Hello all!
I am going to be a birgin; still trying to wrangle who I will be going with, where I will volunteer, what I should participate in (So many theme camps!!) how I will get there (Plane tickets, so expensive!) but am really excited in addition to being really nervous.
I always thought of myself as too WASPy to go to Burning Man, although I had interest in it, particularly the gift economy structure, which is fascinating from both an academic and an emotional standpoint! I can't wait to experience it and to try (and most likely fail) to give freely of/from myself 100% of the time, all day and night, for at least a week.
But I am rather uptight, I thought. Annoying amounts of nudity, people out of their minds on substances, and my strict personal boundaries do not mix. BUT
< rambly story >
I did some travelling for two weeks last year on the West Coast with two people I didn't know very well, and of course that made me very nervous too. We were driving from Vancouver down to San Fran, with a big detour to Yellowstone.
I think it was somewhere around Salt Lake City that I realized, I don't actually have to plan ahead right now or worry about any particular thing. We have the car, we have our supplies, we have our wits about us, and we had no place in particular to be. What a different way to operate!
Cue a half-hour later...driving onto the salt flats, as per the guidebook's recommendation...but little did we know, it had rained the previous week! We drove straight into the mud.
However, even waiting for AAA on a 100F+ day in August, I had a fantastic time and felt a sense of openness/relaxation. Chilling by the car using a light blanket for shade, we even met a man who told us about his adventures interacting with wild bears! He helped us try to dig out our tires with our hands, haha.
By the time we were un-mired, I thought "That wasn't so bad...multiply it by several thousand feet of elevation and several days...yeah, I could survive Burning Man."
< /rambly story >
I can't say I expect BM to be stress-free, but I will have my wits about me, my supplies, no particular place to be, and 50thou+ others around me looking to have a fantastic time as well!
Jump on in, lots and lots of advice to be pondered. First, go read the Survival Guide.
