Desert Adventures Part 2: Midburn

THIS BLOG HAS BEEN MOVED TO A NEW WEBSITE, www.taylorbf.com

To view this post, see http://www.taylorbf.com/blog/desert-adventures-part-2-midburn/

        I’ve never been to Burning Man in Nevada, but have really wanted to the last few years, so I was very excited when a chance to go to Midburn, Israel’s Burning Man, came my way. I was at the Rainbow Gathering when a girl told me about Midburn. It was already sold out, but she had just signed up to volunteer at the event, and she told me how I could also sign up to volunteer and receive a free ticket to an otherwise sold out event as a gift of gratitude for my work. So I went on the website and looked through the possible volunteering options (setup, take down, medical, gate, production, etc.) and decided that setup would be the best for me. I like building things and I thought it would be fun to get to know the rest of the setup crew (“mapatz” in Hebrew) before the event. A couple days later I got an email confirmation that I could come, and a few weeks later I found myself on an adventure out to the middle of the desert.

The Playa

           

            Midburn, as I’m sure is the same with Burning Man, is one of those things that is impossible to conceptualize until you’ve actually been there. You can hear every detailed description and recount of the event in the world and it still won’t be possible to actually understand until you go experience it for yourself. So, even after reading this, keep in mind that you need to go to Burning Man because the picture you will paint in your mind before you go will certainly be nowhere near complete.

           

            Midburn is an event unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. It’s not a festival, it’s not a party, it’s not a desert campout, it belongs in its own category. There is no lineup, there are no headliners, nobody gets paid. There is no money inside the event, so it is impossible to buy anything. The only exchange of goods is through gifts. If you want something that you don’t have, the only ways to acquire it are either as a gift or to create it, and you’re very likely to receive a gift if you promote the spirit of gifting yourself. The people who attend shape the event, organize the activities, design and build the art projects, and do absolutely whatever they want. Before the event, many people organized themselves into theme camps so that they could collectively cover all of the necessities (food, water, shade), and organize activities for the rest of the event attendees. Each camp had a theme, and each camp did something for everyone else. Themes ranged from an Unbirthday Camp which gave out free drinks to anybody who wasn’t celebrating their birthday, a Karaoke camp, a Circus camp where circus workshops were held and a high swing was open for anyone to test their skills, a Sweet Potato Soup camp which served sweet potato soup to whoever wanted it, a Yoga camp with several workshops each day, a Coffee and Cookies camp which was a great hangout spot in the morning and served coffee and cookies, among some other random surprises, throughout the day, a Hammock camp which was a great spot for a midday (or nighttime) nap, a Free Love camp which held workshops like naked meditation and sex-themed activities, and many, many others. These camps functioned day and night, and there was never a single moment where nothing was happening. A schedule of activities was published, but the times were all rough estimates, as nobody actually knew what time it was at any point during the event. For the week, the concept of time seemed to disappear from existence.

The swing at the circus camp

the genital climbing wall outside the shit hole camp

           

            The art projects were also mind-blowingly awesome. The two biggest art pieces were the temple and the effigy. The temple was a giant wooden structure, built by hand over the course of several months, with two levels that people could walk on, and the effigy was a giant representation of a man and woman towering 100ft into the air. These were surrounded by dozens of other interactive art pieces, including an audiovisual display of 1m² chemical tanks filled with flashing neon lights that danced with the music, a giant jungle gym-like structure containing several layers of hammocks, a larger-than-life-sized whale with a pool inside it, a giant Chinese-style dragon, a Baobab tree sculpture which sprayed water on anybody underneath its branches, a 3-way ping pong table, a self-propelled carousel surrounded by lights which appeared to be moving images when spinning, a giant phoenix that lit up at night and was reborn from its ashes after it was burned on the last night. The temple and effigy were both burned at the end of the event, as were many of the other art pieces, as a symbol of the fully-functioning city that popped up and then disappeared back into the desert after a week, leaving the landscape exactly (well, as close as possible) how it was before.

