Decompression of Ritual Time
This entry is part of a series captured at Burning Man 2023. 1. “Morning Before Playa”. 2. First Coating of Dust. 3. Decompression of Ritual Time. 4. What are you burning?
Thursday, August 31, 2023
Bigtime Camp
Gathered around our camp’s low purple dining table for a writing workshop hosted by Jonbo. New faces hailing from distant parts of the city, members of our camp, the occasional billow of dust. A downshift in tempo into the reflective.
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Prompt 1: What’s happening? How does this place feel?
Circled up in a field of introspective interest. The dusty wind on arms and chest. Feeling an unhurried contentedness. New faces from all over. The surreal obviousness of people coming together in shared endeavor.
Noticing: a hesitancy to speak specific names. The general feel of common unity.
The rumble of a city involved in all its rabbit holes.
The sky a desaturated blue. Coating dryness and fluttering purples and greens. Flapping, flowing, bottles and pens and citrus placed in front of us for easy peeling. The street shouts, “Cold drinks!”
Prompt 2: What am I grateful for?
Energy and the sensitivity to notice
The gift of listening to myself
The living lesson of people’s lives
Last night’s sleep
The blank desert
Any slice of home
Friends to share all this dust with
Back in Austin, in tussle and pull of default worlding
The heat has burned itself out for the year; 100+ degree temps replaced by more sensible degrees and the gray drizzle of fall. Transition in the air. I feel myself slowly falling out of the ‘field’ of burning. Parts of myself thrash at this. The cast of characters whose interplay make up my inner dialog are feeling the whiplash of navigating realities.
Didn’t count on the emotional sensory return being so spiky. Suppose this is the price of coming down the mountain of a peak experience.
What I’m noticing most is the shift in immediacy. In the dust, life’s choreographies were tighter. Asking of myself, “what’s next?” concerned immediate need; food, water, sleep, friends, party, art. Time compressed by the saturation of abundant experience.
Back in standard time asking, “what’s next?” has a different temporal flavor; where are we going to live in two months? how can we look legible to a landlord? how can I best tend the fire of vocation over the next year?
I’d heard a lot of talk about decompression after returning from the burn and maybe had some inkling of what it meant, but living its necessity is clarifying. The compression which needs “de”ing is the hypersaturation of ritual time. So much meaning is compacted into the week on playa, there is a necessary overclocking of the self to navigate the psychospiritual abundance.
Seeing new friends in their civilian form has helped with the transition. Sharing stories, dance laughing at the absurdity of the lives we’ve found ourselves piloting. One foot in both worlds, each finding a way to tend the brighter spark of ourselves brought back from compressed time.
Which bubbles up a prompt I’ve been noodling on, “What parts of yourself were sparked into fire in the desert and how can you nurture those flames to live more fully you?”
You can’t bring it all back; intentionally choosing what you do seems to be important to who you’re becoming.
In the next entry: the last scribbled words before the rain ate my journal