Apologia: Truth be told, I don’t write about Burning Man from having direct experience. I’ve had clients who were “burners”, and have observed from a distance this annual ritual (according to a BM ad) “emphasizing art, self-expression and self-reliance.”
Now, I must admit my real interest in Burning Man is that my son Michael has attended BM 16 times, and sets that week aside every year on his secular, spiritual, and personal calendars. And, as his father, I can readily see its attraction and value.[1]
And if I were a younger man, I’d want to go myself.
A quick history: This annual event emphasizing art, self-expression, and self-reliance began in 1986 on Baker Beach in San Francisco and moved in 1991 to Black Rock City in northwestern Nevada, a temporary community about 100 miles from Reno.[2]
A central theme involves the construction of a giant “man” around which a community constructs itself for a week or so, and then climaxes with the ritual burning of the “man” to the ground, after which everybody cleans up, packs up, goes home, and the desert is returned to its former state. This year, the size of the community was reported to be 73,000.[3]
My own fascination with BM
Many years ago I read the late Joseph Campbell’s seminal work, The Hero With A Thousand Faces[4] where I was introduced to the “monomyth” – or the “hero’s journey.” It’s a synthesis of the great myths and stories from all cultures – comprising three stages – separation, initiation, and return. It also involves the religious idea of “cleansing,” giving a sense of the character transforming from old to new.
“Burners” leave (are called) away, separating from their everyday lives, to what is (in other settings) often called “a mountaintop experience” – where a mystical city emerges from almost nothing, from a desert floor, (as the BM ad states) “emphasizing art, self-expression and self-reliance.” Always central is the monumental structure “Man” – as if reminding all that this glory and ecstasy is what we humans can build, can become.
But, as Campbell reminds us, we then have to leave the mountaintop, we have to “return” to our homes, to our people – but with a new awareness, which I’ve come to call “Now I know who I am.” Or as Campbell has stated, “with bliss-bestowing hands.” Or, in other words, “with healing gifts.”
For me, the genius of BM is that one has to leave it. The “Man” who dominates the scene, has to be destroyed. Even the Temple of the Heart, (of which Michael writes – cf Footnote #1) has to be incinerated. Nothing can be left, the City of creativity, ecstasy, even the deep experiencing of each other’s humanity, the synchronizing of so much that is both sacred and profane. For a time the desert blossomed, and we have been cleansed.
But for a larger Purpose.
For those of us who go to Church – we must leave the building and beauty behind (now empty) and go home. I recall, in my youth, the sadness of leaving after a week at Church camp. After a vacation, we need to go home. When we graduate from college or university, we now have to take those gifts we’ve gained, out into the world and use them to make it a better place. Even after the richness of a wedding ceremony and party, the bride and groom have to leave and go alone, and to a new marriage bed. After a funeral, we have to leave and go to a world with an empty place.
There’s a danger in staying ‘on top of the mountain’. I’m sure some enterprising entrepreneur has fielded the idea “ Let’s build condo’s here, so Black Rock City can be year around – an eternal Burning Man, with a huge towering bronze ”Man” surrounded by permanent gas-fed torches. No, Black Rock City has to die, in order that the people can follow through on its purpose.
In some citadels of culture, such as politics, corporate culture, and churches, there’s a danger of staying enclosed too long, and getting “cooked.” No wonder there’s so much sexual and other inhuman abuse and corruption emerging from those ‘high’ places.[5]
So often something has to die in order that a larger purpose can live.
Two other patterns I see when looking at Burning Man.
1) BM is a cyclical (annual) ritual, one can return again and again to be refreshed, cleansed and matured. It’s akin to other ‘holidays’ (Holy Days) in our cultural calendars (including Sabbaths and Sundays). I’ve noticed this with my son.
2) It can become easy for the wealthy and entitled to want to expropriate it. This year I understand there was an influx of private planes and luxurious RVs, and a number of the well-known in attendance. However, the desert rains this year befouled those expensive modes of transportation as well. Human greed can be a terrible befouler of that which desires to be good.
