Working It Out at Da Vinci’s Workshop: Burning Man 2016, Part 5 (Kostume Kult, Art Adventures, and Helios Burn)
Friday we were supposed to have a volunteer space on Headspace but it was broken and not going anywhere, so we had a day free of commitments to explore and play and do whatever we wanted. What that turned out to be was a slow start and some fun chill time in the back of camp with various friends over at our camp neighbors Deron and Suneeta’s place, and then Mom and Kathy and I decided to go over to our neighboring camp, Kostume Kult, for some free costumes. We’d been hearing them all week with their very loud sound system and often obnoxious MCs talking about the people strutting the runway, but we hadn’t yet gotten around to the whole Kostume Kult experience. What is the Kostume Kult experience you ask? I will share. First we went and waited in line along the edge of their frontage, which looked like a graffiti’d metro car cut in half, and watched people who had acquired their new costume pieces come do a parade down a long elevated runway that led from the curtained back of their frontage up to the Esplanade. Then we were welcomed in groups to pass through a curtain and into a large tented space full of clothing racks and bins on tables and wall clips full of costumes and accessories. A lot of what they had there were actual costumes (e.g. the low quality kind made for Halloween and other costume events that you might find at a Spirit store) as opposed to just fanciful costume pieces, but because burners could also bring things to gift (we didn’t, although apparently if you did you were allowed to skip the line), there was some random one-off stuff in the mix too. After browsing around we all found some fun things to try on, which we did over in one corner of the tent. Kathy found a beautiful long pink tropical flower print dress with little ruffles on the neck and sleeves, Mom found a black gauzy overshirt and a bright pink Mad Hatter soft top hat, and I found a silly “Lady Luck” costume which was a long stretchy green dress with three-dimensional foam dice as shoulders (being a long time tabletop gamer, I could not resist a costume with dice), a gold horseshoe insert at the neckline and a gold chain “belt” with a four-leaf clover, a small foam die, fake rabbits feet and a heart hanging from it, paired with an oversized “leprechaun” green top hat with a fake gold buckle on it. Once we were satisfied with the things we found and ready to take them away, we put them on and exited the tent, where we waited in a much shorter line to go show them off on the runway. It was fun to strut down the runway dancing to the music and doing model twirls; the MCs were obnoxious and loud but generally supportive. Sadly, at some point in the trying on fuss I lost my sunglasses, and even though I went back right away to look for them, there was no way of finding them in all the piles and bins of stuff. (I lost a lot of things—sunglasses, water bottle, buff, earrings, flashlight—at the burn this year, like little aftershocks of the bigger losses I had experienced during the year between last burn and this one. But they were very clearly just things, and though I was sad to see them go, it didn’t bother me that much.)
We went back to camp to show off (and in my case, take off) our finds, and hung around for a bit longer with our campmates, until finally at some point in the afternoon Anjanette and I motivated to go out on another playa art adventure. (I got to spend a lot more time with my bestie at this burn than I had anticipated, and that was a real joy.) She wanted to climb on the giant warthog, which even though it was not spinning anymore looked too hard and dangerous for me, so I declined and cheered her on and took pictures from the ground. She made it all the way to the top and back again with no incident.
One other cool highlight from that set of art adventures was a piece that I later found was called “Doors to Recovery” but which Anjanette and I were calling the Lotus Temple (there was a giant and gorgeous Lotus Temple we had spent some time in the year before, but this was much smaller). It was a room-sized, lilac purple octagonal structure with a conical roof, and a big white lotus flower at the top of the roof. Each facet of the octagon had a door in it, and each door was painted with a beautiful painting and a question above it, which said things like “what makes your heart sing?” or “what sets your soul on fire?”. There were a few fill-in-the-blank questions too like “addiction is...” or “a natural high is...” or “self-love is...”. You chose a door to enter through, and once you entered you realized that (not surprisingly, given the size of the building) all doors led to the same interior space. Right in front of you when you first entered were chalkboard-painted walls punctuated with open entryways into an inner room. The chalkboard walls had the same questions as the outer doors above them, and space and chalk to write your answers below.
