If the Greeters are doing their job, the first words you will hear when you pull up to the Greeters' Station will be, "Welcome home."
And if your Burn is everything I wish it to be for you, you will, after two or three days of acclimatizing, find yourself deeply, truly at home, in a way that you have rarely, if ever, experienced before in your life. That's what you see in the eyes of people when they come off the playa for the first time. That stunned and joyous openness.
I left the playa after my first visit and immediately planned to return. I said I'd never not go again. And yet two years later I only ever glimpsed that magic, and by 2008 it seemed better not to go.
As I lived with it, "Welcome home" came to take on an unpleasant connotation. If I only found myself "Home" for that one week every summer, then where was I the rest of the time? The statement risked implying that we were supposed to live for that one week a year, and too many people seemed to do exactly that.
So here I'm going to give you something that no one out there was able to give me, something that took me many years to understand. You may find yourself Home out there because the magic there is very real, but the Home you find yourself in isn't out there. It's inside you.
Welcome Home.