The message left in the flames
Burning Man is best-known for a few things: dust, debauchery, and one particularly dazzling fire. The Saturday night finale is an always-iconic and increasingly-ironic middle finger to corporate society, or “the man.” 80,000 watch in primal elation as the effigy collapses into flames.
By the time the embers have cooled, many have packed their bags and are on their way back to the “default world,” thoughts buzzing between the high points of the week and the long, hot shower ahead. But the festival is not yet over, and a portion of the community remains, licking their wounds and preparing for the heavy evening ahead.
On Sunday night, The Temple, the sanctuary for loss and remembrance at Burning Man, also falls. It’s a mass memorial screaming its sorrow through blue-licked flames. Tens of thousands of broken hearts. An indefinite amount of souls set free.
When I last attended Burning Man, I watched the temple burn and I counted my blessings. In 2016, I was decidedly more complete; I still had people and parts of myself that I have since lost. But there’s always a before and an after, even if we never know when the turn will strike.
I step into churches to look at the stained glass. I wander graveyards like they are museums. I weave conversations away from the dark places where I will not force my voice to reach. Leaving a message in the fire was one of my main motivations for coming back to the desert. All year, I saved up my tears and swallowed my words. I feared the power of my emotions but was desperate to experience them.
This year’s temple looked different than I expected it to. A series of evenly-spaced vertical gates leading from tall to giant and fading out again in a long sort of staircase. Inspired by the torii shapes of Japan, the structure was tall, austere, and almost brutalist. It didn’t rely on the traditionally sacred shapes of years past, like spirals and archways, to evoke the dead, the afterlife, the whatever-you-hope-for, but it was my favorite instantly. Because it was the place I would leave Alex.
As I parked my bike and gathered my wits, the gates of the eternal pulled me close. The burn of sage led me through the narrow first gate. The reality of my past colliding with my present sunk me to my knees. I scanned the walls- overlapping images of those young and old, those that had been to the desert and those that never would. An apron missing an owner, pooling wax of candles left lit, freshly-printed photos and even fresher messages written on wood. Bits and pieces of those gone, but here, remembered.
A tucked-away corner where wooden pillars met desert’s dusty floor: here, I would set up his shrine. A corner that had already been marked by many but still showed pale parts of its wood to be adorned. Blood rushed to my head as I pulled out the documents: a stack of photos and a journal that I had written to him over the past few years. I had never reread the whole thing.
As much as you can imagine a moment, you can never prepare for how you will feel when it arrives. I remembered everything I loved about Alex all at once as I crumpled over the photos. Surrealness slammed its waves down on me. 3 years ago, I had no clue that I would be back to Burning Man, let alone to mourn my brother’s life.
I weeped as I pulled out the images: his curls, wild as a baby…him, three years older and holding me in his arms in front of our Christmas tree when I was 12… as an adult, still climbing trees in our backyard…in the Japanese gardens with the love of his life, Sunni, who- devastating as it is to accept- also passed away.
I slowly pinned the images around messages in thick marker placing final words to their loved ones past. Then I settled in to read the journal of letters to him, recollections of trauma that felt as though they had been written by someone else, typed through fingers jammed with disbelief, shock, pain, and strength.
As I read, I relived his memorial years earlier and felt how hard it was to mourn him then. A funeral is an act of ritual, empathy, and much-needed observance. But in hindsight, I realized gatherings come with emotional strings attached: topics to avoid, people to appease, face to save. Obligation, guilt, expectation, confusion, devastation. So many uneasy hearts and minds trying not to say the wrong thing and feel only the right things.
Here, in the temple, there was no one that knew Alex. There were no painted smiles, unanswered questions, false promises or responsibilities. There was no need to show face, to draw conclusions, to fill in the blanks. Surrounded by the sounds and all-consuming energy of grief around me, I felt safe. The narratives were irrelevant. The “what if”s vanished. The context that connected us was that we all loved someone.
The sun shifted through the natural blinds of the structure above, awakening me from my world of memory and reflection. I placed the stack of tear-stained pages under his shrine. If someone else found and read it, I hope it helped them somehow, but I was ready to let go of it.
As I stumbled out of the temple, new people from around the world filed in. To relive the trauma and grief, to forgive and relive. Ultimately, to accept the permission to say farewell. There would be thousands more loved ones mourned before the structure burned. Why, it was only Tuesday.
What felt like a lifetime, but truly just a few days later, the temple burned. The tall towers collapsed like dominos as dust tornados spiraled in the open-armed crowd.
Together, we watched in tear-streaked silence. The posterboards covered in messages, notebooks left unbound on shelves, flowers hung upside down, favorite shirts and well-worn gloves and tattered shoes laying empty. The things we tie to the people we miss, now destroyed in a sacred ceremony.
Some of us were counting our blessings and some of us were lost in our own narratives. Some of us still ignorant to the depths of loss and some of us only falling deeper. The love we left in the flames was bigger than ever.
Thank you, Burning Man.
