ATTENTION: ALL POINTS BULLETIN Hello friends. Big news to report: Holy Fuck, Burning Man is seriously cool and not to be missed. One of the things that I found myself and others often exclaim (usually in a dumb-struck stupor) was, “There’s absolutely no way I can talk about this. No way I can even BEGIN to explain this… NO WAY!” So this is my dramatically incomplete review of a phenomenon that you simply must know about. To begin with, Burning Man is the name of a weeklong festival held in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada. (www.burningman.com) I had considered going to Burning Man for years, but my own recent process of spiritual questing and discovery brought it into much sharper focus. Over the last few years so very much has happened in my life. Enormous revelations have occurred. I have come to believe that we are at the brink of an extraordinary juncture of the human experiment. We are within the event corridor of the last few years of an evolutionary stage, the current phase of which has been in process for the last 26,000 years. This is a quickening, a revolution in what it means to be human, an almost total shift, and an ascension from one state to another. It’s almost directly upon us, and yet it is as hard to imagine as it would be for the caterpillar to conceptualize the emerging form of the butterfly. For myself, I’ve been following this line of thought like a detective searching for evidence, watching my own story change from the personal particular to the personal universal. Recently, I’ve entertained the thought, “Well, if it is true that we are in the last stages of an eschatological chairos and we truly don’t have all that much time left, where is the hottest place on Planet Earth to be right now?” The obvious answer– Burning Man. Besides, I thought, I had recently decided I wanted to launch into the fast lane again. I had come to a place where I had realized that I was feeling way too shut down, cut off, uninspired, and unmotivated and I wanted to jump start my creativity and refresh my connection with life. I wanted to be in the company of those who innately manifested a higher expression of freedom, totally owning their power to be anything and everything they could creatively envision and do it both individually and within community. I wanted to seek the naked face of the Goddess, incarnated as wild, outrageous, and in full possession of Her awesome sexual and celestial amplitude– and unapologetic about its raw force. I wanted to seek the archetypal presence of the Solar King, the dancing horned satyr, the unknowable, ineffable face of God and weave it into visible light. I wanted to know Him in all His radiance, multiplicity and inventiveness in complete freedom and impenitent joy. I wanted to see the Shakti and Shiva, God and Goddess move through otherwise ordinary people who had made the choice to be that large. To see it in their eyes, have them see it in mine, and realize the simple miracle that we are creating the world anew. I wanted to come face to face with the Divine and get down and funky with it. To grunt and howl, twist and shout, to hang with my fellow uber-dudes and dudettes. So, I hit the road and went to festivals. I had partaken in this sort of thing before, for the last 18 years or so. I had traveled from The Arctic to the Antarctic, to each of the seven continents, and witnessed many kinds of celebrations. Renaissance Faires, Scottish Highland Games, big outdoor music/art festivals, and many, many gatherings of the Pagan/Wiccan persuasion. Had some great experiences, saw a lot of crazy things. (A certain rock concert set inside an Icelandic volcano during a near hurricane comes to mind…) This year I made a few new discoveries worth mentioning. The Lake Eden Arts Festival (LEAF) in Black Mountain, North Carolina is incredible. It’s a music festival with exceptional diversity and a palpable spirit of joy and loving release. This festival, staged for the good people of Black Mountain and its environs really gives one a sense that something extraordinary is emerging in the world. Special highlight: Billy Jonas. This guy is totally worth watching; “Stomp” meets higher consciousness with an infectious groove and big monster fun for all. Pagan Spirit Gathering was terrific, a wonderful homecoming for me. Full of reconnections with old friends and some new ones made as well. This was the time I discovered body painting. As an artist, how could one ask for a better canvas than the naked body of a beautiful woman? Soul painting is really what it’s about. I just do my best to get out of my own way and let the soul come inside out. The recipients of my brush strokes also found that they received an almost overwhelming amount of loving attention from everyone they met. They were “love bombed” all day. The body painting was a definite hit. (www.scottfray.com/bodypaint) In fact, the commanding alchemical intensity of the body painting experience was one that caught me entirely off guard. I had no clue that it would have such intoxicating healing magick, such potential for service to the soul. One young woman said to me, “You may be surprised to find this out, but I used to be very obese. I’ve never been comfortable with the idea of being naked in front of people, much less done anything like this before”. I painted over her scars with the likeness of her namesake, the tiger lily, and she told me later that it had been a day that had utterly changed her life. She had always had a very negative body image and fought hard against it. Now she reveled in the glory and radiance of her body and was given the gift of being seen as beautiful, striking, and magnificent by everyone she met. It felt humbling and deeply gratifying to hear her story. Perhaps the best way to impart what this is like is to quote the words of a dear friend who let me paint her on the night of the burn at Burning Man. A section she shared from her journal reads: All the body loathing that I normally feel was absolutely gone. I was totally unaware at some point of whether I was too fat or too old (although I have to say I thought my boobs were looking pretty fine!) but instead I was the art. The art was my soul and somehow, someone saw me that beautiful (that would be you) and gave me a voice. I cry to think of it. How could I possibly be that beautiful? How could a friend really see that? And then speak it for me? How can I ever thank you? (Later--riding home in the dust filled RV:) With each mile the dust that had settled on my skin felt a little more gritty– the paint slowly flaking– my body gradually returning to a middle aged woman. Back in the real world the beauty of this art was not evoking love. Fear. Could hardly get service in a restaurant and hotel clerks were less than friendly. I think the contrast that I feel as I get nearer to my other world is the brightest insight of all. Fortified with the most love and adoration I have felt in my life, I find their reactions funny. The worst thing to be is invisible. Don't let me disappear. Many of these festivals were “clothing optional” although I myself was never one to bare my naughties. However, one morning I had just just woken up and was standing near the tall grass with a mouth full of toothpaste foam, sans couture, at least for the moment before the spit. Suddenly a photographer appeared out of nowhere, declaring, “You’re nude, dude!” Somehow the tone in which he said this seemed to indicate that he had uncovered my tribal affiliation through this observation. This, in fact, turned out to be true, at least as far as he was concerned, because unbeknownst to me I was about to make the cover of a national nudist magazine. “Come on”, he insisted, “We need you for a picture.” I protested through the toothpaste foam but it was to no avail. “Nope, gotta come now. And make sure you bring a drum.” Wait a damn minute, I thought. This is just too presumptuous. “Can’t I bring something else?” I mumbled. “Yeah, yeah. Whatever. Just come now”. Those of you who know what I look like in the morning know that my hair desperately wants to rise up vertically, like Einstein caught in a wind tunnel. Now imagine me with my anti-grav coiffure, getting down and funky on a medieval instrument (the cittern), and standing like a naked Celtic Elvis in front of a backdrop of nude dancers and drummers as we shook and shimmied for the cover of Nude and Natural magazine. Such was my first five minutes of the morning and my entrée into the world of the nude. Interestingly, I found out that one of the naked boogiemen was actually their king. He later made it known to me how much he liked the body painting I had done and invited me to a festival he was organizing. And so it happened that I attended my first “Naturist” convention. The Naturist gathering was great, as was Starwood, the Mac Daddy of Pagan hip-hops, but none of this could even begin to prepare me for Burning Man. Let me say right now that Starwood is truly amazing. It’s full of wild weirdness and ecstatic craziness of every stripe. And it’s the biggest gathering of its kind– the culmination of three decades of the massively successful festival movement, which has caused Paganism to be recognized by international sources as one of the fastest growing religions in the world. At 1300 participants, it feels pretty big. But I have to admit that Starwood is not even an incremental preparation to the complete atomic blowout that is Burning Man. Burning Man makes all the others together look like an Amish quilting bee. With a weeklong population of perhaps as