When finally I relented, with the help of both meditation and medicine, all was open. All I had to do, I found, was say "yes" to the Now. To embrace what is, rather than what I want. This realization, like the one in the Adirondacks, came suddenly. It was Wednesday night, August 27, probably around midnight. I was walking out of Center Camp, pissed off that I didn't "meet" anyone there, and I opened up to the energy around me. Thirty thousand people, the vast majority of whom are there to celebrate life, to radiate the Divine energy that flows through each of us, to be so vibrantly alive that it almost hurt to hold it. I thought of this quote from Hafiz (translated by Daniel Ladinsky):

Once I did, I noticed what energy was really all about. I had been in my own world, consumed with a certain kind of acquisitive desire, and I had allowed myself to get bored. Caused myself to get bored. Now, open to what was going on, I felt the joy of some dancers at a drum circle, and joined them. I felt the power of the wind in a dust storm, and stood in it in the open desert. I felt the innocent, happy play of a circle of a hundred or more people absurdly dancing the Hora around the burnt ruins of a pyramid. And I felt such gratitude, to be with such weird, radical, wonderful, expressive souls.

That is what religion is about: to embrace God is to embrace the Now, and that means living deliberately, fully, and awake. Religion doesn't mean restricting the self to only some of God, it means grabbing hold of God in all forms and being wildly and passionately alive, whether in sex or study or morality or art - we know that which promotes life is good, we know it; we know. We sometimes just don't dare to live enough. At Burning Man, once I got out of my selfishness, I was with the people around me and their energy, their art and their love. Once released from my own monotonous ego-loops I could actually sense what these other people were feeling and doing. Some pain, some joy, some confusion, so much beauty and tragedy and fun and richness - I felt like I was eating from an endless buffet of infinite ingredients.

[1]       [2]       [3]       4       [5]       [next->] Image: Jay Michaelson, Burning Man 2003