Burning Desire

I am positively salivating. Only three days between me and two and a half days of strange, vibrant, unruly, juicy communal bliss. It has been too many long years. I thirst so deeply for this sort of event, it's distracting. I'm not even remotely ready, though I found someone on freecycle to come and take away all the crap in storage that separates me from my camping gear. I have a list of stuff to get and very little time to get it. My Kali costume isn't even remotely ready. I have blue latex, I have knee-high stockings, I have pillow stuffing. It's going to take some serious work to get it all together, though. At this rate I may be doing it in the shady, pollen-drenched comfort of my camp chair on Saturday afternoon.

I am going to Playa Del Fuego, the local contingency of the Burning Man phenomenon, a suprisingly diverse group of creative folks from all walks of life. Art. Freaks. Nature. Greased up slip-n'slides. All in one place. If there is a heaven, it would be like this.

Even my daughter is excited. Yes, I am taking her. There will be lots of kids there, all wild and giggly and witnessing life beyond Britney Spears and Bratz and everyone's-is-the-same school art projects. Thank goodness. She was a little uncertain about being around nudity at first, but she's starting to think that maybe this fear of bodies in our society is rather arbitrary (this is a 50 cent word version of exactly what she said). Boundaries are boundaries, with or without clothes. We're all naked all the time. We just hide it. She's pretty sure she prefers to be clothed right now, but she knows what she might see and that we can talk about it. This feels right to me.

I was born on a commune, raised on summertime skinny dipping insetad of a/c. People gardened in the nude because it was hot. I still remember the way this one woman's breasts would hang pendulously in front of her when she bent over her garden, like round rocks in the bottom of tube socks. That's how she was, it never occurred to me that there might be anything "wrong" with it. Because there isn't.

Our culture is more afraid of bodies than violence. More queasy about whole, uncovered flesh than flesh that has bloodied and ripped to a shredded pulp. We will take our teenagers to see any number of shoot-em-up propaganda films starring random monosyllabic hunks of meat, but Janet Jackson shows a nipple ring and the entire world implodes. Our priorities are way out of whack. Duh. This explains so much...

So anyway. I used to attend all sorts of decadently spirit-feeding events back in Missouri. Those people became my family. We attended each other's weddings, parents' funerals, and parties with joy and vitality, always amazed to see how we grow both together and separately, and how much silly, hedonistic, childlike fun we could still have no matter how much we grew, both inside and out. They were my grounding in "life as cosmic theater" as Tom Robbins put it. There truly is nothing worth taking too seriously. As we sat together around the fire, singing songs and laughing and eating and talking, there could be no doubt.

It's been a hard couple of years. My spirit is ready for a good meal. Full report when I get back. Maybe more commentary tomorrow. They have some neat concepts that have had me chewing the psychic cud...