Burning Spirit

Burning Man was conceived in 1986 when a San Francisco man named Larry Harvey invited a friend to burn a wooden effigy in honor of the Summer Solstice. It has grown into an annual week-long festival, a place of pilgrimage for some 25,000 people who form a temporary community in the Nevada desert the week before Labor Day. Burning Man culminates in the conflagration of a huge effigy, an event that has taken on sacred significance. A new documentary, "The Burning Sensation," focuses on the performance-art aspect of the festival, but many have found it to be spiritually transforming. Here, Marshall Elliott gives a first-hand account of this year's Burning Man.

It's Friday. A dust storm has just blown in, lifting a thick cloud of dust. Off in the distance, I hear the rolling thunder of drums, though I can't see anything.

Photo c 1997 by George Post

I wander over to see what is happening. I see friends dancing with bandanas over their mouths, and the excitement is like electricity charging the air. I pick up a drum, sit down, and join in. More people come, from all directions. Drumming faster now, shouting, people begin to leap into the air and spin until soon, there are a couple hundred of us. Everyone is covered head to toe in a thin layer of white dust as a large metal phoenix statue is lit on fire. Building and growing in intensity, we invite the magic in through the wind and the rain until-hours later-the clouds clear, the most beautiful sunset comes out, and a rainbow touches down upon the horizon. We all begin laughing and hugging one another in large circles. All of us feel it: you can see it in our eyes. We've just been there: Another spiritual epiphany at Burning Man.

Each year, in the week before Labor Day, more than 25,000 people gather on the flat playa surface of the Black Rock desert in northern Nevada to enact the ritual-a week-long event culminating in the burning of a 70-foot tall man effigy. This structure, which glows in blue neon at night, provides the city with a center, and its most powerful talisman, to which participants ascribe whatever meaning they choose to the experience. Any description of this week is impossible. It is a party, a temporary community, a carnival, an arts festival, and a tabula rasa for radical self-expression. It is a powerful place. While any attempt to define what happens here is inadequate, it certainly is a stage for spiritual transformation. The first time I came here last year, I thought I was inside of God's brain.

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