A final hopeful note (even from an outsider)
I’m reminded of the Biblical New Testament Parable of the Rich Young Ruler (Matthew 19:16-23, Mark 10:17-22, and Luke 18:18-23.). RYR asks Jesus, “Master, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” The man answers Jesus that he has kept all the commandments. Jesus then says, “(Only) one thing you lack. Go and sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor.” – and the man went away sorrowful, for he was a man of great wealth.
Burning Man, with its inherent roots, seems to understand this.
Many of the rich and famous will come to Burning Man, but probably cannot ever be transformed by it. Sadly, they may corrupt the real BM in the process. Or perhaps the gods of the desert, or the Almighty himself, may, as in The Old Testament Book of Exodus, destroy the army and chariots of the Egyptians at the Red Sea, so his chosen people could escape and pursue their journey to the Promised Land.[6]
Pay Attention
Footnotes
[1] For his own account of this year’s Festival, go to The Temple of the Heart.
It’s much more personal than what I’m writing here.
[2] The transition from the ocean to the desert itself has mythic as well as phylogenetic significance.
[3] It’s reported that at the first BM, on that San Francisco beach, there were only ten to observe the incineration of the first “man” structure.
[4] (1949), (My copy is Meridian, 1970). Campbell summarizes the monomythic character journey as: A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.
See more at https://theconversation.com/are-you-monomythic-joseph-campbell-and-the-heros-journey-27074
[5] When the Hebrews of The Old Testament entered Israel, the Promised Land, eleven of the tribes were apportioned sections of land. However, the 12th tribe, the Levites, had no land, for they were the guardians of the Temple, the only ones who could enter the otherwise forbidden Holy Places without getting ‘cooked.’
[6] With apologies for the limiting gender attribution.
Afternotes:
For an extensive photo coverage (85 photos in all), go here. You can see that the whole enterprise does have a ‘fantastic’ (mountaintop) quality to it.
Of course, Burning Man has its detractors, I’ve read a few of them. And they may be, in many ways, right. That doesn’t mean I’m wrong. I hope what I’ve written is a worthy observation of an important institution and energy toward a more livable, creative and ethically responsible world. And it only arises once a year from within a desert place. And then it can live on in the homes and villages and communities of our beloved land.
Even from my youth, that forceful solo Bass air from the midst of G F Handel’s Messiah is seared into the musical memory chambers of my brain, including the frantic energy of the orchestra with its stirring lead-in.
Yet it has never made its way to become one of the memes of the Holiday season – as this year in particular, I think it should.
From the beginning of December, the Advent hymns sung in church, and the Christmas holiday choral music of extensive holiday concerts – this year especially, I have been struck by the ancient idea that when the Almighty chose to ‘save the world,’ he did so by way of an infant born to a lowly Galilean girl, and in a place where there was “no room” for Mary & Joseph, except in a back yard. The first ‘visitors’ were ‘lowly shepherds’ – and only after a short time did three Kings on camels appear from somewhere in “the East.”
This sacred narrative ostensibly was of the arrival of a “long-awaited Prince of Peace.”
And so, the narrative memes of Christmas represent innocence, poverty, and the manifestation of the ‘holy vulnerability’ of the humble. Yet in the background is the maniacal King Herod, who necessitates Joseph’s fleeing to Egypt with his young wife, the child, and a donkey – a very long desert walk of many days. In the meantime, the narrative tells us Herod had 200 children slaughtered in his attempt to destroy the usurper child. (In the Christian liturgical calendar, The Feast of the Holy Innocents of Bethlehem, the ‘first Christian martyrs,’ takes place only three days after Christmas Day.) Even Christmas has, from its beginning, a very dark side.
And all this on the same soil that today suffers the ‘vain’ slaughter, especially of children and women. The “furious rage” of each side trumps even the villainous “slaughter of innocents.”[1]
And so pens the ancient author of the second Psalm as to what happens when there is no respect for any higher order.
