Yes, I am back from Burning Man, having once again expanded my consciousness, my heart and my friend circle. I've been home for days and I still smell the playa (this is probably because we are still in the process of cleaning up all the stuff we brought there, and the dust hasn't fully been washed away or dispersed yet). I can't quite believe it's over already. I can't quite get myself back into the "regular" routine. I can, however, start to set down some of the memories and the takeaways, in order to make a little better sense of what happened to me while I was out there in Black Rock City. Not that I think I can assemble things in neat, chronological order--hell no. But at least I can paint a few word pictures to entertain, explain, and exorcise the nebulous ectoplasmic leftovers of the experience so that I can be more fully here now. For those readers who don't want the full, overly detailed and admittedly solipsistic story, you can just skim everything to look at the pictures (or you can click through to the entire set on Flickr, here) and/or skip to the end to see the summary of lessons learned and takeaways taken. And if you’re unfamiliar with Burning Man in general, you might want to go look at my posts from last year, in which I explain some things (or you could just go look at the official Burning Man website.)

So let me set the scene. The theme for this year's Burning Man, which would show up in both obvious and subtle ways as the week progressed, was Fertility 2.0 (they'd already done a Fertility theme awhile back, apparently). As a supposedly wise and experienced second-time Burner (ha!), I began enacting fertility by so successfully proselytizing the Burning Man experience that I wound up attracting a whole bunch of "newbie" friends who wanted to go this year. The "burgins" (Burning Man virgins) included Anjanette, my best friend since college, and my beloved husband Josh, who would be turning 40 on the first day of Burning Man. There was a whole lot of pre-playa planning, which I won't bother going into here, but the upshot of it was that about seven of us--myself and Josh, Anjanette, our friend and neighbor Eileen (who'd gotten me started on this whole Burning Man journey last year), Josh's high school friend Mark, Josh's gamer buddy Cory and Cory's best friend Patrick--decided to form a "pod" (a bunch of people camping together) within the larger village home of Sacred Spaces Village (SSV was the same group that Eileen and I had camped with last year). We decided to call that pod "Yaboogie", after the expression that Josh and his friends used to use in high school to express enthusiasm and excitement. Though we didn’t realize it at the time, (Look! Foreshadowing!), our little Yaboogie pod would grow and flourish over the week to become a fertile garden full of new friendships. But more on that later.

Our Burning Man journey started on Sunday afternoon with a caravan of 3 cars: Eileen, Anjanette and Josh and I. We had a slow start after hitting crazy stop-and-go race day traffic on Highway 37, which certainly taught us right off the bat to slow down and be patient, and that things would not always go as planned (as Josh said and I’ll paraphrase, “our reconstruction into Burning Man mentality began here”). But eventually we made it out to Highway 80 and chugged our way towards Reno. The rest of the journey to Black Rock City was fairly uneventful, so I won't go into it here, except to say that Josh officially turned 40 during our trip--right as we stopped at Love's gas station, as a matter of fact. :) The line to get in to Black Rock City took us "only" about 2.5-3 hours (which believe it or not, was less than the 4-5 hours we'd anticipated). After a joyous greeting by the gate greeters at which Josh and Anjanette got to ring the bell and declare their newbie-ness, we rolled into Sacred Spaces just before dawn at around 5:30am.

We looked around for the camp coordinator so we could check in, but no one was around at the office. Eventually we found and confirmed our Yaboogie spot anyway and unloaded most of our stuff, then took a break to go look at the Esplanade in the growing daylight. After that we came back and moved more stuff around but since the office was still empty, we decided to leave our camp setup for the moment and go out to the Artery (the group in charge of coordinating all the pre-registered art projects at Burning Man each year) to register and set up my Fly Your Freak Flag High art installation project.

Anjanette and I took the van with all the stuff in it while Josh rode his bike; we were still trying to orient ourselves to the city so we got completely lost trying to get to the Artery, but with the kind assistance of several Black Rock Rangers along the way we finally found it. We spent an hour or two waiting around the Artery for them to process me (Josh and Anj were so tired they fell asleep on the couch there while I chatted with other artists), and then finally got the green light to go out and set up the project. It turned out that I was placed at 4:55 and Esplanade, which was great placement in general, and would have been even better if SSV hadn't gotten moved all the way across the city to 9:45 and E. (But everything happens for a reason, right?) Eileen joined us just as we were finally ready to go and we headed out with Reno Jeff (our Artery representative) to the playa to get started with set up. Luckily, even though it was midday now, the weather was still great: hot but not boiling, very little dust. So set up went about as smoothly and easily as it could. Josh showed us how to set up the stands, and Anjanette and I helped with all the nuts and bolts as he moved from stand to stand assembling. Then we wrapped each flag with a different colored EL wire and put batteries in and set the flags in the stands. We had a few people come by and check out what we were doing, and we encouraged them to write on the stands, which they did. Eventually Eileen and Anjanette left us to go back to camp, and Josh and I finished staking down the flags in their final grouping. It was looking great and I was very proud to see the manifestation of my artist dream flying high on the playa! That was definitely a peak moment for me in this year's burn.

We drove our minivan verrrrrry slowly back across the playa to camp, and finished setting up our tent and shade structures and unloading our stuff. We finally got to check in and get officially welcomed to the camp, and connect with most of the rest of our Yaboogie pod-mates. We had dinner in our just-getting-going dining hall (let me tell you, having a camp with a kickass kitchen that was able to make amazing food for 250 people in the middle of the dusty desert was a true blessing and delight). Then it was time to go take our first kitchen shift, which was a cleanup shift. After the shift, even though we were exhausted from staying up all night and from all the work we'd done that day to get settled, Josh and I decided to skip the SSV opening ceremony (in hindsight, I wish we hadn't, but oh well) and instead go see the nighttime Esplanade and turn the EL wire on for my flags. We had fun looking around--one thing we couldn't help at least briefly checking out was a giant life-sized wooden pier with a listing, sinking pirate ship half-buried in the playa at the end of it--but eventually were just so beat from staying up most of the entire previous day and night that we came back and crashed out relatively early.

[To Be Continued in Part 2...]

[To see more or full sized pictures, click here for the full set on Flickr]