Greetings Earth Activists!
We hope the winter finds you in warmth, good health and good spirits.
Up and coming there are several opportunities to join us in learning
about Permaculture and activism.
************
UPCOMING PERMACULTURE DESIGN COURSES:

East Coast EAT
WHEN:  June 21-July 5, 2009
WHERE:  Unity, Maine
Taught by Starhawk and Charles Williams
Registration open now!
Two weeks that can change your life and help you change the world!
A permaculture design certificate course with a grounding in
earth-based spirituality, and a focus on organizing, activism, and
social permaculture as well as urban and rural land-based systems.
Learn how to heal soil and cleanse water, how to design human systems
that mimic natural systems, using a minimum of energy and resources
and creating real abundance and social justice. Explore the strategies
and organizing tools we need to make our visions real, and the daily
practice, magic and rituals that can sustain our spirits.
Participatory, hands-on teaching with lots of ritual, games, projects,
songs, and laughs along with an intensive curriculum in ecological
design.
Cost: $1400-$1800 sliding scale, includes all food and dorm
accommodations or camping. $100 surcharge for a private room. Work
trade and scholarships possible, apply now!
**********************************
Other Starhawk/EAT Events:
 
Wild Women Weekend
WHEN: Check back to Starhawk's website calendar for time and details.
WHERE: Guerneville, California
talk and spiral dance: "Women and the Earth: Creating the Change"
http://www.russianriverwomensweekend.org/

"Summer Garden in the City: Soil and Water Strategies"
WHEN: Sunday, May 24  10:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
WHERE:  San Francisco
workshop
Taught by Starhawk and Kevin Bayuk
How can we grow food in and near our cities? How can we make sure
everyone
in our cities has access to good, healthy, nutritious and delicious
food?
Permaculture is a system of ecological design that teaches us how to
meet
human needs while regenerating the environment around us. Gardening is
especially challenging in urban sites-dealing with shade, potential
contamination in the soil, and possible water rationing. This one-day
workshop introduces us to permaculture strategies for urban gardening,
including bioremediation- healing soil and water through natural
means,
growing our own fertility, going vertical, and harvesting and saving
water.
Bring lunch to share.
Location: San Francisco location, directions given to registered
students.
Cost: sliding scale $40-$100
To register contact:
Earth Activist Training, email:  or call
800-381-7940

Mud, Magic and Manifestation:  A Natural Building Weekend for Women
WHEN: Friday May 29--Sunday May 31
WHERE: Cazadero, Northern California
With Starhawk and Emily Wacker
Get down, get dirty and get covered in mud in the beautiful Cazadero
Hills, for a magical weekend learning the ancient building skills of
our ancestors.   We will discuss theory of Natural Building and get
hands-on experience working with several different techniques
including: cob, wattle & daub, light-straw-clay, and finish plasters.
In the circle of sisterhood,we will weave together ritual and magic
that will empower each of us to sculpt our dreams into reality and
create opportunities in our changing world.
Women – let’s join hands and hearts with the Earth, where we can
learn, laugh, and create magic together!  Come and feel the strength
of the web we weave together!
Cost:  Sliding scale $250-$400 includes incredible food and dormitory
lodging.
Some work trade available.
We begin with dinner Friday evening and end Sunday at 5 pm.
(Anyone who personally identifies as a woman is included in this
guild)
To register, contact:
info@livingmandala.com
707-634-1461
Annual Harmony Festival
WHEN:  Sunday, June 14
WHERE:  Santa Rosa, California
festival
Starhawk will speak, teach a short workshop, and chat and sign books,
at the
31st Annual Harmony Festival (full festival is June 12-14). Topics to
include re-localization and community resilience.
Location: Sonoma County Fairgrounds, Hwy 12
Cost: included with fair admission
For more information: www.harmonyfestival .com
 
Please see listing below for details. New events are added all the
time, go
to www.starhawk. org/schedule  for
updates.
And check out our website for more information!

So, the truck is unloaded, the buckets of compost distributed to chickens, worms and compost pile, the 100 gallons of graywater has nourished the fig and apple trees, and after several marathon days of packing, unpacking, loading, unloading, and long, long, drives, I'm on to the next adventure.