On one of them I wrote the same “everything is going to be okay in the end...if it’s not okay, it’s not the end” quote that had become such a theme for me this burn. The inner room inside the chalkboard walls was mirrored and at the top of the walls were two long quotes, one of which said “The lotus flower begins from mud and darkness, finding the strength to rise to the light and bloom its beautiful flower,” which is a flowery version of one of Anjanette’s favorite quotes ("no mud, no lotus") and similar to my own love for the “suffering cracks us open and lets the light in” philosophy. The ceiling inside that inner room was hung with gorgeous pierced-metal lanterns with purple light inside, and the whole thing was really beautiful. It was the perfect art piece for the two of us.
After we got back to camp that afternoon, I don’t remember much else besides climbing up on someone’s RV to look at the beautiful sunset and getting ready to go out for the evening again. We did at some point go over to Moon Cheese to get some late night grilled cheese (our camp had loaned their camp some room in our refrigerator truck so they let us cut the line to get our grilled cheese). So they brought us out a big metal bowl full of sandwiches and we got to nibble on warm grilled cheese while listening to awesome live music next door at Crossroads. After that a group of Pinkies went over to see the Helios burn at midnight, which was gorgeous and exciting and started with a ton of fireworks. It was the first big burn I’d been to that week and it got the burn excitement going for sure.
Thursday morning I had to get up bright and early to run my 
Another thing I noticed about the FYFFH workshop this year was that we had many fewer people participating this year (probably only about 20 folks over the course of the two hours), but they were all really into the activity. Many who did participate took it really seriously and spent quite a bit of time making their flags. I had one woman tell me how making her flag really helped her clarify and bring into focus some of the big epiphanies about her burn, and she really appreciated having a way to create a physical memento to remind her of them. Cool! With so relatively few people to manage, I had more time to connect and hear people’s stories about their flags and what they put on them, and really give people the gift of being seen and heard. (I especially enjoyed chatting with a young man from Boston who gave me enthusiastic recommendations about “livetronica” bands from Philly to listen to after I asked him about the logo he’d put on his flag.) My friend Ron came by during the workshop and made a flag and we got to catch up a bit, which was great, and my new artist friend and camp-mate Deron came and made a flag too.
Around 11am people were starting to gather for Halcyon’s 
After the hug-fest broke up, Josh and I decided to linger a while at Center Camp. I wanted to check out the stage there where I would be performing later that evening, plus I’d been promising myself a cup of iced coffee. (I’d been mostly off caffeine since my chemo treatments started back in January, and this was my ritual welcoming it back.) It was, as hoped, just as delicious as always and I talked really fast for a little while but otherwise didn’t feel particularly jittery or anything. We sipped and scoped out the scene for a little while and then decided to go on a mini-art adventure on the way back to camp. So we headed back up the 6:00 spoke towards the Man again, with the intention of spending some time at the interactive workshop area around it. On the way we detoured to check out two amazing giant gorilla sculptures (official name was apparently “Seeing Humanity for What It Really Is”) made of cardboard over wooden frames, and met the artist there who was making some repairs to one of the gorillas. We also got a chance to stop and appreciate more fully the “Inside the Mind of Da Vinci” sculpture and meet the artist Mischell, whom I had recently friended on Facebook after seeing an interview Halcyon did with her when he was at the Generator in Reno. I really admired that particular art piece and how beautifully it was sculpted. Josh and I did the typical Burning Man thing of climbing on it, and took a few pictures, and then we biked out to the Man plaza to see what was going on there.
Josh had been really eager to check out the blacksmith/metal-working workshops in the plaza, but they were either closed or way too crowded while we were there so we kept looking around instead. We got sucked in to a brief activity where people put on togas and arranged themselves around a backdrop that looked like the Last Supper and took pictures, and we stood in line (and chatted with people) for a bit to make leather-stamped pendants. There were other things to make but Josh didn’t want to get too deeply involved in anything so we mostly just looked around at what was there. It was also getting pretty dust-stormy (which is typical for midafternoon) so we eventually just gave up and decided to bike home. We stopped on the way at the porta-potties because Josh had to use them, but I didn’t so I went over to the nearest big art sculpture, the giant Medusa head. While I was sitting there waiting for him a big whiteout dust storm blew through—I could barely see the giant sculpture in front of me and for sure couldn’t see the porta-potties beyond that. I had a brief anxiety that Josh wouldn’t be able to find me after he came out of the potties, but as it turned out the whiteout eased pretty quickly and it wasn’t a problem. Still, we were pretty dusty when we got back to camp, so I decided to change before going back to Center Camp for my handpan jam.
