Of Burning Man and the dusty tides of grief

It's one of those posts... a postcard from Burning Man, an ode to Blaise, a song from the desert outside me and a breath of hot wind from the one inside. In a week it will be six years since she flew away.

I have been away for two months. This time it’s been different; instead of a cyclone of workshops and transit, I have stopped in small forgotten places, noticed the little things, put down roots, taken time, discovered new creatures, made friends; real ones whom I will keep.

The plane hums to itself like some giant sky-thing, ruffling its wings occasionally, spastic hiccups causing the seatbelt sign to come on. I ignore it; I have the miracle of a row of three seats and have stretched out to sleep for ten hours in blissful gratitude. A lover is waiting for me when I land, my desert-parched skin thirsts for his touch, counting minutes even through my dreams. Another lover nests in a tree house a day’s drive away from my landing place. I daydream a roadtrip to her, but not yet, not yet. I’m coming home to businesses demanding attention, programmes to be taught, marketing to be launched, a whirlwind of necessaries demanding my attention. The speaker coughs… we’ll be landing in two hours; this is it, the last part of the exhale, the space between breaths. All the lights are out. I could be anywhere. Sleeping shapes bundled in too-thin blankets curl against the chill. All these humans, all these stories, each the most important one, the only thing, the sun around which all life revolves in our own private solar system.

Burning Man is a mystery to me. It’s truly awful. Awe-full. I come to the desert to poke at the place where it pierces my skin with its violent claw, to stick my finger into the wound, taste the blood and lymph and gritty white dust that burns nostrils and eyes, peeling feet, clotting hair, choking lungs, demanding that the fragile bags of water that we humans are take care, take care, a desert is no place to be reckless, it will devour you whole without even licking its lips afterward. The relentless scouring tongue of the wild licks and licks, waking or sleeping, there is no escape, no matter how beautiful your outfit, how clever your strategies, how gorgeous your instamoments. That tongue rasps away our ideas and ideals, our projections and fantasies, until all that is left is an understanding that humans are wonderful and appalling, magnificent and cruel, transcendent and irredeemable. I think that is one of the reasons so many people come. There is nowhere to hide, no way to delude ourselves for even a heartbeat that we are in control. All we can do is bow before it and be blown and blown up along our fault lines; whatever they are, the desert will find them, cunning in the deepspaces, roaring in the whiteouts. Burning Man is the pulsing manifestation of everything that is best and worst in humans, and each of us are whirling, buffeted microcosms of this revelation. Cells in the body of an enormous living artwork, each thinking that we can see the whole like a neuron may think it understands a brain. Good luck with that.

Awaken. Awaken. Awaken.

Faultlines… What are mine?

I don’t come to Burning Man to have fun. This epic thing is not fun for me, it is work, a workout, a place to do my homework. I hate it. It hurts. It’s amazing. Euphoric. Foul. Divine. Broken. Perfect. I come to meet all the parts of myself; whatever I unearth in myself I know that somewhere on the playa it exists, outside me, rearing huge and indomitable so I can finally run against the glass and press myself against it, feeling it press back, knowing me entire, moulding to my shape with eerie intimacy. Everything is magnified. Here is a place where my inside and outside can truly meet, where I can see all my stories reflected, I can lean into their wisdom and heartache, be broken into insight, and from there feel whatever is in the way of my transformation.

I turn fifty in a couple of days. I’ve had a rolling series of celebrations, and I’m unapologetic. The last time I chose to really celebrate a birthday I was twenty one. Almost thirty years ago. Fifty feels hefty. I tell people, often, mainly because I am marvelling at it myself. As if by telling another I can land more deeply into what it means for me. The responses have been curious to me.

-You don’t look 50.-
-Age is just a number-
-You look great.-
-I try to feel the person rather than focus on their age.-
-It’s just biology.-

Now that I’m here, down the barrel of five decades in this body, I call bullshit.
Just biology, my left tit.

Biology is what ties us into time and gravity, into the sweeping trajectory from birth to death and the ten thousand thousand lessons we accrue on that path. Biology is a fucking miracle. We get a body. We make choices in it. There are consequences. We live those consequences, gracefully or gracelessly. From those stepping stones we make more choices. Each one takes us down a path that is only ours, as we travel down our fault lines and fractures. By the time we get to five decades of those choices, there is enough perspective to start to marvel at the miracle of the brain rather than be the neuron. To be in wonder at the zillions of processes that make up a living body rather than careening around in it like it is a stolen car.

I’m making a stand for fifty meaning more than just despair at a body that doesn’t look like it used to. For consequences being real and lived and understood. For fifty being a vantage point, a place where perhaps wisdom starts to flower with these silver feathers in my hair. I think I have about ten more years left in this body. I can’t see any further than that, and I’m already ten years over where this body was due to crumble in a flurry of dividing cells. How ironic that cancer took my three year old daughter and spared me. Ten years ago the doctors told me that if I kept her I would die, as the hormones of pregnancy would feed the cancer. That I would leave my daughter an orphan. You must terminate, they said. Or you will die.

