Burning Man or Bust

Burning Man is coming up. We leave in a week and a half. Yipes! For those who have never been to this festival in the desert, it's pretty hard to describe. Burning Man is like a combination of camping trip, class reunion, art festival, music concert, spiritual retreat, gynormous bar crawl, and hippie love-fest all rolled into one - with costumes and 50,000 of your closest friends. Set in the high Black Rock desert north of Reno, it's usually described as an experiment in intentional community. For most of the year, the desert is as nature intended, a moonscape;  for one week out of the year, it's transformed into a working city, complete with its own economy (no money is exchanged) street signs, a police force, medical personnel, its own rules of conduct, a schedule of events, several radio stations,  a coffee shop, and even a beauty pageant. One Christian gentleman described it as "Satan's Birthday Party." It's more than an art or music festival, more than a retreat, more than a camping trip in a beautiful natural setting, more than a ritual, more than a gathering of hippies and freaks, more than a big party. You have to experience it to understand.

Last year was my second time, after an ill-fated first trip 8 years before after which I swore I'd never go again. A man persuaded me to go again, and this time, with the help of a wonderful new camp of friends, I had a transformative time. Still, Burning Man is not, at least for me, some carefree jaunt of parties and half-naked women. It's tough, too.  In the desert, I confronted my deep inner stuff. My fear of and discomfort around people, my deep inner insecurities, my relationship troubles, old grief, the gaping hole of need that I carry around with me, my judgments of others and myself, my fear of letting go. At the same time, I came back with a desire to live that creatively in the rest of my life - to be my true self, no matter how weird or different.

At Burning Man, you dress how you want - the more creative the better. Almost everything is participatory and nobody tells you what to do (unless you're a real danger to yourself or others). Art and self-expression are everywhere you turn, sometimes to physics-defying degrees. At Burning Man, you rely on yourself and your friends. You haul in your own food and water and necessities and haul the waste out again, and if you run out of something, there's no corner store to go replenish your supply. At Burning Man, there's music, dancing, yoga, meditation, art classes, lectures, nature walks, fire displays, bars, and performances 24 hours a day - and no money is exchanged. At Burning Man, you can't drive your car around unless it's a permitted "mutant vehicle" - a vehicle that's been modified in some creative sort of way.  People-watching gets raised to a whole new level as folks go by in outlandish outfits, sometimes no outfits, and often being transported by strange devices  (stilts, pogo sticks, unicycles, cardboard fish, cupcakes). In the desert, it's hot during the day (temperatures of 115 degrees are being reported) and cool at night, and sometimes the alkaline dust gets kicked up into whiteouts that shroud everything in what looks like talcum powder. Oh, and did I mention that there are no showers unless you bring them (and the water) yourself?

I've heard it described that at Burning Man, everything is love and there are no judgments. I don't think this is strictly true; on the playa - as the Black Rock desert is called - people are the same as they've always been. There are the assholes who get too drunk or high and act like jerks, or just generally don't act with common sense; there are the hotsy sexpots in their 15 revealing outfits a day who stand around and preen, and the lazy ones who disappear whenever work needs to get done. There are the flakes and the users, just like in the 'default world' (as Burners call where we are right now.) But in general, I would say that Burning Man brings out the best in people. Or maybe it's that the people who go to Burning Man are generally more open, more creative, more flexible, and more expressive than others. 

The experience of Burning Man begins when you get in the car and start the trip. You drive further and further from your life, and your entire new life is packed as tightly and efficiently as possible in your car, RV, or van. Civilization passes behind you. As the hours roll by, you pass green trees and lakes, and then you get further into the desert, and things get more sparse. The weather gets hot and dusty. You start to see other Burners on the road - vehicles piled high with bikes wrapped in pink fur, hula hoops,tents,  rugs, and other assorted items, the vehicles often painted with slogans or crude depictions of the Burning Man logo. The highway, your fellow travelers,  and the barren, hot landscape are all you see.