large as 38,000, the Burning Man community of Black Rock City is Nevada’s fifth largest city, complete with federally recognized zip code (with their own 24 hour mail delivery on foot– Ped Ex). Where else do you have sky divers constantly dropping into the event and as many as 100 flights a day arriving from small, privately owned planes? Where else do you have a vibrant, self-sustaining community where gift and barter economies are the only ones permitted, no monetary exchanges allowed? It’s a commerce dynamic based on the higher universal law of Grace. Where else can you find a place where people put so much heart and soul, not to mention effort, strategizing, inspiration, and commitment into creating outrageous art installations as gifts to their fellow burners – many of which are designed to be torched after their week of glory? At the threshold of a new world, this is the zeitgeist. This is the leading contour of evolutionary transformation. Seriously people, Burning Man is the coolest event on Planet Earth. It is a place of Radical Freedom. Nowhere have I seen human beings so completely creative, powerful, and unrestrained. Above all, Burning Man is participatory. It is a living organism. • It is a place where you are made profoundly aware that Living equals Art. In fact life MUST equal art; what else could you possibly have been put here to do? I’ve never seen a place where creativity blooms with such rabid fecundity. I found myself dazed, watching my distended pineal gland wag about in front of me, lapping up the artgasm juice like a happy Pleiadian puppy. WHAM, you’re suddenly smacked with a terabyte download right from the galactic central core– a mandate boring right into your scull that screams, “WHY AREN’T YOU MAKING ART?!?” • Self-expression! Hot damn people, all I can say is prepare to be shocked, rocked, and thoroughly unblocked. This place is so freakin’ out-there it will function as a turbo-charged cosmic colonic to any homage you may have been subconsciously paying to your anally retentive Calvinist ancestors. It is simply not possible to be too weird. This place makes Mad Max look like the Ladies’ Auxiliary Gardening Club. A massive exorcism of any previous desire you had to remain normal will steam-clean your tubes leaving you high, dry, and satisfied. • It is a place where humor is woven into everything. Even in the Death Guild/Thunderdome where flame throwers, public flagellation, and Black Metal is the order of the day there is a pleasant feeling of taking oneself lightly. There is every flavor of weird, wicked, obscene, and profane here, but it’s all in the spirit of riotous fun. It’s the only place I know of where they hold prayer circles to pray for chaos! • It is a place of self-reliance welded to a community of overwhelming goodwill. One of the basic tenets is “Leave No Trace” and the burners go to great lengths to take their responsibilities as Earth Guardians seriously. Love your Mother, they say, and mean it. More than a thousand committed volunteers are out there right now picking up ever speck of glitter. A cabbie in Reno confirmed the truth of this for me, saying, “That desert is left cleaner than when they arrive”. Ok, ok. First, we gotta set the stage: You’re way the fuck out there in the hinterland of Nevada. Three hours from Reno. The location is a near endless expanse of ancient lakebed (known as the playa), extremely flat with dry, desert mountains in the far distance. The playa consists of hard packed white alkaline powder. Overpowering wind and dust storms are commonplace. Imagine Dune’s Arrakis or Luke Skywalker’s Tattooine and you’ve got a bead on it. You can almost imagine the colossal sandworms lunging from the desert. Temperatures can exceed 110° in the day and plummet to 40° at night. Hydration must be constant or you’re toast. The Burning Man is set atop of a mammoth platform built to look like a lighthouse to synchronize with this year’s theme of the Floating World. Laser beams stream out from him in the cardinal directions, and the layout of the camps are arranged in a massive circle. Longitudinal streets are labeled by degrees out from the Man, Latitudinal avenues bear nautical names. The scale is truly grand, almost intimidating. There’s no fucking way you’re going to be able to see and experience the proliferating multitude of wildly wonderful things to do out there. No Way! This thought is oddly disappointing and enticing at the same time. I understand now why they recommend bicycles, as they are clearly the best way to navigate the playa. Theme camps abound, dozens and dozens, with great names like Camp Pump (get your penis enlarged), Temple of Atonement (get strapped to the spanking machine), Space Virgins (new to the abduction scene?), Moons of Mongo, Oracular Ghosts of