Yay, it’s finally time for the Burning Man wrap-up and reflection. As usual I am writing this a few weeks after returning home, when the dust has mostly settled and/or been cleaned off most things, so some of the immediacy and detail has faded but some of the lessons and themes have finally clarified. I already sort of did a context-setting introduction last week when I talked about “returning” as one of the big themes that affected/came out of reflection upon this year’s burn, so I’m going to just jump right in to the day-by-day recounting here. 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!)
This year’s theme was Da Vinci’s Workshop, which provoked some thinking about Makers and making things (and was a nod to the Maker Movement). Normally I am all in when it comes to making things, and as previous years have shown I like to make big art pieces to bring, but with all my health distractions this year the only things I managed to make for Burning Man were a new pink scallop-coat and the plaster bust art piece I mentioned in the previous entry. Josh however had committed to making a big new infrastructure piece for our Pink Heart camp: a new modular metal water bar to replace our janky wooden one (one of Pink Heart’s major gifts is that we serve ice cold cucumber water 24/7 to thirsty citizens of Black Rock City). Unfortunately, given how difficult and distracting our pre-burn summer months were (with readying for and executing a month of summer camp and my undergoing and recovering from major reconstructive surgery in July, plus a few trips), the way that project came together was through Josh working heroically hard and mostly by himself (with some last-minute assistance from me) to get it done in the couple of weeks before the burn. Then he went up early on Thursday for build (with Anjanette, in a big U-haul that in addition to the water bar was also able to take a bunch of our other big items, thank goodness), to help put together both the water bar and Pink Heart camp. I stayed behind to finish all the packing and get kids situated for back-to-school and then Mom and I packed our stuff into our trusty minivan and drove up together on Saturday, with an overnight stop in Reno at the Grand Sierra Resort.
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.
The next morning we did in fact wake up at 4am and went blurrily down to the same restaurant we’d been in the night before to have breakfast...and that’s when Mom discovered that she didn’t have her daily medications with her. A bit of panic ensued while we half-unpacked and searched the car to see if they’d been packed with the rest of her stuff. Eventually we came to the conclusion that yes, they’d been left behind, and though Mom was a little freaked out, I assured her that there was a relatively simple solution: we could stop at a pharmacy there in Reno to get an emergency supply before heading out. It was like running into unexpected traffic: a bummer and a delay, but ultimately resolvable. It was our introduction to “burn time”, as Josh would put it (having suffered similar schedule setbacks in prior burns, we’d learned not to hold on to anticipatory timing too tightly.)
This incident also brought into focus something that would turn out to be a major theme of this year’s burn, exemplified by a quote that I’ve kept around for a long time: “Everything is going to be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.” Which basically says to me that anything one experiences as uncomfortable or unhappy (or in this case, as an annoying delay) is going to pass, and things will eventually turn out to be okay. If you can just hold on to the idea that negative states of discomfort or upset are temporary, and focus on the fact that the default state of things is positive, it feels better in the moment—and it is surprising what you can endure while you are waiting for things to turn out okay. (Now that I’m typing this, I’m realizing that this theme has been with me through the entire cancer saga as well. It’s also closely related to Halcyon’s “crap or cone” story about where you choose to put your focus. But I digress.) That ability to hold negative things lightly worked for us that morning, and helped us feel better about the change in plans. Thank goodness we were still in a big city (and hadn’t driven straight on through and discovered this on playa and had to go through ingress twice), and that the pharmacy Mom uses (CVS) had a local branch nearby. The local CVS didn’t open until 8 though, so we had a few hours to kill. But at least we had each other and some friends to talk to. We met up with Ari (who turned out to be a delight as well), and then Kathy and Anthony joined us as well and we all sat around and talked with another burner sitting at a table next to us (John) while we finished breakfast.
At around 6am, Ari decided to go on ahead without us, but we waited around with Kathy and Anthony for a while (they had discovered a need to run their own errand there in Reno before leaving too) and then they left and we went over to CVS to be there when they opened at 8am. CVS as able to fill Mom’s prescriptions no problem, so by around 9am we were back on the road.
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!”
We did some more set up, and then a bunch of camp-mates wanted to go out dancing so Josh and I changed into night-roaming clothes and went out with them. We headed over to 10:00 and stopped at Opulent Temple. They were not completely set up (no lights, no one else hanging about the dance floor) but they were playing music so we stopped for a bit and danced there. It was so awesome to just look around at all the happy Pinkie faces and it finally felt like we’d arrived at Burning Man. For a while it was just us Pinkies, but we attracted other passers-by and it made for a fun impromptu dance party.
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 leads me to another them of this year’s burn for me: PHamily (and by extension, the families we choose). I spent a lot more time with camp mates and at camp this burn, and felt like I got closer to PHamily I had already known as well as made some heartfelt new connections. Which is not to say I got close to every single Pinkie or managed to spend enough time with each and every one of the bright souls in our camp to really feel connected, but the desire for and delight in connection was very strongly there all around. More on this later.