Julia Dvorin                                          (Solipsistic Storyteller)

Yes, it’s that time of year again. I really like having a day specifically to focus on the things I am thankful for in my life. I try to bring a general sense of gratitude to every day, and with my new appreciation of appreciation as a tool for social change, I also try to verbalize the appreciation of the things or the people I am thankful for to their source as often as I can. But Thanksgiving (and the days around it, which inherit many of its holiday characteristics) is a day to really focus on feeling that thankfulness all day and in as many ways as possible.

For me, spending time with family and friends on Thanksgiving  is a huge part of what I am thankful for in my life. I actually like my family, and generally enjoy everyone’s company. Unlike a lot of other people (who have many more negative emotions associated with their families and family gatherings), I look forward to family rituals and events. I’m excited and thankful that I get to go over to my parents’ house and help cook (and eat!) the traditional Thanksgiving foods. I am thankful that we always make such delicious food, and that we so much enjoy spending time together making and eating it. I love the ritual of it, and that it’s something I get to enjoy over and over, not just once.

Watching my sister-in-law wrangle her two kids on Thanksgiving Day also reminded me that I’m incredibly grateful for how far I’ve come in my own parenting journey, and how much autonomy over my own time and body I’ve finally gotten back. It was not that long ago that I was chasing toddlers, dealing with baby schedules and kid food and having to focus on keeping kids entertained, all the while yearning to have a non-fractured conversation with the people I loved. Now that I can finally relax and not have to pay attention every moment to what my kids are doing or needing, I find myself much, much happier. So I am thankful, oh yes I am thankful.

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Once we bid farewell to the sunrise and the playa, we came down from the DJ booth and dragged ourselves back to camp and to the flurry of final camp breakdown and packing the car. I was exhausted by the time I finished packing everything back up again, but Isis really wanted to leave by 8am Sunday morning to beat the crazy exodus traffic. So we powered through, bolstered by a cool random hot air balloon sighting right above our camp and a final stop at Center Camp for coffee for Isis. Then we began the slow crawl out through Black Rock City and the dead zone between BRC and the highway.

We got out without too much trouble (Isis had been right), and stopped in the closest town (Gerlach) to get a preliminary carwash. As we headed back towards highway 80 and Reno, the euphoria of the previous night and the adrenaline of packing and leaving ebbed away and I started falling asleep at the wheel—so we pulled over in one of the other small towns en route and found a shady place to park and nap for a little bit. We slept for maybe an hour, and then roused ourselves to get back on the road.

The rest of the trip home was long and tiring but relatively uneventful. We stopped in Truckee for gas and lunch (we had sushi in an air conditioned mall restaurant, which was a bizarre contrast to what we'd just been living), and I think a couple of other stops to pee and stretch, and eventually made it back home around 8 o’clock at night. I unloaded Isis’ stuff for her at her house, and then quickly unloaded most of my stuff into a pile to deal with in the morning. The boys and Josh were away at a gaming con until the following day, so I had a lovely, quiet and relatively clean house all to myself, which was great. I took a long hot bubble bath (which I dozed off in briefly), then I finally got to go to bed in nice clean sheets in my very own comfy bed and even though I missed being at Burning Man, that made it a glorious homecoming.

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Saturday was really our last day at Burning Man, since we were going to try to leave really early on Sunday morning, so there was lots to choose from to do. I chose to go off on a bike ride on my own in the relatively cool morning hours, leaving Isis to go do her own thing for a while. I biked around the playa for a while and saw some more art, but found myself really drawn back to the Temple, so I biked over there. (Side note: It was at this point I decided to name my bike “Shifty”, since it had the temperamental habit of randomly shifting into a new gear without provocation. But since everything there was so flat, I didn’t really mind, and in fact found it kind of entertaining.) I found a bench on one of the walkways connecting the main temple to one of the smaller outbuildings and sat there for a while, hanging out and being quiet with myself, trying to process some of the things that had come up over the last few days. I wrote in my journal, and eventually on the Temple itself. This time I wrote on the Temple “WE ARE ALL CONNECTED” along with a little drawing, and “NO ONE CAN MAKE ME FEEL INFERIOR WITHOUT MY CONSENT...AND I DO NOT CONSENT”. I wanted those concepts to burn up and send opposite messages to the universe—one was a wish for something that would come into being (the communal realization that we are all connected) and one was a wish for release (from the hold that others’ expectations have had over me). I also tucked one of my little freak flag cards into a crack in the wall, so that it would come into being in a big and hot and flame-tastic kind of way.

After that I came back to camp and shifted into work mode—we broke down and packed up as much of our camp as we could, and organized things for a quick getaway in the morning (put things in the car, moved our car, made sure the way was clear, etc.) That took most of the afternoon, though of course we took chillout breaks. Then we had dinner and got dressed in our final costumes (Isis was dressed as Isis with beautiful gold wings, and I was the Silver Supernova with my fabulous silver cape and silver sequin-and-fringe skirt). Then we headed out to go see the Man burn—the one big event that the whole city was built around, and that (most) everyone was excited about.

As we headed to the Man, I looked around and saw a really cool effect—practically the whole city was heading towards the Man, and since everyone was lit up in some way (both pedestrians and bikes, in addition to the art cars of course) there was this interesting kind of arterial pulsing effect, where from all sides rushes of light and movement were moving together, converging on the same point. There was a palpable feeling of excitement and anticipation but generally everyone seemed pretty peaceful and calm about the whole thing. Isis and I found a spot to spread out a blanket and sit down to watch, and though we chatted a bit with our neighbors, we mostly spent the pre-burn time appreciating each other (I feel like we have a super close and supportive bond now that we never would have had if it weren’t for Burning Man) and appreciating the transformational week we’d had so far, and talking about what we wanted to release and burn away (fear, anxiety, safety, smallness, expectations, and other stuff I don’t remember) along with the Man.

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