Stumbling across myself in the desert
Burning man offers a lot more than the world’s most spectacular party
My work documenting the sordid mess of politics in Washington often drives me towards nihilism. Most recently, the theatrical Democratic National Convention and continuing farce of the 2024 election left me gnashing my teeth, so I’m grateful to have enjoyed the chance to escape for a week and indulge my various inner children at a countercultural training academy in the Nevada desert.
My first year attending Burning man was in 2003, just after finishing law school. I’d heard amazing things about the gathering, and fell into a phenomenal camp when slipping inside an opening door on a street in San Francisco that led me up a set of stairs—and into the arms of one of the most loving communities I’d ever encountered to that point in my life.
Many participants fetishize Burning Man, treating it as the centerpiece of their social lives even in the depths of winter. Others belittle it, reducing it to yet another music festival despite its many unique elements. I ultimately see it as a gateway to a broader set of elusive, inspiring, and (both personally and socially) transformative countercultures.
I’ll start with the 10 official principles adopted by the community. Over the course of the next week or so, I’ll also share a few examples of them from this year and others before it.
10 principles
On the one hand, the countercultures that converge at Burning Man reflect a dramatically broad swath of the world. Yet, despite coming from one side of the planet to the other, and embracing musical tastes and cultures wildly different from one another, burners find commonality in a series of profoundly important principles.
As explained at BurningMan.org, they include:
Radical Inclusion: Anyone may be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation in our community.
Gifting: Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift giving. The value of a gift is unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value.
Decommodification: In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience.
Radical Self-reliance: Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise and rely on their inner resources.
Radical Self-expression: Radical self-expression arises from the unique gifts of the individual. No one other than the individual or a collaborating group can determine its content. It is offered as a gift to others. In this spirit, the giver should respect the rights and liberties of the recipient.
Communal Effort: Our community values creative cooperation and collaboration. We strive to produce, promote and protect social networks, public spaces, works of art, and methods of communication that support such interaction.
Civic Responsibility: We value civil society. Community members who organize events should assume responsibility for public welfare and endeavor to communicate civic responsibilities to participants. They must also assume responsibility for conducting events in accordance with local, state and federal laws.
Leaving No Trace: Our community respects the environment. We are committed to leaving no physical trace of our activities wherever we gather. We clean up after ourselves and endeavor, whenever possible, to leave such places in a better state than when we found them.
Participation: Our community is committed to a radically participatory ethic. We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation. We achieve being through doing. Everyone is invited to work. Everyone is invited to play. We make the world real through actions that open the heart.
Immediacy: Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important touchstone of value in our culture. We seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us, participation in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers. No idea can substitute for this experience.
Some of these principles can stand in tension with others. For instance, communal effort can become a crutch inhibiting radical self-reliance, just as easily as it can be a liberating factor enabling it.
Similarly, decommodification can create challenges for the vision of leaving no trace. Last year, the Burning Man organization sparked some controversy by shutting down camps that offered bicycles available to be picked up and dropped off at the event. While motivated by the goal of reducing commodification (in the form of paid services and bike rentals), the policy predictably increased the number of bicycles left behind after the event.
Gifting and civic responsibility are two other principles from the event that have inspired me for years. I envision dedicating another post to them soon.
Participation: A lesson in subjectivity
When I first came to the playa in 2003, I enjoyed the great fortune of being part of Sol System, a theme camp that held down the 2:00 corner at Esplanade that year and the following year (when I skipped Burning Man to instead support protests at the Republican National Convention in NYC).
Sol System was a formidable camp composed of hundreds of participants from around the country. We built a groundbreaking sound system arrayed in a Stonehenge pattern that created a sweet spot in the middle unlike anything over ever heard since. Other camp members built a statue, and I joined the build crew for the first iteration of an evolving art installation that, over the past 20 years, has been installed all over the world, from China to the city hall of a major California city.
Even though 2003 was my first year either on the playa or camping with that group, many people I met at camp thought I had played a leadership role and approached me as a resource because they saw me MC a fundraising auction that we had organized a few weeks before coming to the desert.
Each time I explained that I was a newbie in this community, folks reacted with surprise. I realized, meanwhile, that I myself maintained an impression that everyone else spent considerable time together back in the city, when the reality was that they lived across many communities and were grateful for the chance to converge from their various lives.
In short, everyone looked on everyone else as if they were closer to the center, while each observer internalized an impression of standing on the social periphery. To me, it was a license to suspend my self-impression and step into the center—not only of Sol System, but also other communities I would come to encounter in the years since then.
Finding mirrors in companions
Like many people among my friends, I struggle to see myself. Even though gratitude is a conscious practice of mine and I find many reasons to give thanks every day, the uniqueness of my perspective, my path, and my characteristics often fades in the face of whatever challenge or frustration bedevils me on any given day.
