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| The Man burns |
Burning Man 2013: Cargo Cult
Thus far, I have been writing about each of my days individually, but this post will be a little different. Instead of going day-by-day, I will give you the highlights from the last part of the week and my final thoughts on BM. The reason for this is that while Friday was my best day at BM and one of the best days of my life, I had been attempting to keep my posts to fairly brief descriptions of the major events of the day and the lessons learned as a result. However, I have nearly exhausted the smaller lessons and would like to focus in on my reflections during the final days and in the time since BM 2013 finalized (about two and a half months at the time of this post).
After my intense experience of homesickness on Wednesday, I took Thursday to decompress. I spent the majority of the day by myself. I ran a 5K, did yoga, took a shower with someone's solar shower bag (THANK YOU BRET AND LAINE! You're both going to heaven for your joint efforts to make me smell less like a dead animal and more like an unwashed burner), and bummed around in my campmates' RV. I rested. I reflected. It took a lot more than that one 24-hour block of time for me to fully process what happened on Wednesday (two and a half months later, I'm still processing) but I NEEDED that time to myself. BM is intense. If you don't take time for yourself, time to process, reflect, and recharge your batteries, you'll fizzle out and you may miss some of the larger philosophical points that BM has to offer as a result. If you were to take away the fire, colors, and sounds BM would be a lot less fun. By the same token, BM would be a lot less fun without the seemingly mandatory existential crisis. Decompression time is a necessary pseudo-evil.
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| This is what your eyes do after two days at BM |
Throughout the week, I had several conversations about ways to describe BM to those who have never been. A campmate described it as Mad Max dropped into a bag of Skittles. He was right on and he wasn't speaking metaphorically. The bag of Skittles is just really, really big. On Friday night I got to experience the Mad Max part of that equation: I fought in Thunder Dome with my friend Ian. Ian's playa name is Panda and as a direct result of this, my playa name is now Panda Slayer. For clarification, I am on the left in the video and Ian is on the right. This was easily one of the best things I've ever done in my entire life. It was such a rush, such a thrill! Months later, I find myself breaking into a huge smile and laughter at incredibly inappropriate times (e.g., like when my boss is talking to me about terrorism in Kenya). I still can't watch the video without laughing so hard I cry. At some point in your life you should get together with someone who is near and dear to you and beat the shit out of each other with bats (preferably foam or at least foam-lined). If you can get a crowd of roughly 200-300 people to cheer you on, even better. It's the kind of experience that if I ever have a kid and if said kid made it to the ripe old age of 18 and wanted advice from dear old mom about what to do in life, I'd tell them to do this. Or maybe I'll just send the kid to Burning Man. Either way.
Saturday was the night The Man burned. It was an intense bonding experience with my entire camp and with basically everyone there (all 69,000 of us). It was really moving to be a part of such a deep emotional current. If Disney World is the happiest place on Earth, I think Burning Man on Burn night is the most loving place on Earth. The entire day is fueled by an urgency spurred by the realization that it's almost over. Burning of The Man is basically the closing ceremony. The Temple is burned on Sunday night, but for many burners Sunday is tear-down and travel day. Hence, the sense of urgency. So many weird things left to do, so many crazy people left to me, but not enough time to do all the weird things and meet all the crazy people regardless of how little you sleep. Burn night is a great way to culminate the week. All of the art cars create a ring, inside which is every burner and The Man dead in the center. There's fire dancing and chanting. There's hugging and cheering. There's a huge fire works display and then The Man finally goes up in flames creating it's own mini-weather system that spawns fire tornadoes into the people unlucky/lucky enough to be sitting downwind. It's incredible in every sense of the word and I got to experience it. Fist bump me, bro!
Since The Man burned, I've had a lot time to reflect on my experience and even when I didn't have the time I did anyway. What I've come to realize is that BM is an experience that is ongoing. While the event itself is only officially a week long, after you've been it stays with you. You experience the world differently. I can't help but feel satisfied in a way I never had before because I have bonded with so many people so deeply. BM didn't change me, but it did put me in touch with a part of myself that I wasn't aware existed until I ventured to BRC. Yes, it's silly. Yes, there are a lot of hippies. Yes, there are a lot of cliches that are thrown around when talking about BM. But. BUT. BM serves as a modern day vision quest for many. It's our time go seeking our higher calling, find the meaning of life, ponder what we want out of life, and all of life's other big questions, but the catch is that you get to ponder them with thousands of other like-minded people. And, also while setting stuff on fire, dancing your ass off, and fighting your friends in Thunder Dome. One of my campmates described the essence of BM very well in a recent post to our Facebook group about a conversation he had with some non-burners in New York:
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| Sunset on the playa |
Glossary of useful terms:
Art Car--a motor vehicle that has been transformed into something else entirely, though it can still be driven. These art projects are massive undertakings. For information about art cars see the following links:
Burner--someone who has gone to Burning Man
BM--Burning Man
BRC--Black Rock City
Deep Playa--when you have gone so far on the playa that there are very few art projects or people. If you go far enough into deep playa, you hit the trash fence, which functions as the official border of BRC.
Gifting--BRC does not allow any sort of economy whether it be bartering, capitalism, or otherwise. It's strictly a gifting culture. There's no quo-pro-quo. It's simply because people want to.
Playa--refers to the large central part of BRC where most of the large art projects are found.
Playa Name--name by which you are known at Burning Man. These names are earned and usually bestowed by friends or campmates, but really anyone could give you a playa name. Not everyone has one but they are very common.
The Man--refers to the large wooden effigy of a man that is the center of BRC. The Man is burned on Saturday night of the festival and generally thought of as the closing ceremonies.
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