feeling the burn

Burning Man is under way this week. For those of you who are unfamiliar, it's a blessed out of this world festival deep in the Nevada desert. A temporary utopian community created out of sand and wind and heat. It's a difficult thing to describe if you haven't been there, but it's really something extraordinary.

Everyone is living out their fantasies, whether it's dressing up in tutus or being completely naked. The art and creativity is out of this world, the full on discos, the fire walking pits, the 24 hour lounges. I was a low-level burner, someone who showed up with a tent and a few costumes and trinkets. Others bring entire structures, giant elephants rise out of the desert, double decker buses covered in pink fur and disco balls careen through the neighborhoods. It's a non stop visual delight, groups of gorgeous women cycling naked, men on stilts, costumes, lights, energy, heat.

The cornerstone of the Man is kindness. You can purchase nothing at the festival besides ice. Everything else is barter. You trade or are given what you need and offer what you can. As you walk around the enormous festival you are assaulted with creativity and beauty everywhere you go. One night as we went exploring I ate roasted corn with some gypsies, drank absinthe with clowns, danced in the Sahara, watched a medieval play and saw the most exotic woman I have seen dancing for the world on top of an old fashioned popcorn cart. It's everywhere, this rampant over expression of divine creavity, sexuality and bliss.

One of the most memorable impressions I have from the festival (aside from vagina tents and downtempo safaris and women cavorting on trampolines) was really quite small. Two men on bikes ran head on into each other. A gigantic crash. I remember pausing and thinking oh shit, what is going to happen now but both men jumped up and hugged each other and got on their bikes and rode off in different directions. The kindnesses I witnessed should be the norm in a world where anger at strangers seems to be the common denominator. And it's combined with bawdy sexy off the charts self expression combined with intentionality. It is really an extraordinary experience.

So when I learned that this guy took it upon himself to desecrate the most sacred of events, the final burn of the festival, the one where all 25,000 beautiful people are gathered in an enormous circle with drums and lights and non stop funkadelic to welcome the burn I was angry. Angry that one dude would take it upon himself to be the anti-burner, the one who was thinking of himself and not the community and destroyed the Man too soon. But I also know it's a temporary interruption, that today thousands of folks are meeting at the center of that desert and doing what they can to repair the man using items from their camps and their general brilliant creativity. So all in all I am betting that this year's burn will be the most special of all because if there is ever a place where the community will triumph against the individual, it's at Burning Man.

And I wish I was there. And I wish all of you could be there too. Because it changes the way you look at the world, this one week in the desert living in a world where the answer to everything is yes.