Burning Man -- or What I did on my Summer vacation

For about 20 years I've wanted to spend a week camping in the Nevada desert, surrounded by 70,000 people and endless adventure.  They call it Burning Man, and it's filled with hippies, techies, cool people, nerds, and Nobel Prize winners (more below). Two of my post-docs have gone to it, but since it was always during the first week of school, I could never go because I was always teaching while they were burning stuff. 

At Burning Man, there are 500 camps that offer different adventures (from a meditation camp to a Thunderdome camp) and only 8 days to do as many as you want between sand storms and heat waves.  The greatest t-shirt I saw said: "THAT'S A HORRIBLE IDEA! What time?"  My second favorite was "Safety Third".

Did radio and documentary interviews, and had tons of fun.   Learned to direct an orchestra, walk a circus tightrope, do sign language (in painfully slow motion), throw an ax, and make hippy jewelry.  



Ran a 5K race, won a Tom Waits poetry reading competition, drank Kirschwasser from a shell (ala Steely Dan), won Forbidden Desert, and was repeatedly accused of being an undercover cop. 



If you're an adult with adventure ADD, it's a super great experience.  Slightly less than super great if you hate to camp in the dust.

Next year:  Burning Man Hampton Inn

The 10 Principles of Burning Man

Burning Man co-founder Larry Harvey wrote the Ten Principles in 2004 as guidelines for the newly-formed Regional Network. They were crafted not as a dictate of how people should be and act, but as a reflection of the community’s ethos and culture as it had organically developed since the event’s inception.
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Radical Inclusion.  Anyone may be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation in our community.
Gifting.  Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift giving. The value of a gift is unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value.
Decommodification.  In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience.
Radical Self-reliance.  Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise and rely on his or her inner resources.
Radical Self-expression. Radical self-expression arises from the unique gifts of the individual. No one other than the individual or a collaborating group can determine its content. It is offered as a gift to others. In this spirit, the giver should respect the rights and liberties of the recipient.
Communal Effort. Our community values creative cooperation and collaboration. We strive to produce, promote and protect social networks, public spaces, works of art, and methods of communication that support such interaction.
Civic Responsibility. We value civil society. Community members who organize events should assume responsibility for public welfare and endeavor to communicate civic responsibilities to participants. They must also assume responsibility for conducting events in accordance with local, state and federal laws.
Leaving No Trace. Our community respects the environment. We are committed to leaving no physical trace of our activities wherever we gather. We clean up after ourselves and endeavor, whenever possible, to leave such places in a better state than when we found them.
Participation. Our community is committed to a radically participatory ethic. We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation. We achieve being through doing. Everyone is invited to work. Everyone is invited to play. We make the world real through actions that open the heart.
Immediacy​. Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important touchstone of value in our culture. We seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us, participation in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers. No idea can substitute for this experience.