I took this picture while seated in the dust feeling the heat and watching the flames and the smoke and the embers wheel into the night sky, taking with them written invocations of pain and regret and blessings and thankfulness. I was not feeling them as I did in years past. In years past I wrote what I needed to write, to my brothers, my wife, my parents and grandparents; and saying those things out loud to the world yet only to myself helped in some small way. But this year I wrote very little. Ex had asked that I write something for her, so I did, and when I started I felt an unexpected sorrow choke up into my throat, but there was no revelation, just a chance to be fully in a moment of grief for something I can't live with but don't entirely want to live without, and also for her pain, which is different than mine. On a whim I noted on a wall how thankful I was that I had nothing to say to my sons that needed to be said at the Temple. For some parents, this Temple and its immolation are the only means they have to write to children who were taken early.
This writer says many things much better than I can:
More food for thought:
It’s possible to be like this, [Burning Man] says, to live so richly and creatively and expressively and sensuously, to be this in love with life. And once one has really seen that such a life is possible, one cannot go back to how one was.
3 comments:
That last quote?
Yes.
BM is, to use the ten dollar word, one's epiphany. Sounds like you were remade at the cellular level.
May a brighter new day be in store for you, Don-- you're a beautiful soul and deep.
The whole business sounds like a wonderfully conceived ritual environment of a type I could never participate in (because of the sheer number of people involved) but admire for its metaphorical solidity.
Do people really regard the loss of a child as something other than the removal of an oppressive obligation? I have to wonder.
But the image of all those messages vaporizing into the night sky is haunting.
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