In our last post, our intrepid heroes had been exploring their inner 8-year-old amongst the dinosaurs and stars. Today, they go on a more spiritual quest.

Their first indication that this quest would be a more spiritual one was this scene that they came across:

We then stumbled across what purported to be the truth:

But what was inside?:

Me? I’m the truth? Selfies? The sky? Tell me! Wait…Uh oh…:

A WILD S APPEARS!:

AUGH! [incoherent noises]:

Our monstering[1] finished for the day, we headed towards our original goal, the Burning Man Temple. It’s a special place, for people to express their grief, to help them come to terms with things, a deeply personal place for each person. In the words of one of the builders:

”
“I went down and talked to [a large computer company] and they call their place a campus. They have a barber shop, you can get a haircut. There were three different restaurants, at their campus. I forget how many people are there, 2,000, 3,000 people. If you feed that information into a computer, for 2,000 people, at least three of them are going to have lost a family member. And they don’t have any place in their campus to address [that] and they want to profess that they’re building a family yet they don’t have a place to address the loss of a family member.”

“It’s like, when Burning Man built up that population, we all of the sudden needed that. It was just an obvious absence. There was a void that no one really noticed. They got the porta potties, they’ve got the police station, they’ve got the medical and they’ve got the Man. They just didn’t have a place for grief. And the Man kind of did grief for a while, but it was a mixture of so much celebration that it was hard to really have a quiet place.”
”

It’s another one of those places where it feels wrong to take pictures inside, so I only have a few pictures, all of the outside, from a distance. Here, you can see S on her way towards the back of the temple:

The 2015 temple[2], ‘The Temple of Promise‘, to us felt like a welcoming entrance, squeezing out the emotions you wanted to express, and almost rebirthing you into a treed garden. Here is the temple:

The imposing yet welcoming entrance, leading through the tighter and tighter squeeze of all of the memorials:

Until you emerge into the peaceful garden (on the left):

The temple is always[3] so full of emotions, people grieving, memorials, it’s difficult to put words to it. All I can say is that each time I have gone, I have experienced something. A catharsis for sure, but also something else difficult to quantify, or even qualify.

Next time, our intrepid heroes experience a type of comically large quotidian object, along with a poignant procession. Stay tuned!

[1]And photobombing.

[2]Interestingly, googling ‘2015 temple‘ (at least for me) returns pictures of the temple, and a bunch of irrelevant (to me) text results.

[3]Well, both times we’ve been there.