Welcome to the Real of the Desert
Back before drugs, when someone needed to really get in touch with God, The Universe, and Everything, they’d go out into the desert for forty days and forty nights. I only got a quarter of that time in the desert this year, but drugs and unapologetic hippie culture act as a hell of an accelerant.
This the first ten days of the month that changed my life
I - Environment
I don’t want to turn into one of those guys that often talks about Burning Man and how great it is. But this month did start with Burning Man, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. It’s hard not to have a spiritual reaction to living in the desert. It’s vast, and unforgiving. The world goes on forever. You become very aware of being a small biological system trying to exist on the skin of a living, breathing world. The rhythm of the sun and the procession of the moon actually become enwrapped in your life, like a the respiration of a god you inhabit.
In addition, the desert uses classic psychological tactics to break down your mental defenses. The physical discomfort is relentless. The heat bears down on you all day. The relentless pounding of a vast EDM heart assaults you all night. This year was particularly bad for dust storms, meaning there was always grit in your eyes and your lungs.
This all makes you very open (or vulnerable, if you prefer) to large updates on experiences. And this year had some amazing experiences.
II - Experience (specific)
First, this year was in large part about connecting with my partner. With psychological barriers torn down that much, we reached parts of ourselves and each other that we’d never opened before. Importantly for our blogging purposes – I came to understand various things the way she understands them, and internalize some of those understandings myself. Things that include a relentless loyalty which is hard to distinguish from faith. The entangling of those concepts, and in how they related to our relationship in particular, shifted something.
Second, I experienced a legit Love-Bomb. A camp we visited hosted a cult-indoctrination-experience, which ended with an actual Love Bomb. You are blind-folded and walked through a tunnel of people, where two dozen+ people all touch you comfortingly/lovingly and whisper beautiful things to you (“I adore you”, “You inspire me”, “You are a wonderful person”, “You belong here”, etc). It was an amazingly positive and memorable experience. I tried to get recruited into the cult, but of course it was all just a play and they all broke character after the event was done. :(
III - Experience (generalized)
But perhaps the most important experience wasn’t any single experience, it was the generalized feeling of acceptance.
As mentioned before, I dislike (disliked?) men generally, and being male specifically. Men are dangerous and unwanted. The first thing I need to do whenever I meet someone new is find a way to assure them I’m not dangerous without looking like I’m doing that. And I have to keep reinforcing that reassurance for many, many years. The second thing I need to do is establish a reason to be tolerated/wanted around. By default men are unwanted. So I work to be fun to be around, liked by others, and useful. Doing something useful and important is necessary to justify my existence in any space. And, again, this must be constantly maintained.
Burning Man (at least the areas I’m in) is a super-hippy place, and astonishingly accepting of everyone without reservations. There are still some things expected of everyone, but the default position towards everyone is that they are valuable and wanted simply because they are human.
I didn’t really believe this, the first two years I went. I didn’t accept it. I don’t know what was different this year, why I started to accept it at last. I think a large part of it was the work my partner has done to accept me unconditionally (if you’re reading this, thank you!!). But I did start to accept it. I kept presenting myself, and I kept being accepted as I was, even the parts with flaws and ugly. I was included without reservation. I was treated like a person rather than a scary body, even by people who didn’t know me well.
Vitally, we all accepted each other despite sometimes radical differences in world views. There is a broad spectrum of people in our camp. We even had a super-woke lady that brought up a few of her super-woke ideas. We could talk to each other like humans anyway. Most people ranged on a spectrum between liberal libertarian and modestly woke, and we could still feel love and acceptance towards each other anyway. Here, we are people. Deep, multi-faceted, with decades of history that hews us into awkward and ungainly shapes. And we can love each other even when those shapes don’t interlock perfectly, because there is so much to all of us.
(III and 1/2 - no internet) — this acceptance is in large part due to there simply not being any internet worth accessing on the Playa. Online, we are reduced to our Identities(TM). We have beliefs that can be captured in 280 characters. We have characteristics that can be conveyed with a single avatar pic and some #hashtags. It’s easy to catagorize and dehumanize things that are packaged beliefs and ideologies and genders/races/religions. It’s much harder to hate the person living two-sheets-of-tent-fabric away, sharing food and water with you, and feeling all their feelings in front of everyone with you.
This was a big deal to me. I lost my most important relationship not long after my last Burning Man, due to her turning increasingly woke and me taking a step back from it. In the intervening years I had to work out a lot of my shit with wokeism, and I did much of it online. I was legit worried that I would not have a home at Burning Man anymore. But when we all showed up and started building our village, all that online BS faded away. I was home, and home is a place in the physical world with analog human bodies.
(III and 3/4ths - one final specific experience)
Near the end of the desert adventure, I briefly interacted with a hot girl. It was a small thing, to pass along a Will O’ Wisp for the Atlas Project. But, in that brief interaction, I realized she was attracted to me.
This may not sound like a big deal to a normal person, but this was a huge deal for me. Someone who didn’t know me, who I hadn’t established that I was Not A Monster for, who I hadn’t demonstrated I’m Useful And Worth Being Around, who I didn’t even really try to joke with or befriend (cuz I was just passing along a notepad!), thought I was sexually attractive. Just… my physical appearance. My physical body. Something that someone was drawn to rather than repelled by.
I don’t know if I’ll ever forget that. I certainly won’t forget it for a long, long time.
IV
Takeaway?
I felt like the world wanted me to exist within it as I was. Rather than the world wanted to eject me from it and I had to constantly win a right to exist. I didn’t realize this was as deeply ingrained as it was in my psyche, and I didn’t realize how radically different all of existence feels when that sign is flipped.
Of course, this was just the beginning. Burning Man is a separate world, completely unrelated to the mundane reality we spend 355 days of every year within. This sort of thing would not generalize to my remaining life and actually change me if it was confined to the desert. We still have 20 days left in this month!