Burning Man is touted as a no-commerce event. It’s also viewed as a hippie/freak oasis miles away from the “default world”. The closer it gets to the event, though, the more grumbling I hear from people who are a little cynical about the ideals, because there is an insane amount of commerce going on.

While Joshua and I closed on our new house in mid-September, we didn’t move until mid-October, because for the beginning of October we were participating in Alchemy, a Burning Man-related event in Georgia. I’ve tried before and failed, so I’m not going to attempt to describe a burn to you. If you’ve never been, you can probably tell from pictures whether it’s your kind of thing, in which case you should go. It’s always the pictures that speak the most to me about burn events, so I’ll just share some of the photos with you. None of these photos are mine. They are all borrowed from various artists from the Alchemy 2009 Flickr pool.

I’m away until next week at Alchemy, the Georgia burn, an event in my current home state that’s inspired by Burning Man. I hope to have some pictures up soon of this year’s event, but in the meantime, here are some awesome shots from Alchemy 2008 to give you an idea of the kind of fun I’m immersed in right now.

There are lots of things to love about Burning Man, of course. This was my third year going, and there’s always a lot to wrap my mind around. This year, there was a gigantic slide that create a huge influx of patients to the medical center, an enormous Rubik’s Cube that you could try your hand at solving, a nearly-all-day dust storm on Saturday, and, of course, the thousands of awesome people to interact with.

I travel to a Circle of mountains. I step inside and live and know that pre-history is now and the future is now.

I was at a regional burn once, and an acquaintance who was new to the burn scene grumbled to me that she hadn’t seen any of this gifting thing that everyone was talking about. Five seconds after she was done speaking, someone ran up to us to give us some handmade soap. The “gifting thing” is an integral part of burns, and is truly everywhere when you are open to it.

From the Burning Man website: “Radical Inclusion: Anyone may be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation in our community.”
Radical inclusion. Everything about Burning Man is radical, to be sure. It starts at the very basics, though, and says anyone may be involved.