[Sdpg] [starhawk] Burning Man
Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network
lakinroe at silcom.com
Sat Aug 25 07:30:17 PDT 2007
Hi friendsit’s been a while since I’ve
writtenbut here’s what I’ve been up to. Follow
our adventures at http://www.myspace.com/earthactivisttraining.
Starhawk at Burning Man: Part One
I didn’t really intend to get this involved in
Burning Man. I’ve never beenalthough of course
for years now I’ve heard friends who go regularly
rave about it. I’ve been curiousas someone who
has spent my life creating ritual and advocating
that Western culture needs satunalias and
carnivals and moments of public ecstasy and
pageantry, I of course want to see this
phenomenon which began as a group of friends
burning a small effigy on the beach, and has now
grown into a weeklong encampment of forty
thousand or more artists and their posses out in
the blazing, empty Nevada desert. Hey, our
Reclaiming community of Pagans has been burning
an effigy on the beach for decades on the Summer
Solstice, and it remains a joyful but
comparatively sedate religious ceremony for a
couple of hundred people. What are they doing
that we’re not? (Well, there’s drugs, for one
)
The scale, the madness, the accounts of
incredible ecstatic moments and intense life
transformation have intrigued me for years. But
I don’t do desert. That isI can be persuaded to
go to some blazing hot climate for some
overwhelming world-saving causeprotesting nukes
at the Nevada Test Site for example, or chasing
tanks in Jenin. But for a good time, give me an
ocean, or a cool trail in the mountains, or a
pleasant, green, intermittently rainy day in
Ireland. Camping out in overwhelming heat,
punishing cold, with blowing alkaline dust and
the occasional eighty mile an hour windstorm is
not the terrain I’d choose for either fun or
spiritual transformation. Yeah, prophets have
always gone to the desert for visionsbut look at
what they came up with: angry gods, punishing
deities, the concept of hell. Case in point.
This year, however, the theme the Burning Man
organizers put out was sustainability, and The
Green Man. The Green Man is an ancient Pagan
figurea face surrounded by leafy branches and
vegetation mostly now found in old churches,
remnants inserted by subversive stonecutters of
an earlier, nature-based faith. So a number of
my Pagan and permaculture friends started
murmuring that maybe this year we should go.
Since we were thinking of going, and since I
spend a good portion of my life now teaching
techniques of sustainability and ecological
design, I though I should do
something. Maybe
this was the moment to build the portable solar
composting toilet trailer of my dreams?
Friends of friends put me in touch with the team
that is organizing the Sustainability Pavilion,
and I decided we should submit a proposal from
Earth Activist Training, our organization which
offers permaculture design courses with a
grounding in earth-based spirituality and a focus on activism and organizing.
I seduced myself into the project with those
dangerous phrases that have gotten me into so
much trouble throughout my life: “It won’t take
long,” and “It’ll be easy.” After all, you can
always do a great-looking permaculture
installation with a truckload of straw bales, a
bunch of live plants, and some mulch. No
problem. Then I talked to my housemates, the
veteran Burners. No live plantsthey won’t stand
up to searing, eighty mile an hour winds. No
straw balesthey shed and the Burning Man folks
have become fanatics about picking up every stray
bit of MOOPMatter Out of Placethat might
possibly contaminate the baking, lifeless old
lake bed where the burn takes place.
How do you demonstrate sustainability in an
inherently unsustainable environment?
Over the years, I’ve created a lot of graphics
about permaculture, beginning with our project in
Cancun in 2003, when we built a handwashing
station and graywater system for the campesino
encampment to protest the meeting of the WTO. We
needed something to identify and explain the
thingand my friend Delight and I printed up,
cut, pasted and labeled a whole lot of pictures,
which speak louder than words, especially when
people speak different languages and when many of
them don’t read. I did something similar for the
G8 encampment in Scotland in 2005. They all
looked a bit like someone’s 7th grade science project, but they did the trick.
Later that summer, I redid the collages on
Photoshop and printed them up with graphics that
brought them up into the 21st century. We took
them down to New Orleans after Katrina and used
them to introduce concepts of permaculture and
sustainability into the relief work we were doing there.
So, my second thought was just to set up the graphics on a nice piece of board.
My veteran Burner housemates were not encouraging.
“People don’t want to learn about permaculture at
Burning Man,” they said. “They want to see
art. They want to take drugs and have
sex.” And, forebodingly, “Whatever you do, don’t be lame!”