Lahontan, Pastie Camp (yes, glued right on your nipples for you), Genital Portrait Studio, Haiku4Beer, and Piss Clear, the headquarters and namesake of one of the local newspapers. Lots of great events. One that comes to mind is The Great Canadian Beaver Eating Contest, where contestants are judged on artistic merit, presentation, athleticism, enthusiasm, perversion, and, of course, hairstyle. Electronic trance groove pumps out at a quaking volume far and wide. Art installations are everywhere, scattered throughout the playa, but the space is so damn huge you might not even see them unless you go out there and explore. There’s an absolute explosion of creativity and originality out there just waiting for you to stumble across it. I swear to you, every ten minutes without fail I would encounter something so new, innovative, crazy, strange, clever, beautiful, funkadelic, demented, or angelic that it would just blow my mind. Often, it would be something I had never even imagined before. Here are a couple of vignettes of the event to give you an idea what happens there: • Imagine meeting your neighbors gathered round camp for the evening meal. I wound up sitting next to a gorgeous, naked amazon/valkyrie whom I saw just that morning dommed-out wearing nine-inch platforms on thigh-high leather boots, ultra-fuzzy pink, day-glo stars pasted on her nipples, and a wicked Third Reich officer’s cap sporting large antelope horns, electric chaser lights, and a shock of horse hair trailing down her back– the whole get up. She had expertly administered a cat-of-nine-tails to a longhaired Jesus look-alike, who was strapped to a cross and sucking a tootsie roll pop while reggae throbbed from behind these giant Rasta-man Mardi Gras puppets in the background. I managed to say, “…Uh, I’m quite a fan of your work.” (Duh!) • Another dinner vignette: I’m sitting there, plate in hand, overhearing the conversation between a young girl of about eight or nine and her parents. The little girl whines, pleading with her mother and father to come and look at what she has written in the white dust of the playa. Reluctantly they shuffle out of their seats, reading the letters, B-O-R-E-D. “How can you be bored, honey? Look, just watch them blowing up that car out there”. It was true. There was a big black limo in full flame not 30 feet from us. Only at Burning Man. Remarkably, I had hardly noticed it myself. That’s just how much of a chickin’ lickin’ carnival it all is out there. If an extraterrestrial spacecraft had landed right out on the playa no one would have even noticed, such was the freak-quotient. Maybe they did. • Art Cars. One of the most astonishing and delightful parts of life on the playa is the wacky, scrumpdillyiscous world of art cars. These things are so cool! Suddenly, a giant white whale comes by with glowing eyes and twelve-foot maw, which opens to reveal a whole nightclub in the belly of the beast. Partygoers mingle around a fully stocked bar (often it's all free, remember no money allowed. I once got a drink for doing a trick with my tongue!), while on the second level of what you now see to be a massively converted school bus, a stage supports a band, rocking at full tilt, under a immense series of clipper ship sails fully equipped with pirate lookouts hanging off the main mast. “Great mother of Moby, Batman!” you exclaim, as the whale shakes its gigantic flukes and sails off over the playa, followed by motorcycle octopi and glittering manta rays. Bicycle seahorses and jellyfish trail behind. All piloted by radical iconoclasts fully decked out in their post-apocalyptic techno-tribal rave pagan slutshop survivalist finery. This is not Disneyworld. There is no corporate sponsorship, no public funding, and no commercial backing. Just mutant metalworkers and mad scientist hackers here. Obsession rules the day. It’s phenomenal the lengths that people have gone to make this possible! Un-fucking-believable! You’ll enjoy the monstrous lobster car, the armada of ships that sail the playa like an ocean, the UFO’s, the gargantuan spiders and the pyrocars that belch out huge jets of flame (hoo boy, you have NO idea!). Because if there’s one thing that the citizens of Black Rock City like most, it’s playing with fire. • White Out. There was a desert storm like I had never experienced before. Total white out. Furious winds pick up the dust from the playa and turn it into an all-encompassing blizzard. Burners dig this big time. Despite the fact that you can’t see a damn thing and you are basically fucked if you don’t have goggles and a face mask (and I had thought that these were mere fashion statements). They head out into the roiling tempest for the sheer novelty of it. I wandered out myself on one of the mutant bikes, covered in shag fur, with four wheels