Burning Man 2023

Burning Man was a trip! Jon and Kat invited me to join the Preservation Society, the burning man camp Kat has been a part of for many years. Burning Man engaged more aspects of my personality and life’s journey than most things I have experienced. In the lead-up to the festival, I volunteered to lead the camp's public shade, which is a community lounge space. Volunteering to lead one of the more arduous camp projects on my first trip to Burning Man was perhaps a questionable decision. Still, it all worked out and I really enjoyed being more connected with the community!

As a bit of background, there are two areas at the festival: the city, which is where all the camps are located and is situated around a clock in the picture below, the the playa, which is where all the art lives and is in the middle of the clock. I didn't realize the English definition of playa is "a flat-floored bottom of an undrained desert basin that becomes at times a shallow lake"; I had thought the use of playa at Burning Man was a tongue-in-cheek reference to the Spanish word for beach. The picture below shows the festival layout.

Source: burningman.org

Source: governing.com

The picture above helps to give you an idea of how big everything actually is. Roughly 80,000 people attend the festival. 

I spent the week prior in Reno getting some things ready for the camp. I also got to catch up with Garrett, his partner Crystal, and their baby Avery :) Garret and Crystal were so generous in helping me and the camp out by allowing us to ship things to their place.

I did a lot of prep for Burning Man including dying my hair purple!

I drove in with Austin, a high school friend of Garrett's. He was such a lifesaver in helping me get all my stuff (and the public shade stuff) to the playa. My hair was such a pretty, dark purple at this point!

Austin and some other artists designed this huge Queen Cobra statue as one of the artworks on the playa. It was 25 feet tall, and unfortunately, I never did climb up to the top of the Queen Cobra but I saw many others do so.

The first few days are called "build" where everyone sets up the camp. I loved getting to meet people and doing all the tasks. I could have been a bit more patient with other people in the camp who were less familiar with tools, but I think I balanced the respect of others and my desire to be doing stuff all the time.

This is a picture of the public shade, which is the project I led. It took a lot of work by the camp to get everything together,  and I was pretty pleased with how it turned out! 

Meet Lucy, the camp's art car! She is a beautiful snail with an LED shell and DJ sound system on the roof. 

As one of my camp shifts, I was guiding Lucy on her first night out, and, oh boy, did I have fun! I definitely took my job too seriously as I was living out my sheepdog/sleddog fantasy. My friend Ryan had given me a plastic lightsaber to use as a herding instrument –– it's lovely to have good friends. As Lucy drove through the city, I got to move bikers and people aside, which reminded me of herding cattle when I was a kid. 

The worst sandstorm of the week started while we were directing Lucy. It got so bad that on several occasions it was a total whiteout, which reminded me of snowstorms in North Dakota.

Despite not having a ton of time to plan my outfits, I ended up having different daytime and nighttime outfits each day. I did my best to try to get pictures of each outfit; here is my first daytime outfit.

On Wednesday, a new friend Jonathan and I spent the day walking around the playa and exploring the art. 

We spent a while sitting meditatively watching people interact with this red fabric sculpture about resistance to the Iranian regime.

After the stroll around the playa, I changed into my favorite outfit! The outfit vibe was Ensnared Dragon.

On Wednesday afternoon, we took Lucy out for an afternoon safari around the playa. I had a wonderful frisbee session with some folks, and while I was walking back, I saw the lantern lighters lighting the lamps before sunset. The lantern lighters reminded me of Buddhist monks and the Temple (in the background) seemed very pagoda-like. These elements combined with the dirt streets and darkness at night reminded me a lot of being in rural Myanmar, which was a beautiful connection to my life.

During one of Lucy's stops, there was a man with a twister kite on a telescoping pole. This is a photo of Jon maneuvering it. I had such a wonderful time dancing with that kite!

Wednesday concluded with sunrise at the Robot Heart camp's art car 💜

On Thursday, one of my other camp shifts was to help host the Taylor Swift party. I borrowed some clothes from a friend to put together this lovely outfit!

Kat recommended that I take the shift for the Taylor Swift party, and what a fantastic recommendation that was!

The party concluded with Taylor's song All Too Well (10-minute version). I was grateful for having memorized the song and gave, what I thought, was a stunning performance.

On Friday, the rain started to come more heavily. I took a long walk in the rain Friday afternoon. While on the walk, I found a trampoline and spent about an hour jumping and doing flips in the rain. It was suuuper fun :) 

This is the inside of the Temple. People often hang memorials of loved ones who have passed. The Temple usually burns the day after the man.

That evening I couldn't resist doing some mud sliding. On Wednesday while on a short walk, I did some sliding on my feet across the main road after they had watered the road to keep the dust down, so I knew the playa dust was particularly slippery. 

But I wasn't prepared for just HOW slippery it would be! I found a big puddle just one camp over where I was able to penguin slide for like 50 feet. It. Was. Amazing. 

As a child, I used to slide on the muddy sandbars in the Little Missouri River near my home and have been mud sliding on several other times in my life, but none was as slippery as this mud!