Was it worth it? I don't know. Had I known our installation would only be up for a day and a few scattered hours here and there, I would never have spent all the spare moments of my time for a month and half and thousands of dollars on it. We do still have the big graphics and could use them again, although they are dusty and some have corners ripped off from the wind. We also have the graphic files, and will undoubtedly do something with them, somewhere, sometime. Our display got lots of positive reactions when it was up, and it was a great pleasure to sit inside it for one day at least, talking to people and answering questions. We made some great connections with other permaculture people. But it has left me exhausted, and left Earth Activist Training financially strapped. I'm not yet sure if I'd do it, or something like it, again. Remember Burning Man! Is still our watchword of caution.

But Burning Man itself was amazing, and I'm glad I went. It's left me inspired, under the exhaustion, and asking new questions. Why can't our permanent cities be inspiring, magical, creative places? ? Let's have a garden of earthly delights in Golden Gate Park, with bowers for lovemaking. Let's have magical, sculptural windmills providing power. Why don't we ban cars from Market Street in San Francisco, make it a promenade with over-the-top sculptures that people can climb into and play with? Why don't we have giant swings on the Embarcadero, and Thunderdomes, and street cafes and stages and all night parties going on? Why don't we hold a contest and convert all our busses and streetcars into giant flying pigs and pirate ships and dragons with dance floors—that would get people riding public transportation! Why at the very least can't BART run all night? Why do we limit our imagination of what fun can be and what art can be and what a city can be?

There's a move afoot, too, for another festival, a counterpoint: Watering Woman, where instead of leaving no trace, we would find a piece of degraded land and design the encampment to heal it with our compost, our presence, our creativity and even the fertility of our wastes. That sounds like a fun time. Stay tuned…
Starhawk

by Starhawk

There were two great frustrations in my week at Burning Man—and the first was that I was never able to get online and post anything to this blog. I wrote one post, then discovered I couldn't send it. Somehow that discouraged me from writing more. But now I'm home, and will try to capture some of the thoughts and memories while they are fresh. I will even upload some photos although that might take a day or two. I'll get to it after I unpack the compost buckets and empty a hundred gallons of graywater out of the truck.. Any teenagers out there want to send me instructions on how to upload photos and make them big?

The greatest frustration, however, was that in the aftermath of the premature burning of the Man on Monday night, the Green Pavilion was closed almost all week—at least, the side of it that our display was in. Other displays managed to move to the other side, but ours was not too moveable as it took us about ten hours to set it up. So…after a mammoth amount of work at a killer pace for weeks and weeks, our installation was only visible for one full day and a couple of other stretches of a few hours here and there. I know there's a cosmic lesson in this somewhere, but I'm damned if I know what it is. Well, I have two theories:

A. Evil forces are at work thwarting all my best intentions.
B. The Goddess has a very warped sense of humor.

All I know is that I worked too hard on this thing. People have sometimes accused me of being a workaholic. I of course don't agree with that assessment at all, but if I were, I would be like the kind of alcoholic that just drinks steadily and quietly from daybreak until bedtime, holds her liquor well, and doesn't show any visible signs of her addiction. I'm not generally a binge worker. I don't pull all-nighters and I can stop any time, really I can. But this project put me over the top. However, I tried to maintain my calm, sweet, understanding personality, not to mention my reputation as Spiritual Leader, and only got hysterical one time with the Rangers, and spent only one afternoon in tears. I would have felt a lot better if I could have blamed the Burning Man organizers and maybe flat out screamed at someone—but truly they were doing all they could to cope. The Man is a forty foot tall structure mounted on top of a pyramid of logs that must be two or three stories high—really they are huge tree trunks, all hung with wires and surrounded by a sculptural tent structure—all of which had to be checked for structural soundness after the fire. Then, some long suffering carpenters who had already worked for weeks to build the man had to rebuild him, just when they thought they were done and able to party.