I had to go over to Center Camp a little early and check in before my scheduled stage time, and Josh and a few other Pinkies came with me (Ali and Keith, Anthony and Kathy, Mom, I’m probably forgetting others). I was pretty nervous, having never played handpan on a stage with microphones and an actual audience, but everyone at the backstage was very nice and helpful and made me feel respected as a performer. Josh was with me backstage for a while but then he went back out front to get a good spot to watch and take video from. No other players showed up to jam with me (which I had mostly expected), so it was just me up on stage, at least for the first few songs. I hadn’t really prepared any specific songs or set list, so it was really just me improvising and playing whatever came into my head. (The only problem with the spontaneous improv method was that I felt like I was being too repetitive/not diverse enough in my rhythms so that everything I was playing sounded similar and by the end of the half hour I started to run out of new ideas/things to play—next time I do this I’ll prepare a bit better and at least make sure to have some variation in my seed rhythms or something.) After the first few improv pieces I did alone, Ali came up on stage to sing with me, and we improvised several pieces together. That was really fun—she mostly sang wordless hums and trills but for the last piece she started to put some words in to what she was singing and I really liked the way that we sounded together. (It reminded me of some of the jams in the 
After my official stage time was over, Josh and I were wandering slowly out of Center Camp and chatting with one of the people who’d been at the concert. He wanted to try the handpan, so we stopped at one of the benches and I let him play, and we had a nice little interaction there for a bit. We told him we were heading back over to Pink Heart and he told us a story about a negative experience he’d had there with our campmate Deron, who had apparently mocked his headpiece (he was wearing a goofy, colorful, little mini-hat/fascinator thing). We were surprised to hear about that and tried to make him feel better about it, without much success. (We heard another side of the story later on from Deron, and I think the whole thing just proves that we often hear what we want to hear and that some people are very sensitive to and have a hard time letting go of perceived offense or ridicule).
Thursday evening Josh and I went out with some other Pinkies for more playa art adventures. Highlights of that particular journey were Helios (which Josh climbed on and helped activate), the Black Rock City Lighthouse Service (which we did not climb on because it was too crowded and we were too flittery and now I’m sorry we didn’t), and the Sonic Tunnel (which we did walk through and it was awesome.) We also saw a several-stories-tall sculpture with red sails that I never learned the name of that flapped and fluttered beautifully in the wind. I really was intrigued by the concept of wind art this burn. I really love the movement of fabric and wind and the playa is a perfect place to play with that (there was another very simple but pretty sculpture not far from Pink Heart which was just three large triangular flags in a row made from something white (silk?) that caught the wind really easily and rippled and snapped, and a camp near us that had a whole lot of brightly neon-colored flags and streamers all over their camp). I feel really inspired to do another big freak flag art installation either next year or the year after using fabric (as opposed to the rebar ones I made a few years ago)...stay tuned!
So now it is Wednesday morning and even though Our Heroine still has not slept, and neither has her bestie co-conspirator Anjanette, we decided it would be a good time to finally go to the Temple (which had apparently just opened that morning). We went to go freshen up a bit and I checked back in with Josh, but he was still sleepy and didn’t want to come with us. I changed into my Wednesday white outfit (which seemed fitting for a Temple visit) and grabbed my plaster bust art piece and then Anjanette and I biked over to the Temple. We split up when we got there (Anjanette had her own processing to do and I wanted to be by myself for a while) and I walked around the inner walkway for a bit, looking for a place that felt right to leave my offering. I finally settled on a corner of one of the four archways that led into the main sanctuary room.
