matched the movement’s stated promise of a place where younger women could ask questions and find mentors without qualification.

Other conversation remained outside West’s understanding. One woman said she felt transformed after a twenty-four-strand DNA activation performed by a specially trained practitioner with a crystal wand. She described twenty-two spiritual strands beyond the two physical ones, a process said to take ten hours, and a golden gate intended for larger groups. Another participant connected DNA activation to the Mayan calendar. West asked what the practice meant but remained unconvinced and confused. Her account preserves that distance while also showing that disbelief did not prevent her from staying in the circle or receiving its welcome.

Leaving the gathering

After hours sitting cross-legged on pillows, West and Jenny left with their legs numb. They ate more jelly beans in the car and talked about their feelings. The physical awkwardness of the visit did not cancel its emotional effect. West continued to suspect that belief might be what made such practices work for the women who embraced them, but she also acknowledged that sitting in their world for a few hours had been surprisingly nurturing. The gathering’s value, in her account, did not depend on her adopting its cosmology.

That distinction matters to the event’s aftermath. Back at the office, West expected that her job was to make fun of the gathering, yet she found she did not want to. The women had been gracious and earnest, and she questioned the purpose of hurting them simply because their sincerity made easy material. She connected this response to a wider reconsideration of her earlier efforts to seem cool: writing mean jokes for cheap laughs, neglecting good friendships, disavowing feminism, and accommodating casual misogyny in hopes of being liked by men. The Red Tent visit made those choices newly visible as choices, not simply habits of a professional persona.

Significance for West

West did not present the gathering as a conversion or claim that its beliefs had become her own. She wondered instead how long it might otherwise have taken her to understand that she could choose what kind of person to be: open or closed, generous or cruel, a writer who could do more than ridicule. The circle’s total approval of an ordinary intention offered a practical example of welcome that did not depend on matching everyone else’s language or aims.

She also connected the gathering’s promise of space for women to the labor that often leaves little room for women themselves. Her father worked all day; her mother worked all day and then made dinner. In that context, the Red Tent’s insistence that women could gather and replenish themselves held meaning even for a visitor who did not believe in most of its spiritual framework. West’s final reflection turns from the circle’s unfamiliar rituals to the limited time available to live well: she did not believe in an afterlife, and concluded that one life made it important to do a good job with it. The encounter’s decisive effect was therefore ethical rather than supernatural. It gave West a reason to take sincerity seriously and to regard generosity as a form of authorship as well as a way of living.