Imagine gifting yourself an opportunity to reinvent part of your person. Which edges would you smooth out? Which parts of your person would you like to let shine a little more? Would even a glimpse of this part of your being be enough to set the wheels of transformation in motion?

There is a gathering whose collective aim is to do just this. At the end of August of each year, people journey vast distances, some even from other countries, congregating on a 200 acre piece of BLM land in the Nevada desert -- to try something a little different. Tens of thousands of people commit to the commandments of this gathering: bring everything you need to survive in the desert for seven days (and then leave nothing behind), do not interfere with the immediate experience of others, and whether one comes to the desert to meditate or to celebrate ancient or modern Bacchanalian rituals, every person must participate in some way (no spectators).

From the lines drawn on a map of all of these arrivals, it would seem that all roads lead to...
the Nevada desert?

Participants arrive and assemble into a temporary community called Black Rock City that will contain, what organizers bill the event as, “an experiment in radical self-reliance and radical self-expression.” This accepted and honored group intention is what catalyzes peoples' migrations here to this remote Earth wilderness-social-experiment, commonly known as Burning Man.

The land is so open and expansive, some claim they can see the curvature of the Earth. Artists experience this expansivness as a massive blank canvas to create something from their visions that people can interact and engage with. Hundreds or even thousands of hours may go into a creative endeavor that lasts only for seven days. Much of the art that is created during the week also finds its place in the alchemical transmutation of focused effort and various connections to an exercise in being without attachment for thing, to work creatively simply because working creatively is a divine act.

Radical self-reliance in a place that dances between near freezing temperatures in the very early morning and well over a hundred under a cloudless sky on a white oven floor of periodic howling dust storms and the curious alchemy of sudden rain on a clay desert stratum, there lies something wonderful. And this is why people come. There are gems in the mix. Within my experience, I found that by concsiously intending to be even more open to the places in my life where I felt inspiration and joy that in doing so, I was cultivating a gemfield around me, and in doing that, I was cultivating these gems for others. These images are glimpses of some of those gems.

The event famously has no particular meaning. A person will create meaning from their personal and larger group experience so rather than talk about what Burning Man is, I'll share a few things about what it can be and was for me.

Describing the festival to another who has not been themselves is notoriously ineffective. Yet, as storytellers, we continue to try. There is something that can not be conveyed about having prepared, driven, set up, wandered, got lost, found some divinity in something, came back to share it with others, seen how day and night merged with the elements into a purifying growth of connected experience, released blessings and attachments into the flames of the cosmos, dancing and dancing and dancing, standing within a “grey-out” with swim goggles on, being alkalized, packing up and feeling grateful to the land that hosted my experience before the long journey back to Portland.

What is “radical self-expression?” What would your way of radically self-expressing yourself look like?
Until we have given our all to this possibility, it's difficult to know what we are capable of.
Through words shared and read and even through photographs, the experience becomes meaningful when it is experienced through participation. These other attempts offer only glimpses of a more profound beauty – that which is fertilized in one's inner garden from direct experience.

Connecting people and potential life catalysts.

Every age and walk of life gravitate to what some returnees affectionately call “home” during this time at the end of each summer to challenge their own mind, body, and spirit. How could such a commitment in such a place not open up new doors of perception? When people explore their own selves with honesty and courage and then share this energetic state with other beings, amazing things can happen. What is the speed of love?

Being in this kind of physical and energetic field of creativity and intention to deepen one's intelligence, I found it natural to go inward. The challenging conditions provided the slightly different angles to see myself being challenged. How was I to respond to these challenges?

Creatively, of course!

And so this self-expression invited a variety of small miracles – the kind that happen when one person shares something that is real within them -- with another. No where to go but to Connection. And because of whatever ancestral and energetic connections we have with other humans, getting through the armor of our external physical fortress to something that is in the core of who we are, to what our life experience has brought to our paths, feels completely en-lightening.

It is this connection between so many of the unknown kindred souls around us that we never dare randomly introduce ourselves just to meet the need that our kind of social animal has – and that is to connect with others. And so this gathering which has now gone on for twenty one years is still a source of light and inspiration for so many.

