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:
Self, you have just about made it through the valley of shadows, and that is awesome. You are a rockstar warrior goddess bright shining supernova and it is time once again to stand up and beam that sparkly light out and be a beacon in the darkness. Time to burn away the all the pain and the fear and the loss, and rise reborn like a phoenix from its ashes, keeping only the memories of your journey to give you strength, compassion and story fodder.
I love you, self. I am proud of you. You got this, it didn’t get you. The darkness only served to highlight how much light you truly had inside (not to mention all the light you were surrounded with...you have some amazing village). Welcome to “new normal”. May it and this next year be full of way more good things than bad, and may you always continue to burn bright.
Love,
Yourself
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 “24 Hours at Burning Man” videographer at the “HOME” letters, dressed as playa Elvis and lip-syncing to “Bridge Over Troubled Waters”, which apparently turned into its own whole video shot at various installations. It was another great example of crazy juxtapositions and “you just can’t make this shit up”.) Once we got back to camp, I went back to our yurt and Josh and I decided to go on a quick ice run. Unfortunately, while we were biking down the Esplanade on the way to Arctica I got into a bike accident—it was one of those stupid things where another woman and I were biking towards each other and we each swerved the same direction to try to avoid each other and then swerved back in the same direction to avoid each other again but then we were too close and I turned the wheel of my trike too hard and not only did we crash into each other but my trike tipped and I went down flat on the road. Ow. I wound up with a big scrape under my right armpit and a huge bruise on my right calf. The underarm scrape hurt bad enough that after we got our ice we also stopped off at the medical tent, where they cleaned and bandaged me but couldn’t really do much else. I had to spend the rest of the week being really careful when I schlepped my Camelbak around and the bruise developed into all sorts of pretty colors during the week (and after we got home), but I didn’t let it stop me. I’m grateful though that it wasn’t worse...it totally could have been. (Just like the rest of this past year.)
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.
I got up around 2 because I was supposed to help serve ice cream but as it turned out there was a surplus of camp-mates helping out and they didn’t need me, so instead I hung out for a bit and then went to work at the water bar serving cucumber water for a couple of hours with Anya. Working the water bar is another of my favorite things to do because just like with the ice cream, it’s really satisfying to give people something so delicious and desirable, and just like at Arctica, you get to meet a wide variety of different kinds of burners. The nice thing too about the water bar is that there is also much more opportunity for conversation and connection because it can take a while to fill up people’s containers. I asked people how their burn was going, or to share a story about what they’d been doing or seeing that was cool. One of the highlights of all that interacting was that I got to meet Kate, the artist of Helios (a really gorgeous art installation that was relatively nearby but which we hadn’t gone to see yet...more on that in a bit), and tell her how much I appreciated what she had created.
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.
Wednesday evening after dinner a bunch of Pinkies got all dressed up to go to the Opulent Temple White Party, but as often happens it took us quite some time to actually gather everyone who said they wanted to go together, so there was also a lot of hanging around in the Pink Lounge waiting for this one to go do that, or that other one to go fetch someone else, or for people to change clothes or whatever. Our friend Lea showed up during that hanging around time, which was great, and we convinced her to join us at the White Party too. (We even convinced Halcyon to join us at the last minute.) I had wanted to put some metallic tattoos on with Anjanette, but we never got around to it and then she left to go find Rory and go over to Opulent Temple on the Monaco, so while we were hanging about I went to go fetch the tattoos from our yurt with the intention of bringing them back to the Pink Lounge for everyone to put on. But on the way there I ran into MissyKat and she said she had tons of metallic tattoos and body paints and other decorative stuff so we just used hers.
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.