There is some inherent quality about Burning Man anyway that is about insane amounts of work for ephemeral moments. Come to think of it, there's some inherent quality about art, writing, or any form of creativity that involves discarding insane amounts of work. I've spent months writing drafts of books that I later tossed out, done endless revisions of things, buried entire novels under the bed never to see the light of day—all of which were projects that felt urgent and timely and important while I was in the midst of them. It must be an aspect of what I call Writers' Syndrome or Artists' Syndrome—the conviction that what you are doing is absolutely the most world shaking thing ever done, that it alone will save the world, feed the poor, heal the sick and win you fame, fortune and endless sexual partners, and that it must be done now, now, now! Alternating with the conviction that everything you've ever done is a hopeless waste of biological resources and you'd best just return your carbon to the Big Cycle and shut up. I suppose without the driving force of the Syndrome, not much writing or art would get done, because really there is so much else to do in life that is more pleasurable than the actual work of creativity.

Burning Man takes the Syndrome and ramps it up to superhuman proportions. Frustrations aside, I absolutely loved it. (Well, I hated the music. I'm just not a techo fan. Why can't we have good music, like in the old days? Gracie Slick wailing, "One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small…" wafting over the playa…now that would be inspiring instead of the constant boom thumpa thumpa loud enough to shift tectonic plates.)

Once I saw the playa, I understood why they picked such an unlikely, inhospitable environment. The dried up, alkaline lakebed is wide, utterly flat, and featureless. Ringed by low mountains, its cracked, gray skin is the perfect blank canvas, the white wall that shows off the work of art. In the harsh, desert light and the vast space, perspective shifts and form is illuminated. When I was an art student back in the pre-Cambrian era, my teachers told us that painting was about color, space and light. In the desert, space and light abound. In the openness of the physical space, you feel free. You can ride a bike out onto the hard surface of the playa in any direction, unbound by roads or traffic sighs. The space calls forth giant efforts—nothing small can make an impact. Huge sculptures sit on the norizen, diminished by distance to toy silhouettes. Anything small or indistinct disappears.

The vastness and flatness allows for a classic, almost archetypal city plan, with no bumps or hills or watercourses to interrupt the perfection of its geometry. Picture a circle, with the Man at center above his sculptured mountain of tents and the Green Pavilion at his base. At six o'clock is Center Camp, a smaller circle of services like Playa Info and Medical and the Artery where artists register, itself centered on the Café, a ringed shade structure around an open heart, like the village structures of the Yanomamo. The café is entered through a monumental arched gate made of welded bicycles, some with wheels that spin in the air.

At twelve o'clock stands the Temple, a counterpoint to the Man. This year the Temple is an exquisite structure of Chinese architecture. Five perfect cubes, each easily twenty feet tall, are arranged in a cross with the fifth, the center, serving as the base for two more that rise high above. They are decorated with lattice work and perfect, circular archways and openings, with an altar in the center. The detail is unbelievable, and it must take someone weeks or months to build. Were it made of something other than light scrap wood, it could sit in Golden Gate Park and become a beloved monument and pilgrimage point. Here on the playa, people come and write messages on the woodwork, poems, memories, goodbye's to loved ones they have lost. They place pictures and gifts on the altar. On Sunday night, the whole beautiful, exquisite thing is burned. I thought about cultures that burn offerings to the Gods, or burn the regalia of the dead, or Tibetan monks who labor months on a sand painting only to brush it away in the end. Mostly when we make art we're devoted to permanence or the illusion of permanence. To create such a mammoth, lovely thing only to destroy it makes us question all of that. Is it a waste? If it exists for a moment, for a few thousand people to see and enjoy for a few days, has it served its purpose? If it existed forever, would we grow jaded and bored with it? In a world where people are homeless, can we justify expending such time and resources to build something so beautiful and then burn it down?

I'm thinking about all these questions, and also thinking that art fulfills its purpose when it makes us ask such questions. One of the reasons I became a writer instead of an artist was that I never could quite figure out what art was for in these times. (Well, okay, there was also the factor that I wasn't very good at it.) Mostly throughout history art has been about faith and belief. In the nineteenth century, the great revolutions of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists were about challenging the way the culture sees. In the Sixties, pop art made us look again at images from popular culture. But in the 21st century, when we are bombarded with images and challenges and revolutionary new effervescent sodas, how does anything cut through all that, and why try?

