Okay, we burned stuff. But what did you learn?

Every year I make the pilgrimage out to the desert. I like to sit around in the dust with a bunch of weirdos and burn stuff. Chase blinky lights into the horizon. Stomp around to music I don’t much care for most of the time. (Although once in a while it floors me, like, take a knee, it’s so good.)

The question that kept coming up this year is, why? Why do I keep coming back here? I ask myself that at some point each year, but other people kept bringing this question to me as they were pondering it themselves.

13 years of Burning Man…. that’s kind of a lot.

You see, after a few years, the amazingness of the playa wears off a bit. Sure the art changes, the lasers up-level, there is incredible and interactive shit you have never seen or done before, but the wonder of it fades slightly.

So what is it? Why do we spend the money, and make the effort and choose to go build a city in the middle of nowhere and go bonkers for a week or two and then struggle-monkey the shit back into the truck and come home. (and take DAAAAYS to get it all cleaned back up… still working on it…)

Two things comes up for me when I ask that question…

One is the thing I usually speak to pre-playa each year, which I didn’t this time. That is the process of releasing.

I spend a significant amount of my daily life looking at my ‘stuff’, my way of being, my baggage. I go to countless workshops and have endless discussions with likeminded folk about how to choose a new reality. How to choose to be whole and healed and all-powerful. How to change our lives and the world around us.

I fucking meditate.

Burning man is an opportunity for us to look at our pile of shit and drop some off. You can pick it back up, that’s always an option. The grief. The heartache. The trauma. The drama. The shitty shadow parts of ourselves. You can always keep it, but the ceremony of showing up to Burning Man, getting ritualistic in your heathenism, and unloading whatever you have the courage to let go of at the temple (or at the Duck Pond, or at Bubbles and Bass or wherever you happen to find your release this go-around), that ceremony is one of the big reasons I keep showing up.

That shedding of layers is something not everyone does without a big bold reason to. It’s not something that usually creeps into our daily lives. Unless we seek it out.

So Reason #1, I go for that. To watch it. To encourage it. To remind people to go into that temple and sit for a while and see what comes up/through/out.

The second reason is multi-faceted…

I have managed to be loved by an incredible circle of people out there. Not sure that I had to do much to win them over, but I know that there was a time that they weren’t sure they needed to keep me.

Sad truth. Many years ago I didn’t get the email invite to re-join my camp. I had been a bit of a dick the year before and they weren’t sure I wanted to camp with them. I responded to that with what I remember as a big fucking stand for myself and a plea for people who had no real reason to, to believe in me and the better me I was committed to becoming.

That was maybe the first time I really asked someone to believe in me. And it was also the first time that I really promised myself that I would change. I knew something had to change.

I go to see them and to be seen by them. To witness their expansion and growth and to be witnessed in mine. I go to discover how much more of me I can reveal and how much more I can allow myself to be held, welcomed and appreciated.

I go to fall even more deeply in love with each of them and also to see through their eyes, the immense shifts that I have created in my life between visits. Maybe that sounds a bit vain, but part of the reason I go to Burning Man is to see how much I’ve changed over the last year.

It used to be agonizing the amount of shit I carried around in my brain. Making people and things and even the damn RAIN wrong. The feeling of separation that lingered even as I was standing in a circle of my closest friends. The amount of energetic spikes I had as armor around me, that poked inward if anyone got too close.

So when I can go out there and feel playful, joyful, happy, and pretty dang even-keeled for the majority of the 13 days I spend out there. That feels BIG. It’s different than it used to be.

I go to burn shit down. I go to be the one aware enough to listen to that person in that moment they need to speak. I go to squeak my horn and laugh maniacally and wonder what more is out there. I go for me and I go for all of you too.

Let this be an invitation. If you were there, great, if you weren’t, that’s great too. But if there’s any way to let a little more of the shit go, right now, today, I double dog dare you to do that. And if there’s any way in that letting go, that you can find yourself able to be closer to other people, talk to them, share with them, invite them to open up with you, that would be a hell of an added bonus.

To be trite but meaning-filled, “Burn the past, light the future.”

-Dr. Quinn, the Mighty Eskimo Medicine Woman, over and out!