My pacifist heritage
These past months, I have developed an increased respect for my pacifist parents and the rich heritage they passed on to me. My father was early very active in the World Peace (pacifist) movement within the Methodist Church of that time (the 1930s). And my mother came from the same background, well before they met and married (1939). Being a pacifist may look easy – it’s not. Going to war can be much easier. All you have to do is access your primal anger, and with your basal ganglia (the ‘lizard brain’), the rest comes ‘naturally.’
And I know they each sang Handel’s Messiah because I inherited the leather-bound vocal scores of each, my mother’s, with her maiden name.
Our country is suffering a parallel division. The older folks remember the promise that came with the establishment of the nation Israel (1948), but many of our young see instead through the eyes of the oppressor and the oppressed. And both have missed the leadership of our own country, which used to have that gift of conjunctio oppositorum, managing the conjunction of opposites, which is the lifeblood of a democracy.
And so to the Birthday of the Prince of Peace – God’s gift to the world.
I’m not a ‘right to life’ aficionado. That’s become a political phenomenon, with the luxury of specific good and evil – winners and losers. Way too easy and comfortable! I want to be a warrior-for-real-life person.[2] Much the opposite of people with easy ideological answers.
So what is this Christmas?
So what is Christmas in a world so much at war, a world of intense conflict and murdered children? And who is this Christ Child (that the powers that be, aka King Herod, wanted to kill)? – and eventually succeed. What sense can we make of it? What can we do? Where can we stand? What can it all mean?
My first answer is to stand in the middle. Perhaps with one leg in each warring camp (a specific physiological vulnerability!). For some, it can be that dead or liminal space between what we have lost or left behind and (maybe hopefully) what is yet to come. A barren, inhospitable desert before any promised land. Or perhaps a threshold or vestibule, an entryway to a new reality – a ‘third thing’ that gathers all things together (which some folks call “The Kingdom.”)
Nonetheless, it’s a place of promise, vulnerability, and the hope of countless generations – including our own.
I commend it to you.
Pay Attention
Footnotes
[1] The root meaning of the word War is ‘to confuse, to perplex, to bring into confusion’ (Wikipedia). And there must be ‘rules’ – which in our day have been weakened and easily ignored. The Israel/Hamas conflict is not a war but is based, especially in the repeated language of the Israeli leadership, on “total destruction.” (Perhaps they inherited that from the similar MO of the German Nazis in the Holocaust – who cared not a whit for any ‘rules’ about innocent parties.) In contrast, it seems to me the MO of Hamas is rather retributive anger (rage), which can initially have the same energy and similar tactics but is not the same thing. Any “peace process” must synchronize these two non-synchronous origins of conflict with an elusive ‘third thing.’ At the moment, all they have in common is the land itself (which we sometimes enigmatically still call “the Holy Land.”)
I know; I’m a marriage counselor.
[2] Nikos Kazantzakis’ Zorba the Greek (one of my favorite reads), at one point asks his young protégé, Basil, “Why do children die?… Why does anybody die?” The latter responds, ”I don’t know.” To which Zorba angrily answers,” Then what’s the use of all your damn books?” Basil responds, “They tell me – about the agony of people who can’t answer questions like yours.” The true pacifist fully embodies that agony.
Or, another Zorba quote: “Life is trouble. Only death is not. To be alive is to undo your belt and look for trouble” [Sort of maybe like a real marriage.]
The other day, I pulled from my living room bookshelf a small volume I’d long forgotten – a small paperback with a blue cover by the American poet, William Stafford, with the title “You Must Revise Your Life.”[1]
I don’t remember when or why I purchased it, perhaps Robert Bly had mentioned it. And strange I didn’t write (always in pencil) inside the cover the date I first read it. But I know I read at least part of it, because I had checked or underlined particular parts in pencil – my way of marking a book as my own. Like an animal marking it’s territory. Like a church procession on Rogation Sunday[2], walking the boundaries of the parish. Like a priest with candle and incense (or holy water) blessing each room of a house.