Then I found a place to sit down about 20 feet away with my back against a support pole where I could still see the offering I’d left, and I had a good cry for a long time, just thinking about everything that had happened in the last year and all the scary, painful, violating bits that I’d had to be so courageous through, and that now I was finally ready to release and burn away. I especially remember running my hands through my (still very short) hair and weeping for all the things I’d lost, and all the changes I’d been forced to absorb. After a while of that I was finally ready to re-read a copy of the letter to myself that I had written before I left (and which I’d taped a copy of to the inside of the bust so it could burn too.) I’m not going to reproduce the whole thing here (because believe it or not I do keep *some* things private), but for posterity (and extra juju) I will share the last couple paragraphs:
I also wordlessly hugged a couple of strangers who wandered by with grieving faces—there is something really special and moving about meeting and acknowledging a mutual experience raw open grief, no matter what it’s about or where it comes from. Eventually Anjanette came and found me and sat with me and we hugged and cried together for a bit. I gave her a rock from the spot where we sat and she gave me one too. We talked some and sat quietly some until eventually we were ready to get up and go. Leaving the Temple I felt tired and somber but also cleaner and lighter, having finally observed the major part of the closure ritual that I’d been anticipating for so many months.
On the way back to camp we couldn’t resist diverting a bit to see some playa art. We took pictures in the big picture frame and at the “HOME” and “EARTH” metal letters installation. (We also saw Mark Day, the 
When we got back after all excitement I decided I was finally tired enough to take a nap. Luckily this year we had brought an actual portable air conditioning unit to go in our yurt so I was able to get a couple hours of sleep even though it was the hot part of the day.
When I was done with the water bar I wandered back to our yurt and found Josh outside in our shade patio talking to our friend Mary (aka Pom-pom, a friend from back in our Sacred Spaces/Yaboogie Pod days). We had a joyful reunion and some catch-up hangout time, but eventually it started to get dark and she wanted to leave. We gave her some lights and promised to meet up again for burn night like we usually do.
While we were messing around with the tattoos, a dreadlocked guy with glasses showed up, asking for me. It turned out to be Miguel, a handpan player who’d seen my post on the handpan.org forum about jamming at Burning Man and had come by to find me. (He had stopped by and asked for me the previous day too, but I’d missed him.) I told him I was going to be leaving soon and he said “but are you leaving right meow meow?” He’d brought his pan and wanted to play at least a little bit, which was hard to resist. So I ran back to my yurt and got out my Saraz and brought it up to the front. Miguel turned out to be an amazing player in that super-fast percussive kind of style, which I couldn’t really keep up with (and it made me feel kind of shy and inferior so mostly we just listened to him play. He had to leave after a few minutes to go play a concert next door, so we only had a brief encounter, but I’m glad we connected even though it gave me that burst of inadequacy. I tried to get him to come play with me the next day during the time slot I’d booked at the Center Camp stage, but he was non-committal.
Anyway after all that (and I never did get around to the tattoos), we finally motivated as a group and headed out to the White Party. I remember there being a cool little conversation between Halcyon and Josh about a bunch of philosophical stuff (I think Halcyon was riffing off Josh’s “Mystic” playa name). We found Anjanette right away when we got to Opulent Temple, and had a good time dancing there for a while. (Lea even got to dance with one of the jellyfish.) I especially had fun grooving with my torofluxes there. We randomly ran in to our buddy Alex from Sacred Spaces there, and shared a sweet hug but then lost track of each other. Eventually though we got tired (both physically tired and tired of the scene) and headed back to Pink Heart. But of course we detoured through the playa a little on the way home and saw a cool art installation: a big twinkly bright “wishing star” where you could make a wish by putting a wooden star-shaped token over a sensor on a stand set up about 20 feet away from the star, and then when a single star flashed you made a wish on it. A few moments later the whole thing flashed and glowed. Apparently the more each star got wished on, the brighter it glowed. I wished for my cancer to stay gone and for my health to stay strong. It seemed like a fitting end to a day that had started with a visit to the Temple.