Choice and consequence.

I chose to keep her, my forty year old self sure that there was a way to get us both through. That year was awful. Awe-full. She made it, we both did, when I birthed her we were both bald from the three months of chemo, but she arrived and we danced together for three years and three months and then she flew away, her biology unkind in the end, the trickster gods having their laugh, cancer was going to take one of us after all, and this time around it was her.

That was six years ago. I have had three years now of being responsible for nobody but myself, no child, no man, no debt, no home, a shamanic tumbleweed blown by god, going where I am told.

Burning Man, says the voice, that deep one that whispers through my bones.

I help build the dance floor that is the heart of our camp, the 5Rhythms home. Hundreds of people come every day to dance here. The floor is a temple of sorts. I bolt and screw and carry in the blistering heat with a team of women, we share some egoless telepathy for this task, barely speaking, moving as one and I thrill to the harmony of this, the spectacular joy of communion, this is a dance floor and to build it we are already dancing.

Later, the man who holds the heart of the camp connects the speakers and fires up the sound. The first song he plays as a simple sound check hits me like lightning, finds the stunning crack that explodes into my very core, and I drop, riven.

-The stars, the moon, they have all been blown up…-

This is the song I played on repeat for the first six months after Blaise flew away. This is the song that saw me howling, heaving, railing, panting, screaming on the floor, beating my fists until they bruised, my voice broken into thousands of shards of glass, each one cutting me to bloody shreds as I screamed to the abyss
-Give her back! Giveherbackgiveherbackgiveherback!-

I have mapped every millimetre of the terrain from that place. I have not heard that song for five and a half years. And now like some black arrow whistling deadly and true from the past it pierces my heart and I am back there, back in the flayed horror of those first days of her passing.

-You left me in the dark
No dawn, no day, I’m always in this twilight
The shadow of your heart-

I drop like I have been shot, which in a way I have, drop to the new built floor, patterned with my sweat; drop like a stone, end over end over end, falling, there is nothing to stop me, the world is flat and there is a waterfall at its edge and I am over it, I will be falling until the stars all burn out and then I will fall forever in the dark.

And then there is a back against mine, a beautiful giant of a man who listens in a way very few humans do, he listens with his whole heart, all the time, he has heard me somehow and knows exactly what to do. His back against mine, solid as a promise, real and warm, radiating tenderness and love and the wisdom to leave me to my work, I can feel the slow steady thump of his heart counting out time as mine quivers and staggers against its cage of bone. I lean back and let the wave take me, I howl and sob and let myself be held in a way I wasn’t when it all happened, when she flew away and left me bereft. I have waited six years for this back against mine, to dislodge this particular shard of jagged horror, rising in terrible wonderful alchemy, aimed perfectly at this exact moment to burst bloody and real like a red flower in the desert, so I can weed my garden of tears.
​
When I am done my eyes are raw and my face streaked with snot and water and dust. I thought I had left that Gina behind, the one it first happened to, happened through. And now here she is.

The Temple is the breathless still soul of Burning Man. It is a miraculous forest pool in the centre of a six lane freeway. It’s the Japanese zen garden at the heart of a polluted city. It is a giant wooden structure, bolted together with reverence and sweat, curses and prayers, a shout in the dark, blue flame in the abyss, announcing itself over and over to the edges of things.

Thousands come here every day to give voice and word and name to their sorrow, to find a place where it is safe to weep and wail, held by the staggering size of this edifice, and the simple ceremony of making something sacred just by bringing awareness to it. The wood is alive with chicken scratches, words and letters and photos and love and hate and pain and pain and pain. Here, pain can be clean. Here is a place to be witnessed and not fixed. Here we can dissolve and be loved. Here we allow the storms of chaos to tear our house down, splinter our walls to matchsticks, kick over all the pots and chairs, rage with axes and knives and the softest downy feathering of dawn tears, cough up the heavy stones we have carried in our bellies and hearts for lightless eons. Here in the Temple we let our burdens fall, knowing that on the last night, they will burn, our prayers set alight, to wing to the ears of the gods and in that triumphant shout we’ll remember that we are truly magnificent, and that everything changes and that every single thing we know and love will die.

As I ride past the Temple at dawn, I feel the radiating lines of grief laid down in simple layers by thousands of hearts as a web of tension and I buckle over the handlebars, tangled in cobwebs, my companions all riding ahead while I slow. I cannot see through the tears. One circles back to ride near me, he says, -I’ve got you.- Such a thing, to be noticed, to be witnessed. There is something so powerful about being held in the gaze of another, in all my messiness and stickiness; it is one thing to be loved in peacetime, it is another when I am a broken ship with tattered sails and a leaky hull. Of course I know that it is this vulnerability which is more trustworthy than any held together mask, but tell that to the wounded fragments who want to hide.

-I’ve got you,- he says again, cycling close enough to touch, if I wanted.

