There was a death a few years ago when the man burned. He was 41, he was sober, and he spoke of end of life during the festival. It was his first time here. His friends described him as “helpful and magical.” 

No one will know what drove this man to suicide; from the RGJ story, it sounded like Aaron Joel Mitchell was a happy, fun loving man. He met his wife while backpacking through Nepal and they lived together in Switzerland. From an outsider looking in, that kind of life sounds like a dream come true. What was his intent when he made his run toward the flame? What pushes people to put their toes over the edge? Why do some ignore their own demise while others dive into it? 

He had to run through a line of volunteers acting as a living wall; he had to throw himself into the bonfire. He chose to die. I can’t comprehend what he went through to get to that point, and I am floored by the commitment it takes for someone to kill themselves.

I wish I could say Burning Man is a fantasy camp for adults and a week-long party. But it isn’t. It is heavy. It is intensely emotional. The heightened sense of arousal greets you at the very gates of this place. The weirdness (or drugs) of this place have a way of peeling back a layer of ego and revealing you to yourself and for some it’s too much to witness. Maybe Aaron knew all along this would be how he leaves this world, and in the meantime, he calmly spread joy and light wherever he went with whomever he met. In the end, maybe the carnage of the party sent him over the edge, just lost enough to be drawn into the mesmerizing flame.

. . .

I made my first transition back into the ‘default’ world from the surreal fantasy created in Black Rock City and I am constantly reminded that they both occupy the same world. Perhaps what Burning Man did most to me was warp my sense of scale. Even the tiniest of encounters felt extremely significant, and in the grand scale of things, like nature on Earth or The Entire Universe, we are insignificantly tiny creatures. Maybe this is the art of navigating the self, perhaps it is extremely Sisyphean in nature—the more you discover who you really are, the more you realize how hollow that discovery is. There is nothing but discovery in the face of a vast and uncalculatable universe.

I’m still lost in this post-Man singularity where the entire planet feels like a game—some open-world sandbox goverened by rules, yes, but no goals except the ones you dream up for yourself. I am not sure what the point of this shared reality is, or if anyone else is even playing the same game I am. In this life, there are no hard and fast objectives, no directions from the onset; all we have is simply the mere experience of experiences and the cascade of birth and death. The Burning Man experience is truly a unique and feral one, a high-octane choose your own adventure with exotic interactive art and exotic international bodies and constant distraction and dance music laced with a plethora of party drugs. For a lot of people, Burning Man is the height of human experience and revelery, the definition of a high-water mark; when the tide inevitably breaks and rolls back, the events of the week are the last indications of where the high tide has come and gone, the marks and scars of what the waters leave behind.

Burning Man contains a world of endless doors and mirrors – behind any tent flap is a brand new pocket universe. Between any two people exists a magical spark of connection that could just as well be a temporary, fleeting thing as much as it could be a lifelong bond.

So, maybe the trick to navigating this infinite maze of existence is knowing when to close a door behind you. Some of these doors or portals connect you to a particularly devastating or ugly part of the labyrinth—where one must overcome some inner-demon to acquire a new key of knowledge, which in turn can be used to unlock another door. It’s easy to get caught in the same loop, turning the same key in the same door over and over and hoping for a different result. The definition of madness, or the recursive, cyclical nature of the experience of human suffering? We explore to learn, we learn to explore. Maybe there isn’t much else to it, but I know for a fact that it’s far easier to navigate with the help and collaboration of a community.

This contribution is key. No matter who you are or what you’re doing—you have to use your hands and mind to build a piece of the city. If nobody got out here early to hammer nails into wooden construction posts, there wouldn’t be a scrap of shade for miles. If the infrastructure team didn't get out and drop porta-potties, you would shit in the dust. The roads, the camps, the art, the inevitable exodus all require a significant investment of time and energy—and if a team of environmental scientists aren't working on a plan with the BLM, there would be no festival at all. There is a precisely worded contract in a three-ring binder in a steel bookcase in a BLM field office with a line about how many pieces of trash these partygoers can abandon per square foot of pristine empty playa or else the Federal Government blocks the permit and brings the hammer down on the whole rotten thing. 

So it does indeed take a village to raise this thing from nothing. But still it begs the question - who are we as a species doing this? Which animals are doing the logistics to build this place for the party animals? While it’s clear to me that we’re all playing roles and filling archetypes both out here and in the “default” world, it’s equally clear that some are driven to create, and others are content to merely consume. 

The one thing that I can not seem to stress enough about Burning Man is there is a heightened intensity baked right into the circular streets of Black Rock City. It’s built like a pressure cooker—it turns a raw meat cube into something tenderly stewed in half the time. Knowing fully well from the very beginning that the End Is Nigh and this whole thing will vanish this weekend creates a real and present FOMO that drives the intensity of each moment. There is a deluge of primal energy out here in this raw, no-holds barred party—at best it is savage, ruthless, and real. For some, it is a test of going harder than you’ve ever gone before just to see if you can make it through to the other side. For others it's a retreat to utopia and a vacation on the beach in the exact middle of nowhere.

Maybe the draw of cutting loose in this survivalist environment is the thrill of taking a risk and making a double-move forward, like a pawn in a new game of chess. There’s something very freeing about this weird experiment on the high desert playa, and there is truly some spiritual magic in the air out here. In the best corner of Black Rock City, there’s an indomitable human spirit that has the guts to build something, knowing full well that it will be destroyed. Maybe that’s the magic: There is something special to living as authentically and presently as possible in each and every moment, only to find the courage to burn the whole thing you've made down to nothing and start it all over again.