Tuesday morning a group of us Pinkies (me, Josh, Mom, Anjanette and Deron) put on our tutus (for Tutu Tuesday, of course) and decided to go on a playa art adventure, spurred in part by reports that the Space Whale baby (more on that in a minute) was wearing a giant tutu in honor of Tutu Tuesday, and in part by Anjanette’s desire to go say hi to our mutual friend Chris (Chrispy) at her camp (ASS camp) a few time zones over. We hopped on our bikes and headed for Center Camp, which is where the Space Whale was located. The Space Whale was an ambitious and amazing project: a life-sized diving blue whale mama made of ball-and-joint metal skeleton skinned with over 1800 panels of gorgeous stained glass designed by Android Jones, with a baby whale rising to meet her. (The baby whale was not skinned with stained glass, but it was, as we’d been promised, wearing a purple tutu that day. Later in the week we spotted a narwhal horn on the baby whale.) We ooohed and aaahhed and I took a bunch of pictures but then we got restless (as you do when you’re on an art adventure) and kept going to ASS camp. We stopped in their lounge and did indeed find Chrispy and hung out with her and some other folks for a bit.
Then we got restless again and went to go look at more art. Highlights included a gorgeous wind-powered kinetic sculpture (made by the same artist who made the Olympic torch for Rio, apparently), a giant spinning metal warthog called “Lord Snort” that you could climb on (though we didn’t at the time, because it looked too intimidating...in fact apparently the spinning got to be too dangerous so they shut that part of it down later in the week), an incredible huge orange and blue octopus made out of concrete surfaced with a mosaic of round ceramic tiles (we met the artist, Peter, and some of his crew out there...they were giving away ceramic stamped octopus pendants and leftover bits of the mosaic tiles, and it was really hot out there with no shade so I told them I’d come back to them with some ice cold cucumber water from Pink Heart), an incredible 12-foot tall bear with “fur” made entirely of pennies pressed edge-way into concrete, and a giant friendly-looking metal robot called “Mechan-9” sprawled out on the playa as though it had just collapsed and been partially buried there, which we climbed all over.
Tuesday evening a bunch of Pinkies got all dolled up and chemically enthused and hopped on Headspace for a “roam around the playa” party, and that was really fun. Headspace was packed with people, not just Pinkies, but there were a lot of us on there. We wandered all over the playa while appreciating the music (our camp-mate Aanshul DJ’d, as did Jonny Quest), the constantly flowing parade of blinky lights and the night-time art. I especially remember how fun it was to be dancing on the top floor of Headspace where the DJ was and the way the whole floor jumped and bounced like a trampoline when the bass dropped and people started hopping and stomping around in unison. It was a little scary at first (I kept thinking “will this thing hold if we all keep jumping up and down like this?”) but ultimately I let go of the worry and it was exhilarating. One of the coolest things we went by was the Sonic Tunnel, which was a series of LED-light hoops set into the playa so that it made a super long tunnel that people could bike or walk through. The lights on the hoops were programmed so that they formed a pattern that shot down the “tunnel” in various configurations. They were sound-activated too so various art cars were parked around it having fun trying to change the patterns.
At the end of the night I also remember being upstairs leaning on the back railing with Anjanette and our camp-mates Jessie and Phil and laughing about how a lot of our Burning Man philosophy could be distilled into two things: the good ol’ “You just can’t make this shit up” (aka life is weirder and more amazing than one can ever anticipate or imagine, and that’s why it’s awesome) and “that’s a hell of a lot of shiny shit” (aka there is so much more out there shining for us and calling to us than we can ever absorb at one time). Jessie added her own take on the latter, which we then decided to adopt: “that’s a giant fuck-ton of shiny shit!” It’s so easy to make experiences at Burning Man into metaphorical life lessons...they practically write themselves. I also remember having a silly flirty conversation with Anjanette and a couple of random guys up there on the second floor of Headspace, one of whom was a bald guy in his 50’s named Czaba, from Hungary, about ethnicity (“oh you Russian women”) and astrology and all kinds of other random stuff.
