Free Refills

Over the past few days, photos from people returning from Burning Man have started popping up in my Facebook feed. I looked through a couple of the galleries and noticed myself feeling that strong pull again, touched with the wistfulness of not having gone. YOU MISSED OUT ON A LOT, the photos said.

But then after a bit I noticed something else: Everything about Burning Man looked exactly the same. The camps looked the same. The art looked the same. The people and the clothing they wore looked the same. I saw cars made over into whimsical rolling art. I saw big sculptures with people climbing on them. I saw people in dust masks and people in steampunk and people in pink hot pants. I saw big soundsystems with beautiful people dancing in front of them.

And I don’t mean to disparage any of it, or to suggest that it wasn’t a profound experience for those who went, or even to assert that I wouldn’t have enjoyed it. I’m not trying to be arrogant here. What I’m saying, though, is that after the initial sense of OHMYGOD I SHOULD HAVE BEEN THERE went away, it became all the more clear that my decision to not go this year was the right one. All of the sameness in those photos said to me that if I want something different out of the Burning Man experience, I need to bring a different me out there.

And while I’m a substantially different me from where I was a year ago, I know I haven’t gone far enough yet. Another year of the process of change, approached with a little attention paid toward returning to the playa: that should do the trick. That’s when a return to Burning Man will make sense.

In honor of Labor Day, a holiday that celebrates the achievements of the Labor Movement in the United States, I’m going to take today entirely off from publishing and…oops.

Well, since I’m here anyway, I will I take a moment to comment on how deeply ironic it is that Burning Man, which relies on the volunteer labor of tens of thousands to make a bunch of a money for a tiny cadre of people on its board, is held over Labor Day weekend.

To my friends who are coming off the playa today: may its magic have outweighed its contradictions.

So if Burning Man’s great magic is the liberation of the imagination across its whole society, its great failure is more prosaic. Everything that Burning Man really is–the art, the theme camps, the music, the costumes, the parties, the classes and workshops and events and rituals–is created by the people of Burning Man as gifts for the other attendees. Lurking behind all of this is BMorg, which provides the infrastructure. A substantial part of the ticket price goes to a small cabal of people within BMorg, who pay themselves as the “creators” of Burning Man.

For all of Burning Man’s anti-capitalist/anti-commercial pretensions, nothing could be more typical of amoral/immoral capitalism than the few profiting mightily from the hard work of the many.

I propose that it is exactly this aspect, this ugly contradiction right at the heart of everything that Burning Man is, that has kept it from having the broader positive cultural impact that so many of us used to believe it could.

Though I still recall it with awe and a deep sense of magic, the jolt of energy I felt upon first setting foot on the playa no longer strikes me as especially surprising. You bring tens of thousands of creative-minded people to a place as inhospitable and remote as any in this country and free them to explore their imaginations, joyfully and without fetter, and it’s no wonder at the intensity of energy that results.

The implications for what is possible when we free our greatest selves is pretty staggering.

It was late January or early February of 2006, and I was still very much aglow from the experiences of my first Burn. I was flying from Oakland to Burbank after a few days visiting friends I’d made at Burning Man. I had a window seat on the right side of the plane, and as we came in to land I saw a glacier of headlights creeping down Mulholland Pass on the 405. I have never forgotten the sight. It was like witnessing a vision. I said to myself, Surely we can do better than this.

The utopian drive of Burning Man in a nutshell: Once you have witnessed what creative energy, properly harnessed, can accomplish on a grand scale, you no longer see the world in the same way. Our intractable problems come to seem like failures of imagination. Limitations fall away. You say, Surely we can do better than this. And you aspire to make it so.

Everyone I know who’s attending Burning Man this year should be out there by now, leaving the rest of us free to speak about stuff.

Feeling any regrets about not going?

No. I made my decision and stand by it.

What would it have taken to get you to go?

A gift ticket. I didn’t want to give BMorg $390.

Does that kind of thing happen?

Yes. It’s never happened to me, though.

What if some millionaire gave you a ticket right now? Would you go?

She’d have to fly me in on her private plane, too. I wouldn’t do the charmless 1,200-mile drive to the Black Rock Desert right now.

So if you know of some filthy-rich person looking for someone who’d make an excellent addition to their camp, tell her I’d be happy to pack light.

How are you doing with the feeling of being called?

I’m still feeling the call. I was in downtown Boulder Saturday night and I saw a couple dressed in Burner attire. (“Why aren’t you on your way to the playa?” I asked in my head.) The sight of them got me envisioning what it would have been like to be there right then–I imagined the temperature and the dryness and the quality of the light and the cacophony of the place. At that moment, Burning Man wasn’t even officially open yet, but you can rest assured it was already hopping.

Are you sure you aren’t feeling any regrets?

I thought it through and made my decision. No regrets.

But?

But the way I’m still feeling called says to me that I should plan to go in 2016.

A trip to the Burn takes a ton of energy, time and money. Now I’ve got a year to put together a plan worthy of the investment.

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.