Then, opening to page 3, there was a heading:
William Stafford: 1914 –
to which I added (in ink!) the date 1993 (30 years ago!).
The date year of his death was specific and final – therefore it needs be in ink (not pencil).
That’s what Stafford was teaching his readers and students – that if you are a writer, and you find that the writing takes a particular twist or turn of its own – you need to follow it. And it may necessitate you to ‘Revise Your Life.’ I remember that’s why I bought the book – the title says it all.
You must change your life
Many of the folks who enter my office door are hesitant to enter. There’s a fear that they might have to change (revise) something. It’s tempting and easier to project that necessity onto someone other, even a partner, or family member. “Here, doc, you change (this other person).” Or, at least, make it so change on my own part won’t be so difficult – or painful. My ‘job’ is at least to make it less painful. Or, sometimes, to make it more possible, or even ‘rich’. It can take a lot of courage to walk through that door – and I honor that.
Recently I’ve been refering to my work as “midwifing” necessary or desired changes in my clients’ lives. So something new and maybe wonderful can be born.
Then there’s the question, can the change be just in ‘pencil’ (fairly safe), or must it now be more in ‘ink’ (more serious, enduring, permanent)?
In my own recent case, opening Stafford’s small volume was initially to find some guidance for ‘the folks out there’ about the necessities in life of having to make life changes. But then, taking Stafford more seriously, the simple act of making a change in the book in ink caught me (almost literally) dead in my tracks. William Stafford wrote this little book and then since I bought it, he died.
That personally forced me to acknowledge that at my own advancing age, I have been dealing with the “dropping off” of more and more people who have inhabited my life. Talk about having to “revise my own life…”
I come from a small family, and to my knowledge nobody for some generations back has lived as long as I already have. I’m essentially living in ‘unknown territory’.
To wit also:
– A year and a half ago while visiting in Florida, I came close to dying myself – spending a week and a half in a cardiac hospital bed.
– Just over a week ago I visited in her home, a client for some years, to say good bye only a few hours before she passed over.
– I’ve noticed for awhile now, when I look around my house, I’m beginning to see my ‘stuff’ in terms of what my children will have to deal with then I’m gone.
– I need to update portions of my will.
– The disciplines of diet and exercise are even more important now.
– With Covid, many thousands around us have died.
– Many, too many, innocents are dying by deliberate gunshot, weekly, almost daily now.
– Maybe that’s why I write these monthly Newsletters – to leave a part of myself as a legacy. So my children can know me better. Or perhaps as the fantasy of some immortality.
An Endnote story.
When I am with my Native American friends, and we gather for a meal (potluck style), it is our ritual that after blessing the food, we dine by age, “elders first.” I used to think this was simply honoring the elders. But then I realized it was because the elders would always make sure there was enough to go around so everybody had enough. If the children went first they would probably take as much as they wanted, without concern for those who come after.
As we age, the more we change, we revise our life behaviors, toward preserving life for those who will follow us. We ‘revise’ our life to preserve and enhance the lives of those who will in due course take our place.
Some (many) years ago, when I was in training for the work I do today, a guest trainer named Richard Bandler (of NLP fame) was working with my group of ‘therapists-in-training.’And I vividly recall him telling us the following story:
Richard had met a man who came to him for therapy – with the question “How can I help you?” The man quickly responded, “I’m not going to tell you” – as if setting up a classic passive-aggressive encounter. Richard, without missing a beat, responded, “OK, tell you what, how about you go home and completely make up a problem that has nothing to do with the one you want to keep from me, come back in a week, and we’ll work with that one.” “OK Doc”, the man replied, and in a week did return with a completely made-up situation – which they then spent some time working on. After a handful of sessions, Richard casually asked, “By the way, how are you doing with that problem you didn’t want to share with me.” He replied, “Oh, that one, it completely went away a few weeks ago.”