Most attendees will arrive on the same day, many one minute after midnight when the gates open, setting up by moonlight and a sky so clear that stars seem like the effervescent bubbles in a crashing wave. Everyone camps next to each other along a semi-circular network of marked off roads and the intention to participate fuels the commraderie and support in helping each other setup and clean up and in general, to take care. Everyone who shows up, ready to live fully, helps to make the gathering happen. What makes this festival different from others is that people are almost entirely self sufficient for everything they will need to survive under a summer's desert sun for seven days. You've got to have every drop of water you'll need for drinking, washing body and spoon – right, we're in a desert!

A lot of planning is necessary to pull of a successful adventure where you are really self-sufficient. So there's that and the part about challenging yourself to be more truly self-expressed not to mention the sun, the “brown-out” dust and sand storms and the WIND which I can tell you from personal experience, have been known to squash tents and in even regularly pulling shelters clear off the ground, sending the dome shaped tents in an endless roll into an infinte expanse of wide open desert wilderness. With much gratitude, my flattened tent stayed on the ground. I didn't know a tent could do what an unbrella does when it turns inside out!
With the help of Burning Man tent stakes (18” sections of rebar steel rods), my home for the week stayed put but seemed to collect the playa's highly alkaline fine clay sediments through every opening in the tent. By wind rain snow, the lives of these sediments always moving in place and form.

Just the experience of meeting my neighbors is inspiring. It becomes a collective survival. If I can just describe one other thing using the r-word of the moment, Burning Man has taught me lessons in radical all-inclusiveness.

Vending at the festival is not allowed except for ice and coffee and maybe the two together.

At the end of the week, a large stick figure (the “man”) is burned in a group ritual. This burning represents the release and transformation from one state to another. Some experience this with quietness and reflection, others with ecstatic release.

One camp consisted mostly of bodyworkers. They all brought their tables and built a large shade structure over head. With twenty massage tables and free massages for ten hours a day throughout the week, there was very effective word-of-mouth aound this offering to the community. represents different things to different people however, there are some intriguing common threads. Participants come from all over the country -- and the world -- to a desolate stretch of the Nevada desert affectionately known as "the playa" to find both resonance with their own personal journeys and catalysts for their own transformation.

As a trained massage therapist, my skills were sought after with the kind of gratitude and even fervor that made sharing gracefully easy. Along with the spotaneous gifting to those in need, having one shift for a couple hours each day at the bodywork camp gave me some routine that I welcomed in this vast expanse of internal and external landscapes.

Burning Man is a festival of self-expression, community, self reliance and perhaps most of all, it's a festival about being creative in the face of adversity and challenging conditions.

It is this last challenge that is the gathering's signature quality.

When we can be self-expressed within the real and perceived pressures of our lives, then we have transcended the baseline level of existence that can sometimes resemble a kind of sleepwalking.

Sometimes, in the adventure of exploring one's own authentic self-expression, extreme or edgy facets of our personas come to the surface. This exploration occurs through the vehicles of dress, behavior, and attitude that allows us to create something new -- someone new.

Through exploration, we provide ourselves with a clean slate to be the person that we want to identify with, to find that part of being that we already are. And when this meeting happens, it is empowering, inspiring, meaningful.

The gathering encourages people to form communities, to help each other, to be generous without expectation of anything in return. It's remarkable what can happen, what can be built, what can become when people help each other.

Several of the images show this kind of cooperation to build and take down structures that no individual by themselves would be able to accomplish. This happens on a scale that is remarkable because it involves people that don't necessarily know one another and it involves people who are willing to cultivate giving for the sake of giving -- without any strings.

People come to Burning Man in part to practice this exploration, to practice expressing themselves through creativity, interaction, generosity, and acceptance of others and of themselves. For many participants, the festival acts as a catalyst to make possible what is possible -- transformation.

Images and Text associated with www.rakuloren.com is © Raku Loren 2007
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