The Temple

The Temple's last minutes

The Baobab Tree spraying water on the crowd below

The Phoenix, which was reborn from its ashes after it burned

            I came a week before the event to help set all of this up. As part of Mapatz, my job was to ensure that all of the fence was in place around the perimeter, to put up all of the main tents and shade structures, to use GPS to mark all of the streets on the Playa so that the camps would know where to set up and the artists would know where to place their projects, and to make sure that everything was up to police standards and in the proper place to create a smoothly-functioning city. Mapatz was a great team of amazing people, and though we set off to a pretty slow and inefficient (but fun) start, by the end of the week we were working together well and got everything done in time. Our slow start was compounded by the police, who didn’t understand Midburn and thought it was just a bunch of naked hippies doing drugs in the desert (for those who think this, think again, it’s soooooo much more). The police refused to sign a permit for us to use the land, which forced us to stop construction for a few days while an amazing lawyer volunteered his time to appeal this decision and take the case to a higher court, where he eventually won and the police were overruled. This is part of what made Midburn so amazing—there were so many incredibly talented people who volunteered their skills with no expectation of compensation: lawyers, doctors, construction workers, urban planners, sound and light engineers, artists, all of whom would have been paid at any other festival or event, but did it for free at Midburn out of love for the community.

Acroyoga, a common sight in the Mapatz camp

The geodesic dome inside the main tent, run by Mapatz

Art.

            Mapatz gave me an amazing sense of accomplishment. When the camps finally came to set up and the city became populated and began to function, I felt like it was truly my home. I forgot about what life was like outside of Midburn, forgot what it was like to rely on money for my well-being, and lived in the moment using the 10 principles to guide me. Both individually and collectively, people function according to the 10 principles of Burning Man. These are:

1. Radical Inclusion
Anyone may be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation in our community.

2. Gifting
Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift giving. The value of a gift is unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value.

3. Decommodification
In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience.

4. Radical Self-reliance
Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise and rely on his or her inner resources.

5. Radical Self-expression
Radical self-expression arises from the unique gifts of the individual. No one other than the individual or a collaborating group can determine its content. It is offered as a gift to others. In this spirit, the giver should respect the rights and liberties of the recipient.

6. Communal Effort
Our community values creative cooperation and collaboration. We strive to produce, promote and protect social networks, public spaces, works of art, and methods of communication that support such interaction.

7. Civic Responsibility
We value civil society. Community members who organize events should assume responsibility for public welfare and endeavor to communicate civic responsibilities to participants. They must also assume responsibility for conducting events in accordance with local, state and federal laws.

8. Leaving No Trace
Our community respects the environment. We are committed to leaving no physical trace of our activities wherever we gather. We clean up after ourselves and endeavor, whenever possible, to leave such places in a better state than when we found them.

9. Participation
Our community is committed to a radically participatory ethic. We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation. We achieve being through doing. Everyone is invited to work. Everyone is invited to play. We make the world real through actions that open the heart.

10. Immediacy
Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important touchstone of value in our culture. We seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us, participation in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers. No idea can substitute for this experience.

            

They wanted a bench, so they built one. 

            The magic of the place is that if you want anything, you have the power to make it happen. Whereas in many other facets of life you would be restricted by time, money, availability of what you want, social pressures, etc., at Midburn none of these boundaries exist. If you want to play music, you get up on stage and play music. If you don’t know how to play music, you can try, and nobody will judge you, or you can ask somebody for advice and they will do their best to help you learn. If you want to dress up as a lion, you go to the costume camp, find suitable clothing, and ask someone to paint lion whiskers and a mane on your face. If you want to dance to psytrance under a giant wooden tree that sprays water at you, you go to the Baobab tree. If you want to float in a clothing-optional pool in the desert while someone leads you in floating meditation, you go to the Leviathan whale sculpture. If you want to eat pancakes, you go to the pancake camp and ask them to make you a plate. If you want to sit in a solemn place and gather your thoughts, you can find a spot within the intricate woodwork of the temple. If you want to see colors that will blow your mind into another dimension, you ride the carousel with the trippy lights around it. If you want to have a relaxing, spiritual day, you can. Or if you want to have a crazy party night, you can also do that. Literally anything you wish for, you can find on the Playa.  This is the magic of Midburn. And this is why I will continue to return year after year.

The Dragon

Possibly the most peaceful dome in the world.