The streets of the city curve around the bottom of the clock, from about 2 o'clock to 10 o'clock, in about ten rows named alphabetically. From any point on the Esplanade and from every radial cross street, you can see the Man, and it's easy to get from one point to another, either following the streets or heading out directly across the playa. The layout was so formal, so classic with its long arcades and sight lines, that it played beautifully against the madness and chaos of everything happening in it, creating a dialectic of order and disorder, calm and disturbance, stillness and motion. I've always loved cities, and I've spent a long time imagining cities and, writing The Fifth Sacred Thing, envisioning San Francisco transformed. The City is a powerful archetype—of both order and perfection: the Celestial City, the Four Gated City—and possibility, freedom and hope. The Emerald City of Oz, the bright lights of Broadway, the moveable feast of Paris, the place where a serf could escape bondage, where you might find fame and fortune and love, or at least, hot sex, where you might meet amazing, liberated, exciting, sexy people.

The inside of the clock face was the open playa, a perfect stage for art.And the art was fabulous—witty, beautiful, moving. Here's a few pieces I especially like:

A giant lotus made of metal, it's petals lacy with cutouts, big enough so that the petals form lovers' bowers.

A double cone of fluorescent tubes criss crossed into webs. You crawl under and up to lie on a platform. When someone spins the outer dome, participants lying inside can look up and the lines of tubing and lights make patterns that create the ilusion that you are spinning around.

A Celtic Goddess of fire surrounded by sculpted metal trees holding bowls of flame.

The tree sculptures that surrounded the pavilion: a tree of bones, a tree of bottle caps, a Christmas tree whose ornaments were tin cans cut into flowers.

The art cars—decorated in all kinds of fantastic ways. A flying pig, a giant birthday cake, pirate ships, a Chinese junk, a Goddess with feathered headdress, a dragon; a giant, old fashioned bicycle, some huge, with sound systems and dance floors, some small, like the golf cart transformed into a fairy glen of flowers. They cruised the playa and the streets, and in the dark, seemed to take on personalities of their own, making you feel like you'd fallen into an animated cartoon full of prowling, mythical beasts.

And the ultimate—a group of nine monumental figures of cast metal, some must have been twenty or thirty feet tall, praying to an oil derrick the size of a ten story building. When I describe it, it sounds like a political cliché, but the actual impact was overwhelmingly powerful. Each of the figures was in a different attitude of worship—standing wit upraised arms, crouching, kneeling…and they were so powerful, expressing all the beauty and fervor of belief. At night, they held belching, roaring fire: one had his hands alight, another her heart, another had small fires in each of her charkas. You could climb the tower to look at them from above, and it will be my everlasting regret that I never quite got the chance to do so. On Saturday, after they burned the Man, they burned the oil derrick, with a display of fireworks and an explosion that shook the playa and rumbled up in a cloud of smoke and flame.

And there were all kinds of strange and wonderful things to do. In our magical teachings, we speak of Younger Self—the part of us that responds to emotions, color, music, images, all the nonverbal cues. Younger Self had plenty of room to come out and play. You could swing on giant swings so large that you felt like you were five years old again, or ride on the art cars around the playa. One small dome had a machine that made hydrogen bubbles. As they rose up into the air, you could try and pop them by shooting flames from sculpted flame-throwers. If you succeeded, they burst into a sheet of light. It was amazingly satisfying, in somewhat the same way as popping bubble wrap, but more so.

You could go to the slut garden and transform yourself, trading in old clothes for sexy new ones. If your desires ran that way, there were domes where you could go and have sex day or night in puppy piles of accepting flesh. Or you could go hear talks on new forms of energy and climate change strategies. (I have to admit, I did the latter.)

I never did find the site where they dressed you in a fire-proof outfit and made you dance until you missed a beat, whereupon they shot fire at your face. But I did find the Thunder Dome—a geodesic dome where a Goth priestess with hair in hundreds of braids wearing a shirt ripped into hundreds of ribbons presided over a surreal wrestling match. Opponents were strapped into harnesses suspended on bungie cords. Each were then pulled back to the edge of the dome by two burly men in kilts with arms upraised in stylized fists. The priestess waved a giant wand tipped with black fur, and let it fall, and the opponents were released, to snap forward, collide with each other, and proceed to wrestle and whack each other with foam clubs. It was a mad, surreal scene in the darkness, with all the trappings of violence but no one actually getting hurt. The wrestlers especially seemed to be having a hecka good time. Having recently been through a period of much processing of peoples' personal conflicts, I long for a Thunder Dome in daily life. Imagine how that would help our consensus processes: "Mudflat and Pondweed can't agree—go work it out in the Thunder Dome!"