We got back from the Headspace adventure probably somewhere around 2 or 3 in the morning. Josh was tired and wanted to go crash and I went with him but then I wound up not being able to fall asleep. I laid there in our yurt for a couple hours hoping to wind down but the only thing that happened was me getting increasingly conscious of my unhappy digestive system so around 5:30 or 6am I got up and got dressed and went out to the porta potties. When I got back I was still feeling awake so I decided to go out to the Pink Lounge to see the sunrise. There was no one in particular around so I actually headed across the Esplanade to go sit on the bench next to the Tetrahedron and take some pictures. After a few minutes of hanging out there, there was a tap on my shoulder and I heard someone say “I should have known I’d find you here.” It was Anjanette, who also hadn’t been able to sleep. We hung out and talked and watched the sun rise (which was GORGEOUS) and took some pictures. Eventually Mama Doody came out and joined us (she was just coming home from dancing the sunrise set at Robot Heart) and we had a nice little hang out with her.
Monday was a slow start. I was hoping to be able to go to the Temple and place my art piece and have my processing time, but the Temple wasn’t finished yet (there were quite a few things actually that weren’t finished by Monday, including the Man, whose head had broken off and they were struggling to fix, the Catacomb of Veils, various big theme camps, and probably a bunch of other things I didn’t see). So instead there was a fair amount of hanging around both in our little shade patio outside the yurt and out in the front of camp in the Pink Lounge. We had fun reconnecting with people we hadn’t seen in a long time (like Fink Purry and Aurora Gold, whose RV was next to us) and got to know some new-to-us Pinkies like the adorable Keith (who made the Love Trees art project across the playa from the Pink Lounge) and his wife Ali (later renamed Bliss), who were from the U.K., and Deron (an old friend of Halcyon’s and an amazing artist, who drew super cool sharpie “tattoos” on my arms).
We also got a chance to finally see Headspace, the amazing art car that one of our camp-mates (Mark) had built and brought to the playa this year (with a lot of help from a dedicated group of people, including our camp-mates Kathy and Anthony). They were still working on it when we first saw it, but we got a chance to get on it and look around and it was seriously gorgeous in every detail. I especially loved the metal sides with the “HS” logo cut out of them in a beautiful pattern, the gorgeous and comfy purple velvet cushions on the bottom level and the metal stairs that led to the upper deck with cut outs of the ten principles (at night these ten principles cutouts glowed with rainbow colors). Of course the face itself on the front of the car (which appeared to be white when viewed one side and black from the other, and was all lit up with changing color LEDs at night) was gorgeous and amazing too. Josh and I had contributed to the Kickstarter to help fund the car, and I was excited to see one of the “perks” of that contribution, which was supposed to be our names engraved on a copper plaque as “Headspace crew”. We found the plaque—but only Josh’s name was on it, not mine (probably because he was the one who actually sent in the contribution), which kind of bummed me out. He got a pink captain’s hat with the Headspace logo on it and some other schwag too, but at least we can share that.
Around lunchtime someone told us there was a camp right behind Pink Heart that was serving grilled cheese so Mom and I went to go get one. They were pretty delicious (as is any food someone else makes you in the desert) and even Mom, a diabetic, decided to treat herself to one.
When we returned triumphantly with our ice (and about $40/each in tips, which we contributed to the camp fund for buying ice), I was supposed to have a water bar shift but it turned out we were having a camp meeting instead. It was great to gather with all our camp-mates and introduce ourselves and get in the Pink Heart groove with Halcyon’s inspirational words. Lots of people (including Josh) got recognized for their over-and-above contributions to various bits of making camp go that year with rad pairs of glasses from Halcyon.
After camp meeting there was dinner and then that evening they pulled Headspace around to the front of camp right next to the Pink Swing and the Love Trees and the Tetrahedron and had a dance party there, which a bunch of us Pinkies enthusiastically checked out. The nice thing about having a party in your front yard is that you don’t have to schlep all your survival stuff with you and when you get tired, you can just go crash, which eventually, after much dancing and other fun shenanigans, I did.
