Yes this seems completely insane to jump on a plane and travel for hours to make our way back to San Francisco only to pack up a truckload of equipment to spend a week out in the middle of the hot, dusty dry, remote desert of Nevada. But we do it anyway. Steve has been attending this annual event for 11 years. I have only been going for 3. I guess we are committed to going no matter where we are in the world. Yeah it is crazy, but then, so is Burning Man itself crazy.
It is hard to describe what Burning Man is to anyone who has not attended and difficult to describe even to those who have attended. Someone once said, “Burning Man is like a county fair that has gone very very bad”. A lot of people revere Burning Man as feeling like going home. They talk about the world we live in as the default world. Burning Man is the real world where things are as they should be. And when you are there, you do get the sense that this just feels right. Overwhelming and permeating throughout everything else is a since of community and creativity. It certainly is a place where thinking is not restricted to what is expected. And perhaps the underlying current of the whole experience is the gifting community. There is nothing to buy at Burning Man except ice and coffee at center camp. After that, everything is given freely to those attending. Literally hundreds of camps are set up to gift to those attending anything from bacon, pancakes, crepes in the morning to music, dance, art, root beer floats, ice cream and pop corn in the afternoon.
But there is much more than that. There are spectacular fire events throughout the week culminating in the burning of “the man” on Friday night and the solemn torching of the temple on Saturday night. Burning Man is every bit a spiritual experience as it is a spectacle of creative forces when normal is anything but normal.
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