Anyone here ever been to a hippie festival?
This video popped up on my Youtube sidebar recently with the title “Boom Festival”. I watched it (the thumbnail image of people having fun while half naked is always excellent clickbait) as I downed a bit of delicious homemade soup, and marveled at how awesome it seemed. People hop on their bikes and come from all over for this event of camping out, making music, dancing to music, getting massages, and all sorts of natural feel-good shiz.
There’s probably drugs involved too.
But that wasn’t spotlighted in the longer doc I watched that this is from:
It’s like that other festival – Burning Man.
I still don’t 100% know what that one’s all about – but looks like the time of your life. For BM (hmm – bad acronym – I immediately regret this decision), the style of people is generally the same – lots of free flowing, dreadlock donning, parasol toting earthy sort. As they dance happily around, they all look positively liberated – and nobody’s rocking those judgmental elevator eyes you’d see sizing you up in L.A.’s latest night club. But the main event – for which the celebration is named – happens in the form of a giant burning dude (wait – is this where the Wicker Man idea came from?)
(Oops. Wrong gif. Only Cage could make “self-immolation” a character typecast)
While we don’t get to see Nicolas Cage ignite at Burning Man, it does look pretty exciting to see this giant structure go up Roman Candle blaze style and then topple like flaming Jenga blocks (That might just be my inner pyro, though). When asked about the purpose of the “burning man”, one of the attendees said it’s supposed to be the death of the “old self”.
I like that – burning away your own bad habits and starting anew with cleared perception
That’s far better, in my opinion, than asking some external entity to change the world to meet your selfish needs. I can relate to this because I’d def need to do some old-self burning to even enjoy this festival that looks like a ridiculously fun weeklong party of mingling and enjoying life. Sure, my “fantasy me” version of myself says I could 100% enjoy this thing and life’s perfect and we all hold hands. But when I inject reality-me into it, reality me – heading there right now, on a plane with all I’ll have in a satchel – would wonder: will there be running water? Where can I take a hot shower? How bad will it smell? Will my contacts stay clean? Do they have fresh fruit? Does my dog miss me? What if my electric razor runs out of batteries?
In the end, it’s like going on vacation or moving with the hope it’ll solve problems you made with your own brain. Hangups follow you until you take ’em off the rack. Why waste all that money and energy if you’re gonna be fantasizing about creature comforts you don’t need but really, really want right right now?
I think there has to be at least a bit of internal burning-man’ing before people like me can enjoy the external sort.
But, then again, when have I ever done the right thing?
Wait – what? All the tickets are sold out and you won’t let me in?
Whatever happened to free love and a planet sans borders?
Assholes.