The double rainbow felt very auspicious.

At this point, it had rained enough so that cars couldn't drive on the roads meaning we were basically stranded for an unknown amount of time. We had plenty of food and water, but the portapotties were no longer able to be drained. Luckily, we had two camp portos that had recently been drained, so we were in relatively good shape.

During a camp meeting on Saturday morning, we were told not to do anything unnecessarily risky because the ambulances couldn't drive either, which meant no more mud sliding.

Instead, I went on a couple longer runs in the coming days. I was surprised by how comfortable I felt running in the mud. And I felt pretty smug trampling through the puddles while others struggled to keep upright.

I had been giving prayers to the man daily and was giving some prayers to the man during one of my runs. The only other person around the man was a photographer, and she took this neat photo of me. 

We started taking the camp apart on Saturday and took this camp photo in the process. I am very grateful to have shared this experience with so many lovely people!

On Sunday, I went on a run in search of the trampoline that I found on Friday. Fortunately, it was still there, and I spent an hour doing front and back flips on it. It was one of my favorite experiences of the week!

I had a few people join me on the trampoline, and they shared their acrobatics. A 12-year old girl gave me some tips on back handsprings, and she was soooo cool! And reminded me of my nieces who are about the same age. I actually think Burning Man is a great place to bring kids around that age, and I really appreciated that interaction. 

This is a wonderful polaroid of some lovely people on Saturday night, which was when the Man was supposed to burn. The man didn't actually burn until Monday night and I somewhat foolishly decided to leave instead of watching him burn. 

This outfit is a full jumpsuit that I got from my high school's drama department. It's one of my lifelong treasures and it felt special for me to wear it on what was supposed to be the climax of the week. The headband I borrowed from a friend, and I later learned it is stylized from a Mexican children's doll!

I left Monday afternoon and should have stayed until Tuesday to see the Man and Temple burn. Instead, I spent 10.5 hours in line just trying to get out of the festival grounds and another 2.5 getting back to Reno. 

But, the lengthy exodus was it's own experience. I snapped this selfy at 5 am on Tuesday morning after arriving back in Reno. I hadn't looked in the mirror or really showered for 11 days and was delighted to find my purple hair had become blue in the front and back! Such beautiful colors!

I spent a few more days in Reno tidying things up at my generous friend Garrett's house, which I used as a staging ground. I flew on a red-eye back to NYC and that afternoon I was swimming in the East River with my friend Meg who was visiting for a few days! While having nothing to do with burning man, the swim in the East River after a red-eye feels spiritually and energetically connected to the experience.

These last few photos aren't chronologically related but will space out some musing on my experience.

A respect for renewal is part of the philosophy of Burning Man as seen in the duality of presence and absence as well as life and death. For most of the year, the playa is a relatively empty salt flat, and over the course of a few weekends, the festival emerges only to again return to relatively emptiness. The cycle of life and death is also symbolized in the man burning.

I also found the rain we experience connected to these ideas. The rain for most of the festival goers meant the destruction of their plans, hopes, and expectations; but to the natural environment, the rain is regenerative and lifegiving.

The appreciation for presence and absence, life and death is also strongly rooted in Buddhist philosophy.

I was struck by how many aspects of my life's journey were connected with my experience at Burning Man. 

• Being in a wide-open natural environment reminded me of growing up in North Dakota. And the communal manual labor connected me to my memories of tearing down barns at this dad’s family's farmstead. Guiding Lucy the art car through the city and the sandstorm helped me embody my sheepdog/sleddog inner animals in a metaphorical snowstorm.
• Many of the people who founded the PS camp were classmates at Phillips Academy of Andover, which connected to me with my experience at Exter since Andover and Exeter are rival schools. 
• The culture of Burning Man reminded me a lot of the culture of West Dorm at Harvey Mudd College. This connection was perhaps the most surprising but allowed me to understand how to operate almost immediately.
• Finally, the combination of the monk-like lantern-lighters, dusty roads and small camps, and widespread darkness at night made the experience feel a lot more like rural Myanmar than I expected.

These connections made me feel rooted in myself and a sense of confidence in my ability to handle a variety of circumstances. My experience of getting divorced upon moving to Myanmar was a big milestone in my sense of resilience, and my time at Burning Man was a good reminder of this resilience. 

I also came away with a narrative of being a "hill person", which isn't necessarily positive or negative, and is a narrative that I'm still observing play out within myself.

Wow, what an amazing sculpture! And it is one of my favorite color schemes!

All of the wonderful interactions with strangers are the primary experiences I wanted to bring from Burning Man into my day-to-day life. I was reminded how much I love chatting with strangers, and how much strangers love chatting with me!

Some of the things I have done in regular life to foster interactions with strangers are to keep color in my hair and to embrace my joy of wearing colorful clothing. Recently, I have found that playing with toys like my yo-yo has prompted many people to start chatting with me.

And that's all folks! Thank you for reading all this. I appreciate your time, attention, and the role you've played in shaping my life. It's been a wonderful journey!