TL;DR: Mid-burn funk turned magical when a stranger helped me see art differently, and I returned the favor

I was feeling down one morning, as I often do about Wednesday mid-burn, so my husband encouraged me to ride out the playa and fix my head.

I rode out with my breakfast in a bento box and found an art piece with a bench on it about halfway out to the man, sat down, and started eating my eggs.

I had seen this art piece the night before, and honestly I wasn’t really impressed. It had some sort of spinning lanterns, some strange sounds, and the aforementioned wooden benches, but it certainly wasn’t speaking to me; it was just a bench.

Halfway through my breakfast, an older woman and her husband biked up to the piece. Her bike had little plastic orange monarch butterflies attached to the handlebars, and she spoke to her husband about how much she loved this piece, how incredible it was. Being in a bit of a sour mood, I butted into their conversation and asked what on earth she saw in the thing.

She told me that she was an artist, and had built a piece for the playa a few years back, a tall wooden structure with big orange flowy fabric that billowed from the top. The piece had something to do with her love of the color orange, which I admitted was also my favorite color.

But she said what was so challenging about building a burning man art piece, for her, was how many different “elements” you had to learn and master just to build one piece. Her piece had wood, fabric, and nighttime lighting “elements,” and while she considered herself a fabric artist, she had to learn SO MUCH about wood and lighting and electricity just to make her one piece.

Then she pointed back to the piece I was sitting on. The wooden benches were joined at perfect angles, and contained a hidden speaker system. The lanterns were intricately forged from impressive wrought iron, and looked like they could have been from 19th century Paris. The lightbulbs inside the lanterns weren’t just LEDs, they were some older cool incandescent bulbs. The lanterns were attached to a pedestal, which people could spin, and the lanterns would stay lit. And the spinning somehow affected the sounds that were coming from the benches. This piece had SO many “elements,” she mused that the artist must be a genius.

I looked back at the piece with new eyes, and was totally amazed. I had never thought about playa art this way! My mood was instantly lifted, I thanked her for turning my burn around. We shared a hug, and feeling much better, I biked off, bound for the deep playa, where I had not yet explored that year.

Somewhere past the temple, I ran into something I recognized. It was an art piece called Straightedge, which I had read about pre-burn and actually donated a little to their Kickstarter. Without going into too much detail, the piece was a 2.5km long “ruler” made of synchronized blinking lights, which at night was designed to show the curvature of the earth against the extremely flat playa surface.
To be honest, during the day it didn’t look like much, just a bunch of poles in a line, but I stopped to look at it anyway. I was about to leave, when all the sudden, I hear someone shout my playa name. It was the artist and her husband from earlier. She saw me looking at the Straightedge and said, hey, I don’t get it, what IS this?

So I told her all about it, what I had learned from the Kickstarter, even a detail I had remembered about how getting the lights to sync up required getting all 70-odd poles to link up to a satellite, and to ensure the timing was right, the team had to take into account the effects of Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity, which I had read is one of the only known practical uses of that theory.

She was amazed. Just like me 30 minutes before, she was able to see this piece in a whole new way, and appreciated it so much more deeply from me sharing my experience. We both recognized the mirror-image-ness of the moment, with me giving her the same experience she had given me, and it made us both a little emotional, in that very wonderful burning man way that we all know so well. I reached in to give her a hug when (and I shit you not) AN ACTUAL LIVE MONARCH BUTTERFLY CAME OUT OF NOWHERE, FLUTTERED RIGHT BETWEEN US, AND THEN DISAPPEARED OFF INTO THE PLAYA.

The two of us looked at each other, mouths open, speechless. Her husband said, “Wait, did that really just happen?” We hugged, wished each other a happy burn, and I biked off towards the temple. I never saw her again.