Not Going to Burning Man
And what making the most of life means when we "miss out"
Hello!
I was planning to send it across the country yesterday but found myself waylaid with the infamous COVID plague. This turn of events left me restless, with my friends getting set for the most epic and ecstatic experience of their lifetimes. I was, and still am bummed.
However! In a world where there are constantly cool occurrences, I am practicing Anti-FOMO. As I’ve read, “what’s for you won’t miss you, and what missed you wasn’t for you.” And, whether it’s “true” or not, it’s a useful thing to believe, because it alleviates reality-resistance… Which, while ubiquitous, does not tend toward wellbeing.
The single quote that most revolutionized my life came from Anthony DeMello’s book, Awareness: Happiness comes from a “moment by moment contact with reality.” And the reality is, I’m sick. While I could force my body into a mask, onto a plane, through the transit of couch surfing, RV rides, and finally into a dust-ridden desert for 10 days of debauchery… Well, the body said “no.”
And despite my mind longing for the adventure, and seeking every kind of ecstasy to replace what it expected, I practice—as a form of self-honoring—listening to my body. So, I chose not to go. It’s not that I “can’t” go either. It’s that I’m not going. I won’t. Agency. Can’t is a will-less statement. Won’t is an honoring of the capacious choice, the human experience, the “Will.”
I believe that what makes a human a human is its capacity to choose, to decide, to move life through agentic and conscious action. We are constantly dancing with each other and life. And in dance, especially partner dance, there is a constant tension, a push and pull, a lead and a follow.
My camp at Burning Man is called Rhythm Wave. They are a conscious dance damp, and they lead daily dances, yoga, and guided relating experiences. That’s my shit. I’m sad not only to miss the ecstasy of some of the best DJs in the world, but also the community of people practicing conscious living through dance.
Over the last couple years, I have deeply immersed myself into ecstatic dance and contact improv.
Brief definitions:
Ecstatic dance is a form of self-expression—it’s a freeform dance space with no talking, no phones, and mandatory consent for connection. It teaches radical safety to be and feel one’s self. I love it.
Contact improv often happens at ecstatic dance, but is a different thing. It’s the relationship that occurs between two dancers who are both in flow. There is no one lead or follow. Both people are constantly listening to each other, and discerning who is leading and following in each moment. There is a push and a pull. It’s special.
Conscious dance has taught me more than anything else about communication and expression. The subtleties of dancing with another human—listening to the micro-movements, “hearing” where there is a gentle “no” in the resistance of a body or a “ugh, fuck, yes” in the melting of a body—light a fire in me. I love the energetic experiencing of discovering a person’s soul through dance.
And that goes for myself, as well. It’s actually much more difficult for me to “listen” to myself while dancing, to both lead and follow myself in solo dance. It requires a silence of the mind to surrender to the intuitive movement in the soul, and then allow the body to be led, guided, danced by the soul, and by extension, by God. It’s a way of meeting the moment with reverence, and surrendering to my essence.
So, yes, I’m bummed to miss these beautiful humans, and a week of dancing with them.
But I chose this path. Sure, my circumstances prompted me to choose it. But, still, it’s my choice. And it’s important for me to own my choice, the reality it creates, and the reasons for which I made it. That last part especially, though, can take a little work to discern.
Jerry Colonna speaks of Radical Self Inquiry. He defines it as “the deep, often difficult practice of turning inward and asking: What’s really going on with me? What am I feeling? What am I avoiding? What truth am I withholding? And perhaps most importantly: What is the cost of my silence?”
As I sat with my decision to opt out of Burning Man, I wondered… “Did I do this because I was afraid to confront the difficulties of the Playa?” In essence, did I run away? It’s a question I’ve asked myself before—When I left my 10 day Vipassana meditation retreat early, when I quit jobs after only a couple months, when I left the US to travel the world.
I’m not unfamiliar with opting out of things. But, as my mom put it recently, “You’re not one to not go when you feel called to go.” And, she’s right. I’m also familiar with choosing, with opting in, with going. And so, I as I sit here, and I’m definitively not going, I wonder: Why? What does this mean about me? Am I changing?
The answer, it turns out, is yes. I am always changing. But, let’s go a little deeper.
In this moment of my life, I’m preparing myself to accept a job, which if I get it, asks me to commit to for a matter of years to staying in my hometown. I really want the job. But, after five years of jet-setting, adventure, and movement, stillness is new.
