Free Refills

You already know that gifting is a huge part of Burner culture.

I don’t remember if I was told to bring things to give my first year, but if I was I didn’t know what one would give that made any kind of sense. When I was drafting this piece, I remembered for the first time in forever that I did give things that first year, but what I gave I was given–I helped a couple of my campmates put the pins in the buttons that they’d made, and they gave me a whole handful to give away, and I did, all week long. They were great buttons, and people liked them. Ten years later, I still have two of them pinned to the Camelbak I brought that year.

But the major form of gifting on the playa isn’t the little things people give you. It’s the big things. It’s the art installations and the theme camps and the art cars and the sound camps, all the hundreds and thousands of hours of work that make Burning Man what it is.

I urge you not to get too involved in giving your first year. For a gift to balance out energetically, it needs to be received. It needs to be received graciously.

Thousands of people have put in thousands of hours to make Burning Man into the wonderland that it is, and though you have heard stories and though you have seen pictures, you have never been before, and most of the people who’ve gone to such trouble to give such wonders did it because they too went out to the playa and were blown away by what they found out there. They wanted to give back.

For your first year, go out and soak it in. Find the things that delight you. The best gift you can give your first year is to balance the energy.

Open yourself to receiving that which will delight you.

My first year I got connected to my camp’s mailing list, and through it I pre-connected with a few people. My not-yet-friend Kyle stepped forward and asked me a simple question that mattered so much. He asked, “What are your intentions for your Burn?”

His question offered me a solid framework to have an amazing experience. There is magic at Burning Man, magic enough to change your world for the better. If you can set an energetic intention for the experience, you are much more likely to be able to tap into that magic. As the saying goes, The playa provides. By setting your intentions ahead of time, you maximize the possibility that you can direct (somewhat, anyway) what it provides.

“Maybe you should,” said Dawn. “Sounds like an adventure.”

Well, sure. But to what end?

That’s not a question I usually want to ask when I’m talking about an adventure. Adventure–stepping, be it gingerly or boldly, into the unknown–qualifies as its own end. I admit that’s something I’ve struggled to explore. All too often, I’ve chosen to wait tentatively on the sidelines of life, to my obvious detriment.

But with respect to Burning Man, it’s a little different. I’ve been five times. Yes, of course, every year is its own adventure, but at the same time I have a pretty good feel for what the flavor of that adventure would be. And at this point the benefits of simply embarking on that adventure–throwing my stuff into a duffel bag, like I did ten years ago–isn’t going to outweigh the costs in money, time, and energy.

Which is why I’ve been trying to express my idea for getting myself back onto the playa. It’s calling me. But I know I need to offer more than just my presence there.

This isn’t new. I recently found an email to my friend Ken from August, 2010. I wrote:

So I sold my Burning Man tickets on Friday. I kept getting messages from the universe telling me to take this year off, and finally I listened. It felt like I made the right choice, but I’ve been having little flashes, like visions, of life out on the playa, and it’s making me mourn a little. An art car trundling past, some unknown DJ playing amazing thumping dubstep¹; the midday sun beating down; weaving my bicycle through throngs of people; the way the light comes down at the middle of Center Camp–disconnected discrete moments and when each arises I feel a pang of loss. It may be the right choice but I’m going to miss it.

I felt this year that I needed to bring more than just myself and my self out to the playa. I needed to give back in some serious way, but that way never revealed itself.

This year, too, I will feel those pangs. And what I said next–“to give back in some serious way”–that’s what I still need to do before I go again. So here I am.

As promised in yesterday’s Refill, I will start by giving a few things to my first-timers, that they may find the pleasure and wonder and joy during their first visit to the playa that I did on mine.

¹ Back in 2010, dubstep could still be amazing.

I’ve written something like 8,000 zero-draft words related to Burning Man in the past two weeks, and yet each day I’ve been finding it almost impossible to carve out a piece to publish.

Maybe it’d be easier if I threw up my hands in defeat, stopped writing, and just started packing. Surely that path would lead to a story or two…

Back in 2009, I wrote some annotations to the Burning Man Survival Guide to help out some friends who were going for the first time. They thought it was a worthwhile resource, so I decided to give it an update and post it over on Transformed.

