Beyond the Burn
Integrating Purposeful Humanity
BOOK PREVIEW
As I stood at the edge of the temporarily manufactured city, I gazed with awe at the impossible scene that sprawled across the unending desert before me. I was amazed by the countless number of artificial structures that were peeking from the ground in every direction. I straddled a borrowed bicycle, and within only a few moments my bare legs and shoes were completely covered by the desert’s dust. The rising sun, slowly making its way above the horizon, cast a soft light, bringing the desert to life with a cool, gentle, almost pale blue overtone.
A skinny long-haired man, probably in his early thirties, not too far from where I stood, pedaled in my direction. As he approached, the quiet of the morning echoed the squeaky sounds of a well-used bicycle. His hair was stringy, wild, and slightly matted under an eccentric top hat. My memory recalls him as somewhat of a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory character, a uniquely designed fellow with obviously kind intentions. He stopped close to me, within hands’ reach, took off his sunglasses, and gently guided them to my face and over my eyes. He stayed silent. I did too. The sunglasses had a bluish tint that highlighted the already soft blue color that filled the air, bouncing off the ground and illuminating the hundreds of art structures that were now standing visible in the morning sun.
As I continued my pause at the edge of the temporary desert city, the expression on my face must have shown my newfound amazement. I expected the stranger could tell that these were my first steps into Burning Man. I slowly removed the sunglasses and just as slowly handed them back to the Wonka-like fellow. We shared smiles but remained silent as he returned the glasses to his own face and over his eyes. I was paralyzed with the awe from both my first sight of the playa and then the added humbleness of the serendipitous encounter with the kind stranger.
Kristin patted him on his back, an expression of appreciation, and with her soft, tickled-belly giggle, without voice, she thanked him. No words were exchanged between the three of us before he set off again. The kind stranger rode into the blue-cast morning, his silhouette shrinking in my vision until he was no longer in sight and the squeaky sound of his rusty bike was gone from earshot.
I met the kind stranger during my first adventure to Burning Man in the late summer of August 2007. I was twenty-eight years old, just a month shy of my twenty-ninth birthday…
… Home for me wasn’t Burning Man, it wasn’t the desert, and it wasn’t the container of camp, even though I found refuge in all three places. Home for me was purposeful humanity, where life is divinely honored and joyfulness is the sacred pursuit. It’s where failure, success, surrender, and action coexist in one heart and create the wholeness of a human experience. An unusual but familiar braveness reassures us of our allied kinship, that our souls are bonded beyond a lifetime of understanding. When our hands are joined as we walk through the fire together, I dig my sword into the ground; it’s the hill that I live on. It’s where integrity outshines everything and where the way we evolve humanity is through togetherness. When we integrate purposeful humanity with full conviction over and over again, we become the change; we become the catalyst for human evolution.
Get Your Copy
