Best of 2009: The challenge of letting go

(Editor’s Note: Inspired by my friends Fatemeh, Jen and Tea, I’m going to spend some of the remaining year participating in Gwen Bell’s Best of 2009 Challenge. These won’t all be about gardening and food, but, well, neither am I. I appreciate your patience as you indulge my participation, and I hope you’ll share your best experiences of the year in the comments, as well.)

I am a woman who goes after experiences, who collects them like small, smooth stones and keeps them in a drawer for later. They become stories, these experiences, and I love them for it.

And that is why, when my friend Fatemeh returned from Burning Man in 2008 and said, you, you need to go out there, I got on board with the idea. It’ll be an experience, I thought. Something to be collected, something to write about later.

But as summer raced forward, I felt completely over my head. I have had some really stupid and awful camping experiences. I really love showers. I would rather slice off small bits of skin than use a portapottie on a regular basis. I had no idea how I would actually handle the isolation of the desert. I feared what I instinctively knew was coming: The desert, and Burning Man, had all the potential to strip away layers of things I’d been carrying around, things that had been holding me back.

I kept telling myself I only had to go once. I only had to survive six days. And, after all, we were taking my car, so if things got really bad, I could just get in said car and point it out of Black Rock City.

I borrowed a tent. I read all the forum posts that suggested actually setting up the tent before arriving in a desert environment. I ignored these recommendations. And that’s how, on a windy night lit only by our headlamps, it came to pass that Fatemeh and I were fighting with our tent poles and trying to figure out which flap went where. Giving up was not an option–the car was so packed full of gear we couldn’t have slept in there if we’d wanted to. We had early entry passes, so those inhabiting the mostly empty city were also trying to set up their camps in the dark and dust.

It took us more time than I’ll admit here, but we got both our tents upright and staked down without getting into any sort of fight. (If I had been Fatemeh, saddled with an imbecile who knows nothing about camping, I might not have been so patient, but she did not kill me.) We popped a bottle of DVX and passed it back and forth, swigging sparkling wine and toasting our arrival on the Playa.

We packed the week with outsized art, and fire shooting up in the air, and dancing, and riding bikes at high rates of speed across the dark desert, and meeting new people, and connecting with friends, and, around every turn, surprising ourselves. Or maybe I should just speak for me. I spent the week, most definitely, surprising myself.

As it turned out, I was the one who begged Fatemeh to let us stay one more day. It took me the full week to let go what had held me back, one handful of dust at a time. And, on the final afternoon, I stood out in the open playa in a duststorm, my arms wrapped around someone I hadn’t even known three days before, and realized I had achieved what I had feared most. The layers were gone. My hands were empty. And I felt better than I had in years.