The city disappears back into the desert

Desert Adventures Part 1: Shkedi’s Camplodge and a Crazy Desert Rave

THIS BLOG HAS BEEN MOVED TO A NEW WEBSITE, www.taylorbf.com

To view this post, see  http://www.taylorbf.com/blog/desert-adventures-part-1-shkedis-camplodge-and-a-crazy-desert-rave/












           It’s been a while since my last post so I have quite a lot to catch up on. The last month and a half have been the craziest yet and my broken laptop screen got so bad that I could no longer see anything, which gave me two reasons to put off writing until now. But now, as I sit on a plane, reflecting on my last year as I head back to the US, I feel inspired to catch up on what I’ve been putting off.

            I wrote my last post just after returning from a trip to Palestine. Since then, I’ve been on a hitchhiking and desert hiking adventure near the Dead Sea, to a crazy nature party in the middle of nowhere in the desert, finished working at the hostel in Tel Aviv, camped in the desert for two weeks to set up for and then attend Midburn--Israel’s Burning Man event, got my advanced scuba diving certification in the Red Sea in Egypt, climbed up and rappelled down 100ft trees in Oxford, England, tried and failed to acquire a taste for Guinness in Ireland but had a great time doing so with two close college friends, Ryan and Kasey, and an amazing German girl, Alina, and then cancelled my plans for Lisbon and ran off to Madrid with Alina for an incredible couple of days before making my way back to the States with an overnight stop on a mid-Atlantic island on the way. So, here is the first of several posts that will cover what I did, what I learned, and how I felt throughout these crazy 6ish weeks.

Tel Aviv Beach, my home for a month

            I’ll do it in chronological order. The first adventure since my last post was Neot Hakikar, a tiny village right on the Jordanian border that is home to Shkedi’s Camplodge, one of the coolest hostels I’ve ever been to. It was pretty empty, as their high season is winter in the Dead Sea region (it gets too hot to bear during the summer at 1400 feet below sea level), but the place was amazing. The camp had several open-air huts filled with mattresses on the ground, all surrounding a big central area with a huge fire pit surrounded by couches inside a geodesic dome. Very hippie, and very good vibes.

the dome at Shkedi's Camplodge

            The staff gave me a free stay since I was working at another Israeli hostel, and I mostly hung out with them for the evening. With the stars and moon bright overhead, we decided to venture out into the desert, a crazy landscape comprised of maze-like canyons carved into a large semi-rounded mud plateau. We climbed up onto the plateau and gazed at the stars, talking about everything from politics to existentialism to extraterrestrial life. I didn’t have a watch on me, but I’d venture a guess that the time was around 4:20.

            The next morning I woke up and went back up to the plateau to explore what I couldn’t see the night before. I climbed through canyons made of crumbling mud up to the highest point, where I found a nice spot to sit, meditate, and reflect. Neot Hakikar is a magical place, a tiny village of somewhere around 100 people where everyone works together and everyone gets along.

the crazy landscape of the Arava

shameless selfie on the plateau

           

            I had to get back to Tel Aviv that evening for work and wanted to stop at the Dead Sea for a swim along the way, but wasn’t willing to pay the bus fare, so I grabbed my bag and asked the camplodge staff where to hitchhike from. The guy working told me that there is a really nice spring with a little natural pool about 3km away and he offered to drive me there and I could hitchhike from there after a quick dip. So I went to the spring, and, since nobody was around, stripped down and got in naked. It was a beautiful place, a little oasis in the desert surrounded by palm trees, and it was just me and the tadpoles.

a friend I made at the spring

Hidden spring, an oasis in the desert 

couldn't go much further past the spring though

            After a short freshwater swim, I walked down the road to an intersection where I could hitchhike to the Dead Sea. Israel is a great place to hitch rides because it has such a large hippie and traveler community. There are always people willing to pick up a hitchhiker, especially near small villages. The first vehicle to stop was already packed to the brim with Palestinian construction workers but they waved me in and somehow I crammed into the cab of a tiny pickup truck with 4 others who didn’t know a word of English. It was only about ten minutes before they turned the other direction though, so I got out and waited for my next ride at the next big intersection. It was really hot and intensely sunny that day and I had forgotten my hat in the last vehicle, so I quickly got fed up with waiting. After about ten minutes I decided to just stand in the middle of the road and walk up to cars that stopped at the stop sign and ask for a ride to the Dead Sea. If you’re ever stranded and hitchhiking, I highly recommend this method, as it is very effective. The first car I asked was a couple of old Israeli guys going to the same beach that I wanted to go to, and upon hearing my American accent when I said the one sentence that I know in Hebrew (“Sorry, I don’t speak Hebrew”), they decided that I was safe and waved me in. One of the guys in the car had lived in the US for several years so he was very excited to pick up an American.