lifting you about 12 feet in the air. Way out there, a staggering cinematic vision appeared before me. As I followed the strains of Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” through the storm I saw a great leviathan of an art car, a vast scaly dragon with enormous black wings and a metallic head that belched out spectacular plumes of fire. Before it was a motorcycle with metal plates welded to it transforming it into a Paleolithic fish with wagging tail, and a guy wearing a poncho and a dust mask that had been partially grafted on to a Halloween devil mask. I zoomed in to see this just as Ozzy sang, “Satan smiling spreads his wings.” The guy in the poncho raised his arms in time with the music, in a spooky, well-timed tableau. • The Temple of Joy. The real magic of Burning Man is that everyone gives of themselves. Not just a little. They give and give and give! Mostly in the form of outrageous creativity and a playful/powerful invitation to LIVE LARGE and jump into the game. Some of the projects are so achingly beautiful, so well crafted and ingenious, so vast in sheer engineering scale and execution, you might just be consumed into weeping at the mere sight of them. Add to that the knowledge that it will soon be surrendered to the flames adds a heart-rending poignancy. In this respect, one is reminded of the Tibetan sand paintings, yak butter sculpture, or some of the Japanese Zen art expressions. Incredibly well wrought and lovingly– painstakingly– fashioned only to be purposely swept away as a joyful release and personification of the impermanence of all things. So the art at Burning Man is all the more precious because you know that the artist has created this monumental piece, a give-away to you and the world, for this moment and this moment only. Such was the Temple of Joy. The Temple of Joy was about seven or eight stories tall, crafted according to some very advanced architectural and structural principles, and exquisitely decorated with a vast profusion of wooden filigree, all of which came from the factory that produces those wooden dinosaur skeletons for toyshops. The effect was sublime. It looked like something from the far distant future or from the depths of the primeval past. It had a delicate, preternatural beauty, unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Add to this the fact that all the while the psychedelic, dread-locked carpenters were busy with power tools fashioning massive alien chandeliers and Triassic hanging lanterns above, thousands of people were accepting the invitation to write their thoughts, dreams, hopes, and tributes. Some were chronicling the remembrance of sweet love lost and still treasured; others gave an appeal to Heaven for a crack in the egg of soul. Still others were just simple, profound gifts of love from the radically awake and alive. I wept and wept. The night after the main burning of the Man (which was truly spectacular), they burned the Temple of Joy in solemn ceremony. Something quite extraordinary happened then. Twisters– funnel tubes of super-heated air and dust, whirling at incredible speeds and reaching hundreds of feet into the black, starry night began to appear. This was an extraordinary display of a natural phenomenon I had never seen before. Like a mighty tornado, they spun fiercely and beautifully, dancing across the playa near the great blaze. Sometimes they would capture the tongues of flame as they licked upward and for a brief moment spiral into the sky in an incandescent arabesque. It was fantastic and awe inspiring. As for myself, I believe completely in the existence and sovereignty of the elemental and devic kingdoms. I believe that that realm is intimately enjoined with sacred natural process and is a place of great intelligence and power. Overlaid upon our own world, the dimension of the “nature spirits” became undeniably visible that night. It felt as though contact occurred. We were acknowledged– initiated. An exquisite and persuasive gesture of “presence” was made and understood, leaving a profound effect on all present. So that’s a short, short look at Burning Man. Based on an archaic ritual we should all remember from over 70,000 years of having burned effigies in rituals of transformation and release. Clearly that old alchemical mojo is still undeniably potent now. For me it was worth traveling across country 6000 miles and 7 days, round trip (by bus, yag!) to be there. I will certainly be planning to return, for it has an undeniable magnetism. As they say when you first enter the gate, “welcome home!” Celebration, participation, restoration– all are offered, even required. There are no spectators. Let all of your nerve endings gush with sustained joy and wonder. See you at the burn. * * * Love unending, Scott Fray email me my website