There was a dark side to playa life. One morning the inhabitants of Comfort and Joy, the pleasure dome, woke up to find an unknown man had hung himself in the night. No one knew his name, or where he had come from, or why he took his life. I thought about how many times, in rituals over the years, we had led people in trance into the Temple of Love and Desire, and how that was always an excruciatingly painful ritual for so many people that we found ourselves constructing an astral Pavilion of Sexual Healing before the temple, where you could choose to stay. Maybe Comfort and Joy was too much for someone with deep, deep wounds. Sinnerjee, one of our fairy brother Witches, had been sleeping there and went back to do some priestessing, and I heard that other spiritual traditions also offered prayers and healing.

There was a lot of erotic energy that pervaded the city. It was in every way a very Pagan place. Our own camp was full of young women who spent a lot of time visiting the Slut Garden, preening themselves and dressing themselves and their boyfriends up in outfits that would shame a Times Square hooker. It struck me that they felt perfectly safe running around the city with butt cracks showing and breasts prominently displayed—and not one of them reported ever being sexually harassed or threatened in any way. There were signs posted in the porta-potties saying basically, "We like sex but ask first, and no means no." I remember back in the lower Ordovician when I was a teenage hippie how I loved dressing in scandalously short skirts, dancing wildly and flaunting my own sexual appeal. Later, in the feminist era, there was an analysis that this was oppressive to women—that we were forced into being Free Sex Toys for the hippie boys. But that never reflected my own experience. I felt powerful and free and in charge of my own sexuality, and perfectly entitled to say either 'no' or 'yes'. I saw that spirit in these young women, who seemed to be enjoying themselves throroughly and glorying in their own bodies—with a kind of obliviousness to their effect on men. In truth, when everyone is wearing pasties and g-strings, they no longer signify sexual availablilty. And when sex is so available, day or night at the pleasure dome, maybe it loses its charge of scarcity and urgency.

In my maturity, however, I confined myself to wearing pants with actual pockets and belt loops I could clip things to, like a cup and a dust mask and goggles, and really tasteful lingerie, which never goes out of style.

The Burning of the Man:

As someone who has spent so much of my life creating rituals, I was especially interested in the Burning of the Man. For two or three decades, Reclaiming, the group I work with, has been burning a man on the beach at summer solstice. For us, it is a powerful and poignant ritual, celebrated at the moment the sun reaches its peak and begins to decline. We construct a figure of sticks and wood, ritually deck him with flowers, messages, prayers and ribbons, and set him on fire. The Man represents the Sun, now moving from the world of light and growth into the world of dark and dream. The beauty of the flowers, the poignancy of their destruction in fire, reminds us of the fleetingness of life and the inevitability of death. We dance, chant, raise energy and unite our intention to help turn the wheel of time and make the shift of seasons, and the chanting and dancing culminate in a cone of power, a release of powerful, focused energy. Then we enjoy the beauty of the flames, looking at them through a wreath of flowers. From the ashes we pull out bread, baked (well, at least toasted) by the fire, and share this communion. It's not the spectacle of Burning Man, but it is personal, involving, and beautiful, and we've been doing it for more than twenty years now without attracting forty thousand people and monumental art sculptures. So in part I was asking myself, "What has Burning Man got that we haven't got?"

Drugs and alcohol might be the obvious answers, as our tradition asks that our public rituals be clean and sober. But I was interested to see a ritual that had taken what is a time-honored Pagan tradition, removed the content and context and meaning, and then ramped up the spectacle beyond anything the Druids could have envisioned in their most smoke-enhanced trance. Are people hungry for ritual but wary of meaning? Or might it actually be more powerful to not set an intention or a meaning, but leave everyone free to find their own?

