Wednesday morning we got up around 8 and looked around Sacred Spaces Village a bit and then finished setting up our camp. We put up a big EZ-up shade shelter in front of our tent, and under that we put the hammock on a stand that Isis had brought with her. I also staked everything down, and arranged camp chairs and boxes so we had a sort of sitting area under the shade. The final touch was duct-taping up a couple of freak flags on the top of the shade structure. Although we’d initially envisioned having two tents and more room to set up, our camp setup actually worked out to be quite cozy and pleasant—we spent a lot more time at our tent than we’d thought we would! While I was puttering around camp, Isis went to an energy healing session she’d signed up for. When she came back, we figured out the day’s costumes (I finally got to wear my custom-made shiny red lace pants!) and set out to explore. Isis wanted me to meet Ammo, the guy who’d done the energy healing for her, and he introduced us to Jai, who was running one of the spaces affiliated with but just outside the main Sacred Spaces Village: the Sacred Spaces Pod.
Jai showed us the pod (which much to my regret, I never got to spend time in—apparently it was a sort of spiritually-focused isolation tank experience) and the Rites of Passage Game experience he’d built around a deck of divination cards. He encouraged us to try the first level of the game: we each chose a card from the deck. Mine was “Mental i-Soulation”. The message in that one that appealed to me was that it was time to retreat from mental stimulation in order to reflect consciously on my own thoughts and the patterns and unconscious habits and conditioning that occurred there. I also liked that it emphasized that “thought is creative” (in other words, your thoughts create your reality) and counseled “rethink your destiny”. It made me question what kind of reality was I choosing to create for myself? What had it been in the past, and what did I want it to be in the future?
Isis and Ammo left for lunch at that point, but I was intrigued and wanted to stay around a little longer. I tried the first level of the game, which required finding a word with a spinner Jai had made and then reading about the “gene key” that it related to. I found myself totally caught up in reading about the particular gene key that I’d chosen: in my case, the gene key was “Diamond of the Self”, which seemed appropriate. Each key has certain concepts related to it, of “shadow” (the human/ego level), “gift” (the soul/spirit level) and “siddhi” (the source/oneness level). In my case the shadow was “mediocrity”, the gift was “style”, and the siddhi was “exquisite”. I’m not going to bore you with the specific details, I promise (though if you really want to check out this or other gene keys and other trippy stuff you can go look here), but what I will say is that this touched me in that pinched, uncomfortable identity work place, where I was feeling blue about “oh sure, what’s so special about me anyway? I should just stay small and mediocre and safe so I don’t disappoint anyone.” Being told that the gift I was embodying was “style”, that unique, creative expression of individual spirit, well, that was right in line with the kind of reality I wanted to create. And bringing that gift forward into the “siddhi” (source/oneness) level of “exquisite” tapped right into my desire to be a conduit of divine creativity. And that’s all I’ll say about that for now (not because I’m trying to hide anything but because there’s still so much to talk about.)
I moved on to the second level, which was themed around the question of “What was your first experience on this planet?” I found myself thinking about how excited and joyous my parents were when I, their first child, came along, and how deeply I must have been loved when I appeared. I know that in some very important ways I was their “little ray of sunshine”, and that led me to thinking some more about ways in which that light which I’d initially brought with me had been disguised or dimmed or hidden in some way, and a resolve to get rid of some of that in order to let my light shine better.
At that point we took a break because Jai had to go look for a fuse part for the space pod. I lingered around helping tape some drawing paper to a table, and wound up in a conversation with an interesting guy about social change and the spirituality of electronic music. He had something rolled up under his arm; I asked him about it, and it turned out to be a movie poster for a movie called “Electronic Awakening” that was premiering at SSV the following night. (You can see more about that movie here, and I totally recommend you check out the SF premiere and dance party on October 2nd—I’ll be going!) I told him I’d try to go see it because it sounded really interesting to me, and then finally I headed out to go find Isis somewhere in SSV.