Dawn is when the desert softens its gaze, its eyes milky with tenderness and nostalgia. It shrugs off the last shards of night-neon chaos like fleas, and underneath there are the crusty corpses of trillions of tiny sea creatures, powdered to dust. They whisper their own sweet song of endings, so long ago their liquid dance and yet they endure to kiss our dancing feet with their tiny stories. The mountains, if you could call them that, ground down molars of an old god’s jaw, cup the sun in gums dried and deep. Humans hear the brightsong and float, scatter, crawl, dance, ride to the furthest eastern edge of this thing, to welcome the light.

-No dawn, no day, I’m always in this twilight-

Tears still wet on my cheeks from passing the Temple. Water in the desert. Words come, to evaporate beneath the nascent sun, caught by a friend before they disappear. As I speak the sun frees itself from the grasping teeth of mountains, a golden bird, flying like she did, like she does.

'She died at one in the morning. After she flew away I held her to my body, nestled her back to me, tucked perfectly into the place she always slept, my little cub, my heart made flesh, finally home. And then Lee and I slept, her pressed against my belly and my chest, Lee next to us, somehow we slept with our dead daughter between us. The dawn woke me, the light changing, dancing around the room. Blaise always loved the dawn. She’d jump on me to wake me up. Dawn. That dawn. For a moment I didn’t know where I was. Her back was warm against my belly, but when I moved my arm and hand the rest of her was ice, so cold. Her back was shockingly warm, like I had poured in my heat, here, have mine, have all of it. Her back was warm but I couldn’t pour in enough, and that was the first dawn I lost her, when I moved my arm and I realised all at once that she was gone. That stunning cold, flesh like marble, like old stone; that’s death.
I’ve had six years of dawns now, but really, every single dawn is that first one, Every single dawn I lose her all over again.'

The sun crawls along the endless desert sky like a beetle up a glass window, flaring in the tears in my eyelashes, spilling rainbows.

'Every dawn is the first one.'

It’s so long since I contacted that Gina, the one who first lost her. I have mapped the planet of grief over years and wandered far from that first beach, the one I woke on after the shipwreck, sand wiped clean of debris and flotsam and footprint by a single roaring tsunami. I had forgotten this part of myself, when it was so fresh and raw, grief an endless falling fist. Here, in the desert, I am back home to myself, stark and ripped. It is always that first dawn. Every. Damned. Day.

I feel so much compassion for myself. It is such a huge thing, to lose a child, to hold them as they fly away, knowing you can’t go with them, no matter how much you want to. Not yet.

Six years and never. She is gone. I can’t even really remember her, just impressions, faded and fragrant dream slices, her handprints on the glass, leaves falling backlit after she threw them in the air, sun dancing on water, her silhouette wavering in the light, clouds veiling a high sky, her fingers pointing at a daymoon. I can't hear her voice any more. I can't feel her vibrant heat.

Not her, not the meaty mighty realness of her, her huge chortling delight, her starfish hands, her tight armsqueeze around my neck when she told me she loved me. Lamb chops and capsicum. Playing all the black notes on the piano. Mundane daily miracles. That’s all gone now, and in the ride back to camp a dust storm whites out everything, the sun, the Temple, my friends, my grief. It’s just my sore legs pushing heavy pedals and my eyes squinting through goggles and my lungs full of dust, dust, ashes to ashes, dust in every crevice of me, every pore white.

I tell the story of her sometimes, like now, here, to remind myself that she even existed at all. That the grief that thunders through me like some sudden southern storm has a root, that there is a space in me where she used to be.

It was a really big thing I went through. Is. Is a really big thing. I have to give myself that. Losing a child is a really big thing. No wonder I press myself against the glass, looking for the places where Life presses back, spikes and grooves and wind and wave and forest and earthquake and tsunami and all. Cobweb and nestling and feather and stamen. No wonder I wander the world, barefoot and wild eyed, blown hither and thither. How can anything ever truly hold me in one place again, with her gone? How can anything ever be big enough? This is the biggest thing. It’s the only thing. Still, all these years later, she is the sun around which I orbit. Every dawn is still the first one.

I am coming home, to Australia, to my own dirt, my birth family, the reassuring nasal twang of familiar voices, the gorgeous bittersharp scent of eucalyptus and teatree and protea. Ocean froth. Sea eagles. Chai. A lover awaits, and I will press myself against the glass in a different way, feeling him press back, knowing myself in the mirror of another, knowing I am alive, skin and breath and beating heart. Trace myself human beneath his hands. Remember who I am. Perhaps.

The plane hums and ticks to itself. Burning Man is the unwiped dust on my boots, the rending deepcrack of melting ice, a newsung tribe of soul connections I will do the work to maintain, an uncaught petal of something really important, a falling featherwisp of dream. Awe.

Blaise is gone, still, always, never. I don’t know what I am, but I am here, breath to breath to breath. Life is a heart tearing miracle that floors me with gratitude.

​And that will have to do.

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