Story and Photos by: Lynn Levitt
Have a good burn!
As you turn off the cement highway onto the vast 400-mile Black Rock Desert, your stomach stirs with excitement of the unknown.
It is your first time at Burning Man and you are a virgin. Here you will touch the terrain of what feels like another planet. You’re arriving at the end . . . and the beginning.
You have been told there are no rules about how you must behave or express yourself.
The mind-altering experience of Burning Man is its own drug. It is not an event, but a way of doing and being wherever you are. You’re not the weirdest kid in the classroom. You are one with yourself.
This is a world where everything is different. Art is an unavoidable part of this experience.
It is up to each to decide how they will contribute, and what they will give to this community.
You need to bring enough food, water and shelter because the elements of the new planet are harsh and you will find no vending.
You will rise at dawn, endure 100-degree heat, and labor in dust storms.
Black Rock, Nev. is now a 7 square-mile civic organism that has become alive.
On Saturday night, the Man burns. As the procession starts, the circle forms and the Man ignites, you experience something personal, something new to yourself, something you’ve never felt.
It’s an epiphany. It’s primal. It’s newborn. Only you can express the feeling, the change.
You’ll leave as you came. When you depart from Burning Man, you’ll leave no trace. Everything you built, you’ll dismantle. There will be no remnants of the city that was.