            They took me to the beach in Ein Bokek where I unfortunately had to wear a swimsuit this time. I got in the bathtub-temperature water and immediately my legs floated out from under me thanks to the buoyancy caused by salinity ten times that of the ocean. If you swim and you’ve never been to the Dead Sea, you have to check it out. As hard as I tried, I just couldn’t push my body further underwater. With my body positioned straight upright in water deeper than my head, I floated with my shoulders completely out of the water. After 20 minutes of reading my book while floating, I felt like I was turning into a raisin and got out and rinsed off.

some light reading 

            My next stop was Jerusalem to meet my sister and a Grinnell friend for dinner, so I waited by the gate to the beach resort area and asked everyone who stopped there if I could have a ride to Jerusalem. After about ten no’s, two Palestinian guys waved me in. They were super nice guys but spoke terrible English so the whole ride they were talking to me in half-English half-Arabic. I almost could not understand a single word over the wind coming through the windows, the sound of passing cars, and the screechy Arabic music that they were playing on full blast through the staticky speakers, coupled with their thick accents and lack of basic English vocabulary. The few things I did understand included that the singer of the song playing was 16 years old and the driver really wanted to marry her, and that they really like Allah. It was difficult to ask them about religion because of the language barrier, but I think they told me that they believe Jews, Muslims, and Christians all have the same God, so Israel is all of their land and it should be shared peacefully. They went on to tell me how Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and the rest of the Arab Middle East dislike Palestine and think of Palestinians as the lowest-class Arabs. “But everyone welcome in Palestine. You Isaac, you Mohammad, you always welcome.” These guys had big hearts, their only problem was that I couldn't really understand them. 

            And then he spent ten minutes telling me about a man named Lude. I think Lude lives in the mountains and has some sort of connection to the Dead Sea and Allah, but that’s all I could understand. I’m not sure what Lude has to do with anything else we talked about, but it seemed like an interesting story nonetheless. I quickly gave up on asking “what?” when I didn’t understand something (it was hopeless), and literally think I said “yeah” and “ok” over a thousand times each by the end of the ride. Finally they dropped me off in Jerusalem exactly where I needed to go, making the past 2 hours of struggling and not understanding all worth it. Later that night I headed back to Tel Aviv for a couple days of beach and work before going back to the desert for my first experience at one of Israel's legendary psytrance nature parties.

Desert Rave

            This was one of the most insane parties I’ve ever witnessed. I got a ride with some random guys from the Facebook group three hours out into the middle of the desert to the secluded spot where the party would take place. Somebody had trucked giant speakers and tents and a food/drink stand down the sand path way out into the desert, complete with microphones for the multiple didgeridoos. Due to some trouble with the police, the DJ’s didn’t start playing until around 4:30am and continued for a straight 12 hours until 4:30pm the next day. Nobody slept, just danced. Psytrance is a really popular genre of music in Israel, and after that party I completely understand why. I never liked it too much when I listened to it on my computer, but being at a psytrance party way out in the desert was completely different. The people, the dancing, the openness, the costumes, and the crazy sounds all seemed to fit perfectly together to create the best possible energy. I learned to hula-hoop there, which was pretty exciting, and I saw a man wearing a frog suit that was so amazingly realistic that I literally thought he was a giant frog. After 12 hours of dancing with only a few breaks to go explore the colors in the monochrome desert landscape, roll around in the sand and become one with the desert, and drink about 10 liters of water, I was wiped out and ready to sleep. I found a ride back to Tel Aviv and passed out for a solid 16 hours, possibly the longest anyone has ever slept in a shitty hostel bunk bed.

A tree that provided shade in the desert, which I felt a very strong connection with

            The next week was my last week working at the hostel, and soon enough I was heading back to the desert for Midburn. I’ll spare you the reading (and myself the writing) for now though, and that’ll be in my next post.