Once again Burning Man has come and gone and this year, more than any other year, it has taken me way longer than I had anticipated to write up my burn experiences. But I had really good reasons. (More on that after the Burning Man posts, as I’m trying to stay vaguely sequential in this here blog format.) Unfortunately because of the delay most of the more fine-grained detail has been fuzzed out or lost, but I at least do want to set down the things I do remember before they completely vanish.

As always, impatient readers (and honestly, I hope there are not many of you here because my constant digressions must drive you crazy) can skim and look at the pics or click through to the full set of pics on Flickr or Facebook, or you can skip to the final entry by clicking here to see my summary of this year’s takeaways. And if you are unfamiliar with Burning Man in general, you can click here to go look at my posts from my first year in 2011, in which I explain stuff, or go look at the official Burning Man web site.

So. Before I go into the details of each day of Burning Man, let me digress briefly with a little prologue. 2015 was my fifth burn and Josh’s fourth, and it was a big year for us for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, it was a big year because we stepped up this year as makers and helped create and co-manage a huge (well, huge for us) art project for Pink Heart: the Pink Heart Carnival. The Burning Man theme for 2015 was the Carnival of Mirrors, and I was already excited about the thematic overlap between the Carnival theme and my Fly Your Freak Flag High project and wanting to do some sort of “freak show” art piece to coordinate. But then as often happens other people got excited about the theme too and some of our campmates started talking about creating interactive carnival games to have at Pink Heart, like the fuzzy dice that Aimee had brought the year before. So in typical Burning Man fashion the idea snowballed into an elaborate multi-faceted art installation and Josh and I wound up committing to make the biggest and most complicated pieces for it, and we also wound up leading the entire project build over at our house. (Anyone who remembers the Temple of Renewal shower project we did a few years earlier is probably completely unsurprised that this happened.)

Once again, working on a big build project in the months leading up to the burn meant that we experienced a lot of our burn ahead of time. Like the Temple of Renewal project, we got ambitious and wound up creating a much bigger and more elaborate project than anyone probably expected, and we sometimes despaired of having enough time or help. On the other hand, unlike that Temple building experience, we (sort of) knew what we were agreeing to get into this time with the Carnival, were operating with better overall building and planning experience, and had more distribution of labor and more help on the actual building and painting parts than we’d had before. We had a tight little Carnival team that did most of the work in reasonably good spirits and overall had good communication, and we felt like we had good moral and practical support from Pink Heart (though this time we also had much more realistic expectations ahead of time about how much help and support we would actually need or get).

And our Pink Heart Carnival turned out great, if I do say so myself (and I do, because it’s my blog!) More about the Carnival itself to come in part 1, but for now I’ll just say I was really proud of what we created, and because the Carnival was placed right across the Esplanade from Pink Heart on the playa, it was really gratifying that what we made was shared with and appreciated by a much bigger audience than the Temple of Renewal ever was. I had initially been nervous about how this project would or wouldn’t “prove” my identity as an artist, but I wound up feeling like I had succeeded at a difficult challenge and that felt really good. 

But there is also another reason that 2015 was a momentous burn year, and that’s because this was the year that I brought my mom to Burning Man. I know, bringing your parents to Burning Man is apparently a thing now, but from the first time I went I knew that my mom the amazing artist, ex-hippie and heart-full seeker would love it too, and I was eager to both facilitate the experience and enjoy being there together with her. It took a few years for the stars and the logistics of bringing her to align properly, but this was finally the year and it turned out to be as awesome as I thought it would be. There were certainly a lot of logistics in bringing newbies again (she brought her friend Rhoda along too), and we had some bumpy times together, but overall I think she had a fabulous experience and she is already planning for next year. :)

[Click here for Part 1]

[Click here for the full set of 2015 Carnival of Mirrors pictures on Flickr and Facebook]