Next Door to Forever
It is the greatest spectacle I’ve never seen.
The grandest celebration I never attended.
The most ecstatic, uplifting, mind-altering, ego-shattering,
Soul-connecting experience I’ve never participated in, ever.
It is Burning Man.
In another year or so, I will find my way back in the desert to a place I’ve never been.
And I will greet the people I have always known, and never met.
I will find ways to give back to each of you who have given so very much to me, a perfect stranger; family.
I think it must call to us, the way the ocean calls to some, or the mountains.
I think it is a beacon of sorts; broadcasting on the silent, iconoclastic, superconductive wavelength of the heart.
An outsider, I will find next year that place of recognition and remembrance, where even the intolerable are tolerated, the excluded come to shelter others, and the dying breathe life into the living.
Here, the profane is mixed in equal portions with the glorious and the sublime; the ridiculous and the reverent.
Here, we come to be human.
We will bring with us our hopes and our fears, our dreams and longings; desires and insecurities, creativity and frustration; our heartache, sorrow, and our joy. And in return we will accept what the Playa offers us, with gratitude, if not always understanding.
Who can describe the sound of a tear on a child’s cheek?
What is it to wake up, knowing you are truly alive?
It will be enough.
It always is.
For a single week, we will once more embrace what it is like to live next door to forever.
As strangers, we will find our way home.
With open arms, we will welcome us in.
by Sonnivhek
