Happiness is Burning Man: After Burn Report

The man at Burning Man

Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace, and gratitude. ~ Denis Waitley

So I’m back from the desert, it was a good week with good friends.  It was the hottest week in the history of Burning Man and that led to a lot of mid-day siestas.  Which it turned out was pretty nice.  It’s been a long time since I did nothing but sit in the shade, listen to music and try to stay hydrated.  We had one short but epic dust storm which a few minutes later was followed by a microburst of likely 70 miles an hour.  The burst threw a pop up into the air for at least 150 feet landing it on our shade structure, seriously crazy but happily no one was hurt.

The world would rather hug you than hurt you

Our camp was great, we run a confessional bar and lots of fun and great confessions were heard.  I met some amazing people and I’ll be writing about two of them later this weekend.  Made some new friends, saw some amazing art and shot over 1600 photos that I’ve just started going through, so lot’s more to come.

There was also tragedy, a burner committed suicide by running into the fire as the man burned.  It’s a horrible thing, the person died, and the impact on the firefighters, law enforcement, medical staff, almost all volunteers is terrible.  People that witnessed it, friends of the burner and the community in general suffers.  With many of us experience a bit of a depression after leaving the event, this tragedy hits especially hard.  People in the default world don’t understand and make light of it, it is easy to dismiss a community of people who don’t fit in the default world, to devalue our lives, we feel this everyday and more so right after the event.  So people’s insensitive comments hit a bit hard.

Love more Fear less

One of the reasons many of us go to Burning Man, including to myself, is to be able to spend a week where you’re not made to feel like a freak everyday for not fitting into society’s definition of normal.  It’s the reason you’re greeted at Burning Man with the phrase, welcome home.

Much more over the next week, have a happy day my friends. ~ Rev Kane