I’m trying something new this year, and pushing to get my Burning Man reflections and wrap-up blog posts done in the first few days after I get home, instead of weeks later. I didn’t keep a journal at the burn like I usually do (because reasons, none of which are particularly compelling), so I am feeling some sense of urgency to try to remember and set down as much as I can while I still have a little dust left around me. Not letting it sit and stew for a few weeks may mean that the lessons and themes from this year’s burn are still a little unclear, but perhaps doing this write up will help to clarify them.
As usual though, you are welcome to click here if you want to just skip to the end of all this detail and read the list of lessons and takeaways, and click here if all you want to do is look at the pretty pictures with captions. And if you are unfamiliar with Burning Man in general, you can go read some of my initial entries from 2011 in which I do lots of ‘splainin’, or click here to go to the official Burning Man web site which has more info and content and things to look at than you can possibly imagine. (But don’t get lost, come back here eventually!)
It was another busy overwhelming summer for me and especially for Josh, so as soon as The Game Academy summer camp finally ended in early August we spent a few weeks frantically prepping and packing All The Things (as Josh commented, we bring the equivalent of a small apartment out to the desert with us every year, because we are glampers and unrepentant just-in-casers). Once again Josh decided to go up early to playa (he left Tuesday with Anji) in order to help build camp, and I stayed behind to get the kids started with Back-to-School and finish the last few pre-burn to-dos. Luckily we didn’t have any major burn projects to work on this year (Josh had to do some fixes to the water bar; I made another scallop coat and put together a little Pink Heart gifting ritual, which I’ll get to in a bit) so it was really “just” getting all our stuff together and loaded (which is harder than it sounds because as I said above, it’s a LOT of stuff).
Anyway...Saturday morning Mom and I packed our coolers and the few remaining things that didn’t go on the truck with Josh and Anji into our trusty minivan and left on Saturday afternoon to head up to Reno to stay at the Silver Legacy. We met up with our Pink Heart friends Ari and Mel there on Saturday evening and had a fun dinner and hangout time with them. We all decided to get up at 4am on Sunday morning (the gate had already opened at midnight) and have breakfast and get on the road by 6am. We caravanned with Ari and Mel and stopped at our traditional Love’s travel stop in Fernley for gas and last minute snacks and then got on the road to Black Rock City by around 7am. The traffic in to Black Rock City was surprisingly light (took us about 2.5 hours from Fernley to the gate, including a brief potty stop) and we were all super excited to hear BMIR (the Burning Man radio station) announce that the wait time at the gate was “only” about 2 hours. As it turned out, it took us closer to four hours from pavement to camp, but it wasn’t a bad wait. For me the real start to the burn is always in the gate line, where we all get to “practice” the kind of interactions we want to have and identities we want to inhabit for the week while we are still relatively free of other distractions.
So as it turned out, right as we pulled up to the end of the line of stopped cars after jouncing over the dusty gate road at 5 mph, I was gifted with my first taste of playa magic: one of the people in the car in front of us turned out to be my handpan buddy Reid. I asked him if he had brought his handpan, which he had, so we sat down right there in the dust and jammed on our handpans. Ari even joined us for a bit on his djembe. It was awesome!
We met some other cool people in line too, and had some nice conversations. I particularly remember a pair of Spanish guys I spent some time talking to, one of whom I wound up giving a playa name to (because he asked me to). I asked him some questions about what was up in his life right now, and what he was working on for himself at this burn, and he started talking about how he was always doing things for other people and how he wanted to start paying more attention to himself (I’m totally paraphrasing here). So I gave him a couple of ideas and then we settled on “O2”, which stood for oxygen (because we were talking about oxygen mask theory, where you have to learn how to put your own mask on before you can help others with theirs). His name was Alberto and so the pun of “o, too” was kind of neat also.
We finally got to camp some time around 1:30 or 2, and were able to pull right in and hug people and start unloading. It was beastly hot though, so we didn’t do a whole lot of schlepping and we were encouraged by Josh and others who had been there for days and were used to the survival siesta schedule to wait to put up Mom’s tent (which technically was already up, but had to be moved elsewhere). So I put my few things into the yurt which Josh had so nicely set up and prepared for me, and took a quick look out at the frontage and the playa around us, and mostly ran around hugging people and saying hello. I was really happy to see Josh (it was his birthday!) and also all the other Pinkies I knew. It felt great to be home with my PHamily, and to be so heartily welcomed by so many people I was excited to see.
Even though the heat and the dust and the pinkness and of course the people made it feel like Burning Man, it took me a while to really feel like I had arrived. That whole first day I’m usually all discombobulated from switching modes (not to mention switching climates). I finally started to feel like I was really there late in the afternoon on Sunday, when I was standing on top of Headspace (Pink Heart’s amazing art car) and looking out over the city (the Headspace folks had a bunch of us come on board and jump up and down a few times so they could do some weight testing). Kathy and Anji and other sweet friends were there with me and I was able to look around me at all the familiar/unfamiliar dusty places and people and really arrive.
Some time after that Josh and I (and another Pinkie friend, Bryan I believe) helped Mom move and set up her tent but we couldn’t find the rebar puller so we couldn’t put up her EZ-up shade over it. There was a camp dinner, and some fun Pinkie reunion time, but we didn’t do much else on Sunday evening (even though it was Josh’s birthday), because we were so tired from the intense heat and the remaining bits of set up. Plus I had an early morning Greeter shift that started at 4am so I kept it mellow that night. Josh and I retired to our yurt and snuggled and slept for a few hours until it was time for me to get up and meet up with Anji, Michelle, and Kathy so we could bike all the way out to the Greeter station for our volunteer shift.
[Radical Rituals at Burning Man: Part 1]
[Radical Rituals at Burning Man: Part 2]
[Radical Rituals at Burning Man: Part 3]
[Radical Rituals at Burning Man: Part 4]
[Radical Rituals at Burning Man: Part 5]
[Radical Rituals at Burning Man: Part 6]
[Radical Rituals at Burning Man: Part 7]
[Radical Rituals at Burning Man: Part 8]
[Radical Rituals at Burning Man: Part 9]
[Full set of Radical Ritual pictures on Facebook]