Richard then asked our group of trainees, “What happened here?” Some of us came up with ideas we already knew were inadequate. We knew that Richard was almost psychopathically intelligent, so we waited for him to share.
First, he reiterated the initial encounter with his new client and the fellow’s agreement to “completely make up” a problem for Richard. The guy knew that the details of the new problem were ‘completely different’, but unconsciously the pattern was the same. Richard shared with us that most effective therapy deals not so much with the details of the problem but with changing the pattern(s) of the problem. In the made-up problem, unconsciously, the patterns of the original problem showed up for the therapist. And with the unconscious congruence present, the original problem was healed as well.
Richard then gave us a name for this phenomenon, calling it “Generative healing.”
Outcomes
The outcomes of this awareness are many. Here are just a few examples off the top of my head.
1) It reveals much of what takes place in religious practice (Christian and elsewise). For me, the power of ‘belief’ is more the (spiritual) pattern of what we do, not just the details of what we think or say. I find that after a time of prayer, a service of worship, or after the Episcopal Eucharist or Roman Catholic Mass, I find myself wanting to exclaim, “Now I know who I am.”
1b) Another way to say it (for me) is the patterns of religious practice (or presence in spiritual places) don’t get me to heaven, they bring heaven to me here.
2) This elucidates many of the patterns used in hypnotherapy.
3) Maybe someday I’ll share how I was healed of hundreds of plantar warts covering the soles of both feet.
3) In a very different frame of reference, it helps understand the ancient patterns of sorcery as well as some of the prohibitions against it.
4) It’s not unusual for my clients to become aware of changes and/or healing in another area than the one we’ve been working on. Remember Richard’s teaching, most effective therapy involves pattern changes rather than just thing changes.
Next month
I plan to write about Burning Man, that annual counter-culture (my term) gathering in the Nevada desert, which this year reportedly brought 73,000 folks together. I’ve not attended, but my son Michael is a long-time “Burner” (16 years!) – and I look forward to hearing from him about his nine days plus a couple more due to the rain and mud that imprisoned them.
In light of what I’ve written in this month’s Newsletter, I’ll explore the mythic patterns that I see, especially in light of the patterns of the late Joseph Campbell’s “Hero of a Thousand Faces.” And yes, this year, I’ve heard some of the rich and over-entitled showed up, and their private jets and fancy RV’s were also encaptured by the mud and mythic dyslocation. As I sometimes will put things, the ‘gods of the desert in more ways than one were having a party.’ As the world is changing and ever-evolving.
As ever, this observer leaves filled with more hope than despair.
And as I usually conclude each Newsletter – Pay Attention!
BTW, Michael publishes this Newsletter for me, therefore this month it’s late, waiting for him to come home from Burning Man (to Oakland and his cats).?
Mark Twain 1835-1910, a great favorite of my father, once said, “You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”
And in the words of a great favorite of my own, Carl Jung 1875-1961, “Wholeness is not achieved by cutting off a portion of one’s being. but by an integration of the contraries.”
Once, a number of years ago, when I was back visiting my old Iowa home town, and reminiscing with a young woman who had been a neighbor, we were discussing my parents. She said, ‘Your folks were always thinking at least a generation younger than they actually were. That’s why it was such a treat to talk to them. And I recall other occasions when someone would tell me how easy conversation had been with one or both of my parents. Almost always one-to-one.
And I personally recall how easy it was to talk to my Dad. Again and again I recall how easy it seemed for him to set aside whatever he was doing to talk with me. I don’t recall at this time the subjects of our conversations, just his seemingly easy ability to reach back and forth from his world to my own.
I think of the late Robin Williams, in those movies where he was a teacher and that remarkable ability to connect with troubled youth. I know my Dad always wanted a way to make a difference in the world, which is why he became a preacher. Sadly the larger Church would in those days especially more honor clergy who would “build churches ” (i.e. buildings). My father and mother were ones to build “little individual bridges” – gifts for which he found the larger church had frequently lost imagination. [1] [2]
Someone once wrote, “What good is sight when you have no vision?”[3]
Sight is what you have at any given time or moment. Vision is the larger context or frame in which sight exists and takes on meaning.