This year’s theme was 
Mom and I had reasonably smooth sailing out of the Bay Area and up to Reno, and arrived in Reno at the GSR around 7:30pm. It was a GIANT casino resort hotel, and a little overwhelming to us with a lot of activity, but we checked in and got our room and were able to chill out for a bit. We were hoping to meet up with another few Pink Hearters in Reno (Ari, a burgin from Israel whom we’d never met, and our friends Kathy and Anthony who were rolling in from Phoenix), and after a flurry of messages and phone calls we did manage to connect up. We decided to see Ari in the morning (our plan was to meet up with him and Kathy and Anthony for an absurdly early breakfast at around 4am and try to leave around 5am to caravan out to Black Rock City together, hoping to avoid the huge long wait to get in by arriving in the early hours) but we wound up managing to have a late dinner with Kathy and Anthony at the GSR. This was the first time we’d met Anthony, and he was a true delight just as we’d thought he would be. It was so fun talking and reconnecting with them that we didn’t get to bed until close to midnight.
We stopped for gas at Love’s in Fernley (our traditional last-stop-before-BRC destination) and discovered that Kathy and Anthony were only about a half hour behind us, so we waited around there for them to come join us. (See, it all worked out okay.) We left Love’s at right around 10am and got on the road, which turned out to be incredibly smooth sailing (unlike last year) all the way to Gate Road into Black Rock City. Once we got into the Gate Line though, it took us about 5.5 hours to make it all the way in to the city and to Pink Heart. But it all worked out okay...at least we had Kathy and Anthony and all our enthusiastic arrival excitement to keep ourselves entertained (I wound up playing a lot of harmonica again...I don’t know why that has become an arrival tradition for me, but apparently it has), and we still made it to camp in the daylight to set up, which is what we’d wanted. (And just in time for dinner, too!) 
Arriving at camp was a great experience, even though we were still a bit discombobulated from our long journey. There were lots of Pinkies around and we were enthusiastically greeted and helped to unpack our van. Josh had already set up and prepared our yurt and outside shaded patio area, so we mostly just had to move stuff in and then help Mom stake and put up her tent and shade structure. Lots of Pinkies hugged me and looked me in the eyes and said how glad they were that I’d made it to the burn that year, that they’d been reading my posts and sending me love during the cancer saga. I just kept grinning and telling people “Yeah, I’m just so stoked to be here!”
Then there was some more wandering around, including a stop at Duck Pond, a dance camp I’d never heard of but others wanted to go find. We didn’t stick around Duck Pond long because the music wasn’t really grabbing us, plus I was getting really tired after a long travel day. So Josh offered to walk me back to Pink Heart, and for a while we walked with Tom and Viren. I had a great time talking deep philosophical concepts with Tom. He told me about a bunch of things he’d recently learned from various videos and lectures. One of them was something similar to the “we are all made of stardust” concept that I’d heard before, but even more specific about how supernovae create the universe and how we all have a little bit of supernova in us. Of course I liked that. And I liked Tom’s self-deprecating but enthusiastic charm—both he and Viren are such wonderful young men, with lives that are so different from mine yet connected so lovingly through the Pink Heart family (or PHamily as we like to call it) experience.
Which is not to say that this returning was all emotionally easy. Anniversaries are hard, as anyone who has ever grieved something or someone will tell you. I had a huge pile of grief and loss and change to process from the year between burns, and I bore that burden throughout the burn until the night before we left, on Sunday when the Temple burned and took at least some of that pile with it. I spent a whole morning at the Temple on Wednesday (nearly halfway through the burn...I tried to go earlier but the Temple wasn’t finished yet) in an attempt to ritually bring closure to the past year. I placed the “my year of living cancerously” plaster bust art piece that I’d made in a spot that felt right and then sat a few yards away from it and cried and prayed and pondered and read and re-read the letter to myself that I’d written about this past year and my hopes for the future. (I re-read that letter during the Temple burn too.) I revisited the Temple on Saturday and checked in on my art piece and saw how it had been integrated into the beautiful dusty organic clutter of loss and remembrance that had sprouted all around it, and pondered some more about how even when we want to lay our burdens of grief and loss down and try to ritually close certain chapters of our lives, they never fully leave us. Some things break and are never completely fixed. Some things are never fully or even partially recoverable. But you let go what you can and embrace the rest, dusty and incomplete and complicated though they may be. And new things come to join the old, and they get integrated or they overshadow or they distract or they compliment or maybe all of those things.