The thought of subjecting myself to the punishing
desert winds only to achieve lameness was quite
an awful one. Over the next few weeks, I
discussed the problem, we had a group in one of
our courses do a design for Burning Man, and I
thought long and hard about the
problem. Permaculture is not just about plants
and strawit’s about designing systems that can
meet human needs while regenerating and healing
the natural environment. It works with a set of
ethics and principles that can be applied to any
situationfrom designing a forest garden to
planning a political campaign. Sowhat could we
create that would embody the principles without
live plants or beds of attractive wood chip mulch?
One of the principles is “Use onsite resources.”
Scratch thatthere aren’t any, not even sand or
clay, just alkaline dust. Another is, “Use
biological resources.” Apart from people, and
their various excretions, there aren’t any of those.
“Waste is a resource”, however, seemed to be a
useful idea. What waste did I have available
that we might use? I thought about the old PVC
water line lying out in the hills on our land in
western Sonoma County. There was lots of
thatand even more if I could cull the scrap of
my neighbors. Perhaps we could build something
out of that, which would embody some of nature’s
patternsanother core aspect of
permaculture. The meander pattern is a pattern
of digestion and aborption, so if we wanted
people to digest information, we could create a
labyrinthine structure they could wander
through. It would have lots of edgeanother
principle. The edge where two systems meet
creates a third system, often more diverse and
creative than either of the others.
So, I started drawing lines on paper, and putting
words on paper, two things that are easy for me
to do. If the structure was going to be a
labyrinth, it would have a sacred aspect, and
could be a journey, perhaps from the fear and
grief and despair we feel about the state of the
earth, through connection with the elements, the
primal patterns of nature, and into a gallery of visions and solutions.
I submitted the proposal, and much to my
surprise, it was accepted. At first I felt
elated. I felt like I’d passed some Ultimate
Coolness Test, which was a relief because, while
I was certainly cool back in the sixties, it had
been a while. Then I felt that terrible, sinking
feeling in the pit of my stomach, realizing that
now I actually had to do the thing.
So, I’ve been doing itworking on the graphics
and the pictures, organizing our setup crew, and
trying a mockup of the structure. I’ve been
sucked deep into the trancelike underworld of
computer graphics, where hours, days, a lifetime
can go by while you tranfer images or parts of
images back and forth in Photoshop with the magic
wand. I could sit and play with that for a long
timethose little dancing electrons stimulating
my brain into a zenlike state of calm.
It’s long been my experience with creative
projects of all kinds that they mostly feel
disastrous and out of control while you are
immersed in them. If you’re lucky, somewhere on
the third or fifth or twentieth draft or the
fourth day of fitting parts together, something
settles into place and it all works. If you’re
not lucky, it just stays a disaster.
That’s just what happened with the structure. I
had in mind something modest, like the Hagia
Sophia in sunburned PVC, a series of escalating
domes. Problem ispvc doesn’t bend well,
especially when its old and brittle. Jamie and I
spent a morning lashing together half-domes of
branches, which were flimsy and looked pretty
silly. Given an extra month or two, I could
probably have woven them into baskets. But
luckily, during our lunch break we discovered a
stash of old black irrigation pipe, which bends
beautifully. Suddenly we had all the domes and
rings we neededand it looks about as good as
something made of old pipe can look.
The pictures, if I say so myself, look
great. Now I’ getting really excited to see what
it looks like when it all comes together.
More later
now I’ve got a plane to catch to go teach in the woods for a week.
Part Two: Friday August 24
It’s after midnight. This is about the fifth or
sixth night in a row I’ll be getting to bed
around 1 or 2AM and getting up early. We meant to
leave for the playa this eveningdecided instead
to go early in the morning. I’d thought I’d have
a more relaxed evening at home to finish packing
and write more of a bloginstead I spent it in a
nightmare of frustration trying to get the last
little bits printed up. In the end, after
closing down two copy shops, I still have to stop
at a Kinkos in Reno tomorrow.
But all the rest is done. All the big graphics
are printed. All the signs are made. The whole
structure has been labeled, bundled, and packed
up in the truck and the bus. Now, if we only all
get there and can figure out how to put it all
back up, we’ll have an installation.
I’ve instructed all my friends that the next time
I get an idea, they are all to say in a firm tone
of voice, “Down, Starhawk! Remember Burning Man!”
Goodnight!
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Starhawk is a lifelong activist in peace and
global justice movements, a leader in the
feminist and earth-based spirituality movements,
author or coauthor of ten books, including The
Spiral Dance, The Fifth Sacred Thing, Webs of
Power: Notes from the Global Uprising, and her latest, The Earth Path.
Starhawk's website is www.starhawk.org, and more
of her writings and information on her schedule
and activities can be found there.
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