The spectacle was—well, spectacular. Everyone goes out to the playa, and a huge ring is created with the Man at center. The tents and exhibits have been taken down, and only the pyramid of trees with the giant figure remain. He's still decked with fluorescent green glowlights—and I was curious to see how they would take them down before burning the Man. (They didn't, which I found disturbingly un-green.) The Man's arms, which have been down by his side, are raised upwards, and everyone cheers.

People sit outside the ring or perches on art cars, which hover in the background like a cast of magical characters come to watch. Then, every fire twirler, spinner, fire eater and wand waver in the world comes into the center and begins the show of fire arts, spinning, twirling and creating amazing fire effects. I liked seeing fire dancers of all ages and body types in that ring—even one woman spinning fire from a wheelchair. After a long time, the fire spinners move out and the fireworks begin—a barrage of them, rising in arcs of color and sheets of sparkling light, bigger than the biggest Fourth of July you've ever seen. They culminate in an explosion that rocks the playa, and the Man begins to burn.

After all the buildup, the burning itself is almost an anticlimax. People watch, waiting for the Man to finally fall. When he does, everyone rushes forward to get close to the fire.

I found it was extremely beautiful but strangely passive. With the art cars booming techno music, it was hard to think or feel or find a rhythm of one's own. With no common intention or linking of minds, it was pure spectacle, a little like watching live TV. I'm sure people have their own sense of release and their own deeply spiritual moments, and after the man burned a small core of intrepid live drummers did begin to play, and some people danced. But I missed the sense of involvement we create in our small, modest ritual. It seemed to me in some ways quintessentially American—a giant, hugely expensive spectacle, in which people are expected to watch other people do things. The Rangers instructed us all to cheer for the firespinners, but no one was given a reason, aside from spectacle itself, to be cheering.

I love spectacle in ritual—I'm always in the contingent pushing for more if it in ours, for aerial dancers invoking the elements in the Spiral Dance, for stiltwalkers and giant puppets and over-the-top performances. But it works in a context of poetry, music, meaning, and involvement. In the right balance, art can lift our spirits and shift consciousness. A dancer's perfect beauty, a song's perfect wedding of melody to lyric, can lift our hearts and expand our sense of possibility. In the wrong balance, it can leave us cold and disempowered, thinking, "I could never look that good, sing that well,"

I'm told the Temple burn is more focused and meditative, with people's prayers and messages set alight. Alas, I had to leave without seeing that. So I'll just have to come back another year.

The night before the Man burned, we did a small spiral dance on the playa. I was giving a talk at the Entheon dome, that began in a dust storm. I said at the beginning that we had the idea of an impromptu spiral dance at the end, but we wouldn't do it unless the weather cleared. If it did, we'd know the land wanted us to do the dance.

At the end of the talk, we got a sprinkle of rain. Then the wind died down, and a rainbow came out. When it turned into a double rainbow, we ran out to the playa and did a spiral, with the intention of letting all the fires of the week fan the flames of freedom. It was incredibly beautiful and magical to dance in that setting, with the Temple in the background and the mythical beasts of art cars prowling. We raised a beautiful, focused cone, and felt that sense of united heart and being which for me is the essence of ritual.

Late Saturday night, I rode out to look for the oil derrick tower, and watched it burn in a spectacle of fire and an explosion so powerful I had to shield my eyes. If art is like a spell—an enacted vision, an intention put into an image that energy is channeled through—it was a powerful one. What will those powerful figures pray to now, with the tower no longer blocking their view?

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 evening—decided 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 blog—instead 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!

I didn't really intend to get this involved in Burning Man.  I've never been—although of course for years now I've heard friends who go regularly rave about it.  I've been curious—as 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 is—I can be persuaded to go to some blazing hot climate for some overwhelming world-saving cause—protesting 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 visions—but 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 figure—a 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 plants—they won't stand up to searing, eighty mile an hour winds.  No straw bales—they shed and the Burning Man folks have become fanatics about picking up every stray bit of MOOP—Matter Out of Place—that 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 thing—and 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 7^th 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 21^st 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 straw—it'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 situation—from designing a forest garden to planning a political campaign.  So—what 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 that—there 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 that—and 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 patterns—another 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 edge—another 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 it—working 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 time—those 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 is—pvc 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 needed—and 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.