My interviewer for the job brought it up right away: “The person who referred you for this job said you’re a world traveler. At this job, we want people to stay for a while. We’re a team. We rely on each other.” And then she basically said, “Are you ready to do that?”
It shook me. Because, I don’t think I was.
But I took her question, and I did the radical self-inquiry. And I learned how to say yes to her when next she asks, and mean it. I decided that I will stay put—through winter, and through all the shit that might catch up to me. I realized I was telling myself a story: “If I’ve been running away from myself, from some feeling deep down, then everything I’ve been running from will, like rubber bands, whack me when I stop moving.”
But, perhaps I can tell a different story.
All we can control in this world is our perspective—How we see life, what meaning we make of things. And, as I wrote about in this previous article, that perspective then essentially makes our “choices” for us.
In essence, me choosing to not go to Burning Man is less a comment on the skillfulness of my choices and more a sign that my perspective has shifted from my mom’s “Faolan goes” to a a new way of being where “Faolan doesn’t go.”
And that’s a big shift.
In Authentic Relating, (read here for a definition), there is a practice called “Own Your Experience,” which the org defines as:
Owning your experience is a transition from disempowerment to empowerment. The practice invites you to reclaim all the ways you assert your opinions, perspectives, and assumptions and project them onto the fabric of reality, all the ways you blame others and external circumstances for your own experience, and instead find the source of your experience within yourself.”
In my choice to not go to Burning Man, I am asserting to myself that my experience is one of discernment and care for my body. Maybe my new story can relate to that.
A value I have consciously chosen for myself this year is “What is most Nourishing for me?” (As an aside, I like defining values as questions because it’s more clear what the answer is than were I to write simply “self-nourishment.”)
When I sat with that question, despite the inertia of years of travel, the clear experience in my body told me to slow down, enjoy the last bits of summer, and really care for myself.
And so, here I am, in a coffee shop, writing this. I look out at the leaves blowing in the wind, and the komorebi effect. I see people living their ordinary lives. A man walks by cradling a bottle of red wine. A delivery man waves cars past his oversized truck. An older couple sits at the window-bar with me. People walk their dogs and drink their coffees.
Perhaps all that epicness and ecstasy is here already, in the meeting of life as it is, in witnessing and being part of it all. Perhaps I can feel the magic of Burning Man by simply turning on some trance-like EDM and sinking more deeply into this strange and beautiful thing called Life.
What if every moment is always waiting for us to see it, feel it, and return to it?
What if each and every second of your life were exactly written as it should be for your most powerful and authentic self-becoming?
If all one can choose is their perspective, would that not be the perspective that most deeply awakens the met-longing for a life well-lived?
So, whatever you’re doing today, whoever you’re with, and whatever you’re feeling. Meet it. Feel it. Be amongst it. This is your life. And it’s the only one you get.
There is no possible way for this moment to be different… Ever.
So, simply be. And let It settle all around you.
Like, Rob Bell wrote in Everything is Spiritual:
Burning Man, no Burning Man… The magic of life is always here…
When “you’re in it for the life of it.”
Closer and closer I get to locking down an ephemeral answer to the source of this blog’s existence: How does one make the most of life? In this post, I believe, I rhymed with an answer. My old self would claim that making the most of life is about “going”—Going to burning man, traveling, exploring, adventuring… I used to believe that “marrow” Thoreau talked about was ‘out there’ somewhere, but the more I explore ‘out there’ the more valuable I find ‘right here.’
Like all those wise Buddhists said “wherever you go, there you are” and “be here now” (Jon Kabat-Zinn and Ram Das, respectfully). Perhaps here is always the place to be, and perhaps there is no way to not be placed here, right where we are, as a “self.”
Dogen Zenji, a Japanese Zen master said:
To study Buddhism we study the self To study the self is to forget the self To forget the self is to become Enlightened by all things
If there is “no self,” as it were, and the world were simply a spiraling vortex of being-ness… Could it be that there is only right now, only Indra’s Net, cradling each of us in its infinities?
Where would we go to experience “the most of life” if there is only the life we are living as it is now?
How would we live knowing that?
I for one, would, and just did, take a big and relieving exhale.
Blessings on your daily journey,
Faolan
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