Routines seem to make that problem worse. I appreciate them as much as anyone, while recognizing that they can suppress the wonder and awe that my gratitude cultivates.
It feels obvious to me that the greatest resources we each encounter in this life are other people. In the desert, many participants gravitate towards the formidable, expansive, and visionary installation art built by artists from around the world. Others relentlessly pursue the musicians who most inspire them, excited by the opportunities to see so many in one place and also to share social space with them.
The part of the event that has most inspired me, however, is the crowd. Burning Man is unique among gatherings in that the events, shows, performances, and workshops are curated, organized, and executed not by a production company hiring professionals, but rather the participants.
Among other things, one thing that means is that there are more works of art, more parties, and more potential soulmates than one could possibly discover in a mere week. But we do our best nonetheless!
Some of the inspiring figures who I met in the desert last week include:
a Mexican-American college history professor who advised a major brand on how to incorporate empathy into its customer service platform before marrying a colleague with whom he made treats for the camp including ice cream, caprese salad, and grilled cheese sandwiches.
a forensic chemist who works with law enforcement on screening suspicious materials for radioactivity and toxicity, and worked with me on cooking a meal for our camp drawn from one of my mother’s recipes.
a grad student and athlete exploring the psychology & brain chemistry enabling human vision who came to the playa for the first time, handled the experience like a seasoned pro, and taught me that one need not necessarily enjoy any given musical experience in order to dance like you do.
a filmmaker (with whom I used to camp & party a decade ago on the east coast!) who just finished a phenomenal documentary about indigenous rights and deforestation in the Amazon, and abducted me for a 48-hour escapade that entailed shredding dance floors from one side of the city to the other.
a traveler and athlete who I first encountered in Havana, Cuba in 2014, where she helped me pick out a wooden sculpture that sits on my dresser to this day. We’d crossed paths only once since then during a surprise weekend in San Francisco, which later left me wondering whether she was real or instead a figment of my imagination.
not one—but several—young Filipino American DJs whose inner children are so present that gratitude moved them to tears at the seeming drop of a hat. I watched a group of grown-ass straight men hold each other and cry into each other’s arms after getting lost in a dust storm and then finding each other at camp.
a pair of mothers in their 60s whose kids brought each of them to the desert. I found them chatting during one of our parties before we discovered connections: one’s daughter (who will come up again in a moment) led the camp in which I camped this year, and the other’s sons camped with me ten years ago!
an ex-boyfriend of my latest ex-girlfriend who came to feel like a brother from another mother, and whose performances in the desert may have led him to professional opportunities beyond his wildest dreams
a co-worker, friend, and neighbor who has incessantly inspired me since the day I first crossed her path. I knew that she was coming to the gathering, but wasn’t sure I’d see her until she magically appeared next to me (on my way home from visiting my friend from Havana, no less). We shared several adventures over the course of the week that I’ll have a hard time forgetting, including dancing in shadow boxes that enlarged our silhouettes before a crowded dance floor moving to the music of a mutual DJ friend (who started our camp, and whose mom came up a few paragraphs ago).
DJ Shango, a tribal house DJ from Philadelphia with whom I used to play parties in the early 2010s when I lived in DC. We found each other dancing at a mid-week party (with the best dancers I saw all week) celebrating “A Seat on the Throne,” a powerful afro-futurist sculpture by artist Chelsea Odufu from Brooklyn. Then Shango & I kept seeing each other on random dance floors over the rest of the week, which is rather remarkable in the midst of a community of 55,000 people.
several family members related to a billionaire who I’ve publicly criticized. I shared a long evening with them, watching the Man burn from the second floor of an art car while listening to an impressive pianist & vocalist (who later recognized me and shared some powerful words of encouragement) playing songs including covers of Elton John and Stevie Wonder hits. I briefly tended bar and played a short DJ set before introducing them to the Sonic Runway (where we danced to an art car playing songs inspired by the Grateful Dead), and later attending their cousin’s wedding.
a DJ couple at my camp who drove me to tears twice: once, when the guy in the couple shared with me that he voted for me in 2020, and felt that the character assassination that drove me from San Francisco was a blessing since it ultimately “brought you to us”; and again the next morning when his wife offered a card reading that felt like an entire season of therapy sessions. The images below summarize it. My favorite aspect was the closing recommendation embodied by both her & her husband.
Paid subscribers can access a poem that I wrote many years ago for a performance at Opulent Temple before a few thousand burners. I still share it from time-to-time, especially for burners exploring the playa for the first time. It encapsulates my guidance for newbies and explains what I consider “the point” of the experience that we all share together.
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