You can find it here:
Advice for First-Time Burners

Black Rock Desert. Tuesday/Wednesday, Aug 30th/31st 2005, right around midnight.

It’s easy to forget this now, but back in 2005 it wasn’t quite as easy to see photos and videos of everything under the sun. The infrastructure for sharing them was far less developed than it is now. We couldn’t see all of our friends’ photos on Facebook because Facebook was barely even a thing and most of us weren’t on it. Back then, we didn’t all carry Internet-connected digital cameras with us everywhere we went. Only ten years ago, but a different world.

Thus I was privileged to go to my first Burning Man with no clear idea of what I’d be experiencing. I had only two friends who’d been there, and one of them was the reason I was going. I had some vague sense of the place, picked up as rumors and hearsay, but I’d never seen pictures, never had an in-depth conversation about it. It was terra incognita.

I sat in the back seat on the drive up while Amanda and Jordan talked about Burning Man in the front. They had a sort of been-there-done-that cool about them in their conversation about it, but it wasn’t hard to tell that they were very excited to get there.

It’s not a long drive from the Bay Area to the Black Rock Desert–up and over the Sierras on I-80 and down into Reno, another 40 or so to miles east to Fernley, then pretty much due north on NV-447 for about 80 miles to the twin towns of Empire and Gerlach and then a little bit beyond. We did most of this in the dark. I wouldn’t see the landscape until the next morning.

It was around midnight, maybe just before or just after, when we came around the big curve outside Gerlach and I caught my first glimpse of Black Rock City. I had imagined Burning Man as a bunch of hippies camping in the desert, but that first glimpse spoke of something far more wondrous. I was truly seeing a city. A cloud of dust hovered low in the sky above it, and the lights–lights, as of a carnival midway–lit the cloud into a glow.

I had a feeling of: “What have I gotten myself into?”

We picked up my ticket at will call, passed the Greeters’ Station, and drove into the city. Whatever I’d been expecting, Burning Man instantly defied it. People in outlandish costumes walked or biked the streets, lit up in electro-luminescent wire. Cars made over into rolling, glowing sculptures prowled the streets as well. Streets. There were streets! We passed a glowing Cheshire Cat, built atop some hidden vehicle underneath. Its eyes were spinning. So were mine.

I had expected hippies camping in the desert, and instead I found myself in a city with an energy unlike anything I’d ever experienced before.

Words came to me: “The Carnival at the End of the World.”

We pulled into camp, where a raucous EDM party was well underway. Amanda and Jordan practically leapt from the car and immediately disappeared into the crowd. I stepped down onto the playa. The moment my feet touched the ground, I felt a buzz, as of an electric current, radiate up through the ground and into my body. I’d never experienced the energy of a place as a physical sensation before, and it freaked me the hell out. I was totally overwhelmed. Dropping right into the party was way, way more than I could imagine dealing with right then. I needed some time to get my bearings. I picked a direction and started walking, to see what I would see.

Tuesday, August 30th, 2005. Somewhere in the far East Bay, CA.

I had only decided to go a week before. I had been debating it back and forth until late one night I quite clearly heard a voice in my head say, “You’ll regret it if you don’t go.” So I told myself, “If I can still get a cheap enough plane ticket, I’ll go.” I could, and I did.

I packed a single duffle bag full of clothes and camping gear and flew on Monday, August 29th, from Connecticut to San Francisco. I would be camping with False Profit, a camp with extensive communal infrastructure, so I didn’t need to worry about food and water.

Tuesday afternoon, a woman named Amanda and a guy named Jordan picked me up from my friend Angela’s house in Berkeley. They became the second and third people I would know at Burning Man, the other being my friend Ken, my connection to all of this and already on the playa.

We stopped at Ken’s mom’s house on the way out of town to pick something up for him. On the TV in her living room were confusing images out of New Orleans. They didn’t make sense to me. They looked third-world, foreign. “BREAKING NEWS,” said the caption on CNN. The city appeared to be underwater.

Tuesday, August 30th 2005, was the day the levees breached after Hurricane Katrina. Those were the images I carried with me that hot August afternoon as we got back in the car and began the drive to Nevada, to my first Burning Man.