Then you hit Reno and it's like someone dropped a huge pot of gold paint onto the desert floor. It's so surreal to have this gigantic mass of lights and glittering buildings rear out of the desert that it seems like a mirage. In Reno, you finish buying supplies, the way the old timers did - stocking up on the essentials before heading out into the brush.

As you leave Reno at 4 am, you know you're heading into the wilderness. You hope you didn't forget anything. The air is quiet and cool, the stars sparkle. Others are on the move, too; the string of red lights ahead of you on the road tells you that. You're all heading to the same place. The further you go, the more Burners you run into, until they are the only people on the road - Burners and the people who serve them.

The closer you get to the playa, the more of the default world you slough off. Cell phones don't work (much), radio is spotty, there's no e-mail. You no longer care if the dust gets into your hair or your fingernails break. Your body adjusts to the heat. You braid your hair to get it out of your face, and you stop looking in the mirror to check your makeup. Then you're there, and the culture is totally different, with different rules and expectations. The first thing you see that lets you know you're on another planet now is a huge metal dragon the size of a bus - oh wait, it IS a bus! The guy getting something out of his RV in front of you in the line to get in the gate is wearing tight silver bellbottoms, platform boots with flames on them, and has a red mohawk. BMIR (Burning Man Information Radio) is the only station you get and it's pumping out music to welcome the hordes. You're not in Kansas anymore, Toto.

A week from this Saturday, I'll be on the playa trail. I hope for myself and everyone else who attends, that it's a vibrant, transformative, creative, challenging, fun, laughter-filled, connecting time. I hope for new friends and for old connections to be strengthened, for joy in the sun- and moonrises, for the time to sit in the shadow of the great, wrinkled mountains and absorb their calm presence. Have fun, y'all!

Life wobbles and flows, like some child's toy. There are the highlights - the sitting in the sunlight with a dear friend, talking, making plans, getting excited about the coming days - then the mistakes and the hitches when I act in ways I'm not proud of and feel the stabs of guilt and shame, and feel like throwing myself in the water in my frustration at not being perfect. There are the days waking up when it hurts to even think about getting out of bed, but there's no choice, then the successes at work where I feel the elation of doing something well. There are the lonely nights and the distinctly not-lonely ones. There are the extended periods of joy when I try not to worry about the dark cloud coming back. There are the moments of realizing that, in that moment, I'm happy, and feeling stunned that that's the case, as well as worried, wondering if that joy is too dependent on someone else's place in my life. There's the crabbiness,  the pettiness, the disliking someone for no apparent reason, and then the bouts of compassion, kindness, and liking someone for no known reason, either. The moments when the most subtle shift of moods happen, where it's clear that the other side of the coin of irritation is an amused acceptance, the other side of the coin of a schoolgirl crush is the moment when I see the crush for who he is: a maddeningly imperfect human.

It's getting harder and harder for me to pretend or to expect that life will ever offer anything constant, certain, or trustworthy. And at 40, finally understanding, or beginning to understand this anyway, is really sort of frightening. It's scary to know that I can't trust my own mind. The difference between the moments of joy and the moments of pain are so staggering that it's like I experience them as two distinctly different people. How on earth can we humans handle this, hosting this ghost in our heads that tell us things that aren't true, and feeling, in the moment, that those emotions are the truest experiences in the world?

But the flip side is that as I get more and more frustrated at my inability to foresee the troughs and peaks of the waves, there's part of me that is giving up trying to foresee them, and I suspect that this is the key: giving up the expectation of anything ever staying consistent is the way to stop the suffering at this unchangeable fact.  But the core longing for something I can count on, absolutely count on, is so strong that giving up that hope seems impossible, like letting go of my arm, or just choosing to stop breathing forever. You can't let go of or stop something that is so intrinsic to you. I think if I learn enough from my mistakes, that i won't keep making them, or if I just discover that one hidden secret that will unlock the universe, I will no longer have bouts of depression, anxiety, sadness, and loneliness. Or that if I can fit the right key into the right lock, I'll be guaranteed success in everything: relationships, work, enlightenment, family life, I'll even become more attractive and people will like me more.

What is it about the human brain that thinks there's an answer out there, anyway?