The promise of Burning Man

Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. Add to that mind-blowing art, ubiquitous public nudity, and wild rave parties until sunrise. Certainly, there is a lot of all of that at Black Rock City, a makeshift town that sprouts in the desert of Nevada, with 70,000 inhabitants this year coming from all over the world. Where we camped, a well-organized but somehow impenetrable group from China was to our right, and warm, boozy, paella-cooking Spaniards to our left. Like every year before it, the town disappears a week later, leaving not a trace, the desert returned to its loneliness. But if you think that is all what Burning Man is about, you are misguided.  Peel through the layers of debauchery, bacchanalia and eccentricity, and one discovers the promise of Burning Man.

The city’s heart is the Temple, which takes two months to build. Almost as soon as it opens, every part of the structure is covered with love letters, photos and other mementos, mostly to loved ones who have passed on.  As a Temple Guardian, I saw many tearful hugs, wedding vows, and heartfelt connections among the burners who streamed through around the clock.  At nightfall on the last day of the festival, in stark contrast to the loud and celebratory burning of the Man the night before, the Temple burns in an almost hallowed ritual.

One participant, describing the Temple Burn, said: “It is a strange sensation, to watch the temple go up in flames. There are these sparks that twirl upward into the night sky. I always look at them as the prayers and the spirit of all the countless people who have arrived here, of those we love and hold dear, spiraling upwards towards the heavens.” As a Temple Guardian, I had to look to the crowd, my back to the Temple as it burned. I will remember, for a long, long time, the reverence and awe on those faces, many with tears flowing.

It reminded me of how it felt watching the second tower of the World Trade Center crumble on Sept. 11, 2001.

Burning Man is a promise of a new story that is evolving for humankind. With its principles centered on generosity and deep empathy, it gives us a glimpse of what the future has in store for our species and our world. The sap-fest version of “Mad Max,” as my pretend-cynical, closet-romantic friends would say. That new story is of inter-being: the connectedness of everyone and everything. We honor the people through radical inclusion and acceptance. We honor the earth by respecting its heritage and leaving no trace as we separate ways, for now.

With the seemingly unending display of viciousness everywhere these days, not least here at home, you might say this vision of the future is deluded. But you are wrong. We are at a transition, from the old story of separation, to the new one, of connection. Current world events are bringing us closer and closer to hopelessness, and with that despair, humankind will finally give up the false solutions that it has accepted for so long as gospel truth—solutions such as the war on drugs, the war on terror, industrialization, and depletion of the environment, all stories of separation, of making our fellow human beings and other creatures and things, “the other.”

But not for long.  When the crack breaks wide open, as it will, light will get in and the new story will finally begin. IS, Trump, Putin, the House of Saud, Mugabe, Maduro and their ilk, the xenophobia engulfing Europe, Duterte and his dirty war, all of them just blips in our history. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Justice and love always win in the end.

Just wander through the dusty streets of Black Rock City and before you know it, you are caught up in a micro-moment of love, a term coined by Barbra Fredrickson, a pioneering American scientist in the field of positive psychology. Getting a hug from a complete stranger is one of the first weird (yet welcome) experiences a Burning Man virgin gets. The generosity and kindness are overwhelming. The town endures with practically no exchange of money. Each one who comes gives something of him/herself (a bracelet, a massage, a yoga class, a poem, a kiss, cocktails, paella) with no expectation in return. “What counts is the connection, not the commodity,” Larry Harvey, one of the founders, notes.

Each experience of that micro-moment of love, of that deep connection between two human beings, whether at Burning Man or out here in the real world, nudges us ever closer toward that promised future, an unfolding story of hope for this world so worthy of rescue.

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Correction:  In the article titled “The wizardry of awe” (Opinion, 8/16/16), the reference to “Eisenstein” in the eighth paragraph should be to Einstein”—i.e., Albert Einstein. This article, by the way, is much influenced by the thinking of Charles Eisenstein who was also at Burning Man for the first time this year.

Joel Villaseca ([email protected]) is a lawyer living in New York City.