When I found her, both Isis and I were feeling pretty beat, so after a few snacks we went looking for a chill space in SSV where we could sit for awhile. The main space was full, so we poked our heads into the Temple of Manifestation, one of the side spaces that led off the main space of SSV. (There were four of these—each was a geodesic dome temple dedicated to one of the four elements of air/earth/fire/water, as well as a particular kind of energy: ancient wisdom/manifestation/passion/new beginnings, respectively.) The space was mostly empty, except for a couple of women and a bunch of pillows and rugs. We asked if we could sit for awhile in there, and one of the women told us sure, but that they were about to start a workshop in a few minutes: a women’s circle. We looked at each other and said “women’s circle? We’re women, sounds good!” and sat down. Little did we know that this serendipitous decision was about to lead us to an incredibly powerful experience.
Other women trickled in, and the women’s circle began. The facilitator asked us to introduce ourselves with our name and one word about how we were feeling right in that moment. (I said “present”.) Then she opened it up for a little more discussion. I was impressed that so many of us were able to drop straight into deep feeling and truth-telling. Someone said she was having a hard time feeling connected to others or to their Burn experience; others were already dealing with some uncomfortable epiphanies about self or others or life. We talked about how we had connected (or not) to women in the past—for example, had we been competitive with other women? I realized during this discussion that I had once been much more connected to groups of women than I currently was. Yes, I have dear women friends now who are deeply important to me, and without whose friendship and attention I would be totally lost. But not since probably grad school (when I was working on the graduate women’s survival guide) had I explicitly associated with groups of women in order to explore the issues unique to women’s experience. And I missed that.
After that discussion, we did some breathing exercises and movement, and then the facilitator had us do a guided meditation. During that meditation, I felt a really strong presence visit me—yeah, ok, I know this sounds so crunchy-touchy-feely, but I’m gonna share it nonetheless. I don’t know if it was just my own higher self (the one that had just been thinking about how to create reality through positive thoughts and about the desire to let the divine creative energy flow through me) or some version of my own connection to sacred source, but I very clearly felt something telling me that I was a big bright star, and I had to stop binding up the light with restraints that I’d created out of my own small fears. It reminded me that “no one can make you feel inferior without your consent”, and at that point, lying on a cushion with my eyes closed in a dusty tent with a bunch of strangers, I burst into tears.
When the meditation was over we shared what we’d found, and there was a lot of strong feeling and realizations that came out for everyone. Many of us had been feeling restrained and afraid, not true to ourselves, and many of us (myself included) spoke about the need to conquer fear with courage, and to surface and encourage our true inner gifts. Some spoke about needing to heal relationships, heal ourselves, connect more deeply with others. There were tears, and smiles, and gratitude for this place of deep feeling we had created together. We ended feeling really open and connected and reluctant to leave, but eventually everyone did trickle out. Isis went back to our campsite but I stayed and talked with the facilitator for awhile, and then when I went out to the main SSV area I found there was a whiteout (dust storm) going on outside—I could see it when I looked at the openings in the main tent, and I was reluctant to go out in it. So I stayed in the main chill area for a while, writing in my journal and listening to some people perform energetic and beautiful Hare Krishna music and watching the ecstatic dancers that were grooving to it. Eventually the dust died down and I made my way back outside to our tent.
Isis and I were chilling out in our tent area when Dina, one of our camp neighbors, came over to ask if we had any plastic wrap that she could use to protect her camera. We started talking, and she said that she had to leave soon to go take a shift as a photographer at a project she was involved in. What project was that, we asked? “It’s called Why Do You Do What You Do?”, she said. I was flabbergasted and thrilled at the serendipity of it. I told her that one of the things I really wanted to find on the playa that year was the WDYDWYD booth, and she said “oh, I can take your picture right here, right now! Let me get the form.” 
So she gave me the official form to fill out, and then I made myself a sign that said: “Because by knowing ME I can help actualize WE” (I hadn’t yet assimilated all the epiphanies I’d had or that were yet to come, or I might have said something different. From where I stand now, a few days past the end of Burning Man, I’d probably say something like “Because I’m a freaky supernova”—but more on that later.) Dina took my picture right there in our campsite, with me waving one of my freak flags and holding my sign. You can see that picture here (along with some other great pictures from Burning Man this year.)
That night, after dinner, we dressed up and went out to visit the night time playa. We decided to walk to the temple (Isis hadn’t brought her bike so we mostly walked places), with stops at whatever shiny interesting things caught our attention on the way. 
