The Burning Man Festival represents many things to many different people. Participants come from all over the country and world to a desolate stretch of Nevada desert affectionately known as "the playa" to find resonance with their own personal journeys.

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 insidious baseline level of existence that resembles 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. But it is this exploration that through the vehicles of dress, action, and attitude that allows us to create something new -- someone new. That newness breaks the cycle of sleepwalking which we normally operate within in some portion of our lives.

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 that meeting is empowering and inspiring and meaningful.

It is in the formed structure of our lives that we sometimes perceive a rigidness to be the person that we were yesterday and others should be just as they were the last time we interacted with them. These expectations are like boxes that we put ourselves or others in which ultimately limit our ability to live freely and to support others in their desire to do the same.