This was my seventh pilgrimage to the desert. Even last year, through chemotherapy, I came.
I return like a hot-pink moth to an LED flame. I catch up with friends, dance at sunrise with my twin brother, to make art and wander through what others have built. I drift into workshops. Each year, I find more reasons to return, yet the pull is hard to name.
On my first night, I sped away from the muted hum of the neon city towards the trash-fence boundary demarcating the wild expanse of the playa, my knuckles whitening on the handlebars, the cold wind kissing my face. As my eyes grew used to the dark, the sky filled with stars. I rode into the vastness of empty space. Behind me, thousands of people had gathered to build a world.
I come for the quiet, the dissolution of identity and space. The structures that hold my life in place loosen. I distance myself from my phone and my persistent sense that there’s something I should be doing. Need to do shifts to want to do, the rigidity of what is, falls apart in the quiet of what could be.
The need to guard myself quiets, too. Surrounded by people giving freely without expectation, I spend less time wondering what a stranger wants from me. Help becomes easier to accept. This year, a longtime family friend came with me, a steady voice reminding me to eat, to sleep. I let him take care of me. At camp, the circle widened. Strangers became family.
Feeling so fully held, I let go.
In this space, getting lost feels like freedom. I begin to welcome the unknown. Cell phone service fades, landmarks move, and a rogue dust storm erases my view. As I wander, the familiar falls away, and the unfamiliar takes its place, and with it, a sense of transcendental wonder.
Thoreau writes in Walden, “Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.”
I used to fear getting lost, but now I wonder how much of the world I have missed by keeping to familiar paths. As my friends head out for the night, I take a sharp right and lose myself in the crowd. I’m learning to let a conversation change the course of a night, to stay somewhere without wondering what I’m missing elsewhere. I flow, letting what I find change what I’m looking for.
I bike through what looks like emptiness in the middle of the night and come upon a mushroom merry-go-round with someone serving tea and cookies. A rainbow rises from the Titanic’s smokestack. I head toward a sculpture and arrive at a live piano and opera concert. I sit admiring a lightning bolt sculpture striking the desert before realizing the artist is beside me. I watch friends and strangers exchange vows. I break down in tears, weary from the residual weight of this year, only to have my neighbor from grade school knock on my RV door, dressed as a clown. Caught in a surprise rainstorm, I’m cold, and someone hands me a bowl of soup. I walk in socks across the playa at sunrise, hand in hand with former strangers, discovering an archway of butterflies.
Year after year, I lose and find myself again. The city is reimagined, the camps change, and the people I come with vary. The dust seems to hold remnants of who I have been. I shed another layer, becoming more vibrant, more myself.
The Temple holds my grief. It is a non-denominational space built and burned every year, filled with pictures and offerings to the dead, words the living have been unable to say elsewhere. I think I am alone in the world with my pain until I realize how much the people next to me are carrying. Some years, I spent the entire burn there crying. Some years, I’ve only visited once.
This year, I stayed longer than I normally do to watch it burn. In sacred silence, I watched the flames rise and the Temple’s outer layers burn away, revealing the bare framework at its core. The flower at the top collapsed, wilting in the fire. One of my best friends hugged me tightly and cried. In that embrace, I felt how much of last year had been carried by people who loved me, too.
Sa Ta Na Ma.
All week, I had been chanting those syllables at Amplified Yoga at Disorient, flinging my body into motion. It’s my favorite hour on the playa. For the past few years, I’ve gone every day it’s offered. My hair, still short from treatment, had been braided into a long pink ponytail that swung against the small of my back. I danced my way back home, back into my feminine form.
Beginning, life, death, renewal. Four syllables carry the undercurrent of all. We are always changing, always ending, always beginning again.
One day, one of my favorite DJs, Gallivanter, accompanied the class. I had often listened to his sets during infusions, anchoring my soul to a time of blissful, free-flow dance. Now, held by his music, I felt the distance between those moments collapse.
The dust swirled. The woman in treatment reaching through the music towards a life she missed, and the woman dancing before any of this, unaware of how precious freedom would come. For a moment, everything but the music fell quiet.
I danced for both of them and for all the women I had yet to become, my heart open to the wide expanse of the unknown.
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