Once a year, tens of thousands of people gather in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert (also known as “the playa”) to create Black Rock City, a temporary metropolis dedicated to community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance.The rules are different here: it’s ok to wear no clothes, and cover yourself in body paint – hedonism, beauty and creativity are encouraged. Towards the end, the mind-blowing, larger-than-life art installations and sculptures are set on fire, leaving no trace. WILD. It can only be Burning Man.
Burning Man is one of the most interesting events in the world, but also one of the most difficult to describe. It’s not quite an art festival, not quite a desert rave, and not quite a social experiment, but something of all three. What’s remarkable about it is that it’s organized around creativity and self-expression.
A good friend of mine, & now jedi yoga flex pro in South America (Jula Hoola) went there last year and said in the smallest of sentences: “I can’t explain it, everybody should experience it”
“There is no way to convey the sheer immensity of Burning Man to someone who has never been there. There is also something rather dreamlike and enchanting about the way it rises out of the open desert for a few brief days only to vanish again after the event is over. Toward the end of the week, much of the infrastructure – including the 40-foot effigy from which Burning Man takes its name – goes up in flames.”
For many participants, the appeal of the desert was that there were no rules. My interpretation of how it may feel is that we should all be living like so, a scene out of Mad Max…
Aiming to go in the year 2014, think about it