We did see some really cool art along the way (one of our favorites was an open dome that you could walk into, and above you were a bunch of lit up white umbrellas, and dangling from the umbrellas were strings of white lights that flashed in a way that made it look like it was raining), but it was the Temple that really drew most of my attention that night. It was such an amazing thing—a temporary, meant-to-be-burned construct, that was nonetheless huge and solid and well built and incredibly lovely. It was in some ways set up like our Sacred Spaces Village was—there was one big central room, which went up several stories and was capped with a dome, and then there were four smaller temples that surrounded it, each connected to a side of the main Temple with a covered walkway. Each of the smaller Temples had its own theme--I’m not sure I really experienced any of the smaller spaces enough to name them, but I know they all had specific themes and their own altars and decorations around that theme.
The floor of the main room of the Temple had several steps down, but was otherwise empty of furniture or big pieces of art. People sat or stood around that empty main area, and one cool and memorable thing was that if you were there at the right time (which we were), you could hear the Temple bells. The walls of the main room were decorated with, among other things, a variety of percussion instruments (cymbals, shakers, gongs, drums, bells), and each was apparently attached to a motor in the walls that made each of the percussion instruments play on its own, but as part of a prearranged pattern. The effect was that the Temple was playing itself—a sort of stately, melancholy, re-imagined gamelan. It was beautiful and moving and set a mood that was introspective and yes, I have to say, reverent. The people who were there at night when we were there were all mostly quiet and tuned into their own experience, so we were able to just quietly experience it for ourselves too, even though there were lots of other people around us.
One of the other cool things about the Temple was that people wrote all over it, everywhere they could reach. In pen, in pencil, in sharpie, with paint, whatever they had. But what was written here was no ordinary, self-centered or purposely offensive graffiti—most of it was soul-baring, poignant messages of loss or grief (things like “I miss you Dad” or “Jennifer, I’m sorry we never made it work out, I’ll always love you) or statements of epiphany and intention (e.g. “we are all connected” or “resist” or “I am not afraid”). People left personally meaningful messages to each other or to the Universe that were specifically meant to be burned up and released or activated in some way. 
As the week went on there were more and more messages, and some people brought additional artwork or bits and pieces of things to leave at the Temple’s base or on its walls or in one of the little side Temples until it was thickly covered with this additional layer of meaningful self-expression.
I split up from Isis to go explore the Temple complex a little more—I wanted to climb up one of the bridges that connected the second floor of the Temple with the ground and look around up there. I took the curvy bridge (there was one curvy one and one straight one up to the second story) and got a chance to walk around the second story, which gave me a 360-degree view of the night time playa. It was once I was up there and looking around at the gorgeous nighttime landscape (with the various big art pieces and art cars all lit up, some close, some far away, and slowly shifting as the art cars as well as the bikes and people moved around) that something finally clicked into place for me: I suddenly “got” the sheer enormous scale of the place and the benefit to creating so much BIG, BRIGHT art in the middle of a vast empty space. Each piece of art or art car or art experience was certainly interesting and meaningful up close and personal (for example, a lot of the art you could climb in/on or touch or manipulate in some way, and of course the art cars were meant to be ridden), but it was also created in such a way so that it could be viewed at a distance as well as up close. 
The fact that one is able to see such a long ways away because everything is really dark and really flat made for a new and fascinating kind of gallery/exhibit experience that I’d never encountered anywhere else. In other words: I realized that each of these individually fantastic, big, bright (and often mobile and therefore constantly changing) art pieces combined together to form an even bigger fantastic, big, bright and beautiful experience, one which shifted depending on your perspective and one which you could literally only have in a place like this. I fell in complete love with the nighttime playa from that moment on.
On the way back to camp we realized that we could see Sacred Spaces Village’s lit up artwork from across the playa, and 
I had a moment of squee just realizing that hey, the place that *I* was staying was big and bright and beautiful and one of the landmarks on the Esplanade. (I might not always want that experience, but for this year as a newbie it felt kind of cool.)
[To Be Continued in Part 4...]
[To see more or full sized pictures, click here for the whole set on Flickr]