One way to get to know my father is through his photographs, a few of my favorites which hang in my office. He was a photographer all of the years I knew him, and he was a very good one. That ‘eye’ is a part of his legacy.[4]
A favorite theme of my father’s photography was capturing individual trees that survived in difficult circumstances. He saw in them a vision of ‘tree heroic’ in the face of difficulty and struggle. And those photographs for him captured a poignant heroic beauty.
Now contrast let me turn that to a current phenomenon with many Roman Catholic parish churches of having a side yard full of white crosses, representing “Right to Life” ideologies. Not to be disrespectful, but my father would never photograph such a spectacle. There are no fetuses of unborn children buried under each of those crosses. There is no sign of struggle or suffering. It’s simply a sterile show-piece. There’s no sign of the struggles of some real people with the true and often excruciating suffering underlying the abortion question. It’s not a Flanders Field.
Back to my Father. During the years of our nation’s involvement in World War 2, he was for a time the only Protestant clergyman within a 50-mile radius of his small parish back in the Rockies. 1) He was born pacifist, anti-war to the bone. 2) He had to minister to many families of the casualties of that war. And he would readily admit he was not adept at that kind of pastoral work. But I am certain no anti-war rhetoric or beliefs were parts of those conversations. He would offer the words of Holy Scripture, the prayers of the Church, and in his own grace, quietly suffer with those households he had to visit.
I have often wished in the years since then to have been able to ask him about how he did that. What he saw was the terror and cruelty of war. But I have no doubt he carried a vision of something far greater than what he saw before him. I know even back then he had begun photographing his trees.
And many years later he was still setting aside whatever he was doing to spend time listening and talking with me.
He was my Father, and I am forever his Son. So much of what I do in this life comes from him. And I love that man.
And from that I can know who I am.
Pay Attention
Footnotes
[1] Even though that was a foundational character of early Methodism.
[2] After my father died, my mother gave me a photo album filled to capacity with black and white photos from his life in the 1930’s. None of them are dated or annotated, and that was the decade, his 20’s , before he met and married my mother when he was 30. Marrying her was one of the best decisions he ever made. But (strangely) she knew practically nothing of his “Chicago years” in those photos which, undocumented, gather dust on a lower bookcase shelf in my library.. Strange, but I feel that much of who I am was still nurtured in those long buried years. The Methodist Church was back then known for it’s dual social witness of prohibition and world peace. (The latter, I’m certain, lives in the shadows of those silent photos.) Many of his friends went to prison by refusing the military, and he and his new bride went to Colorado to ‘wait out’ the war and pursue his ministerial calling. Out there I was their first born. So much of me was pre-formed already. I still carry so many unanswered questions. But the ‘form and shape’ of my personality still prevails. [Well, that footnote certainly took over the page, didn’t it.]
[3] Unfortunately I have no source available. This itself is an example. If ‘seeing’ is all that is important, the context or vision isn’t necessary.
[4] My father left the ministry for the time of my Junior and Senior High School years – so that the peripatetic nature of being a Methodist minister then didn’t have to involve being ‘sent’ to a a different parish or town every few years. Instead, he purchased a Photo Studio in Independence, Iowa, and I was able to spend a lot of time working with him in that space as well.
If you will, please indulge me one more footnote.
It was during those years that my mother discovered and brought to our town, The American Field Service, an International student exchange program, which subsequently played a large part of our family and community life. AFS was originally a battlefield ambulance service in world wars 1 & 2. Out of that carnage emerged a high vision, which became their hallmark motto: “Walk together, talk together, all you peoples of the earth, and we shall have peace.” Talk about ‘an integration of the contraries.’
Some (many) years ago, when I was in training for the work I do today, a guest trainer named Richard Bandler (of NLP fame) was working with my group of ‘therapists-in-training.’