Everything green a slightly different shade. Everything blue fading into infinity.

Moist earthen paths carve through the breathing forest like wormholes, uniting different dimensions. Trees climb towards the sky until the naked rock can no longer hold them, blazing in the daylight.

unpossessable

Apollo’s unabashed arrogance makes it impossible to chill beer in the enveloping mud banks flanking the determined glacial runoff. But our neighbours enjoy the gifts all the same.

The water, overly-excited ice, is too cold for soap, and so crisp it’s unnecessary.

It’s clothing optional, as we enjoy sun-melted cheese slathered over garlic sausage dipped in regular yellow mustard. I recall a beautiful story of a man riding his bicycle home through the Swiss countryside following a minor lab accident.

Sometimes mistakes are the stuff of genius.

Things don’t feel different. They just feel right.

For that fleeting moment, suspended somewhere forever, everything makes sense.

I know it won’t once our reflection, incompletely captured and then further distorted, warps off through that vacuum and we return to our lives. But it hardly seems to matter then. And maybe it doesn’t now.

The day was really good.

But you made it perfect.

It’s out there.

Somewhere along that sinewy, ashen metaphor. Dissecting our world. Connecting us. Moving us further apart.

Forever encouraging the pulse of desire.

“She needs to be chased,” I was told, which hardly made her special, but I was comforted by the fact that I finally had some direction.

I ruminated on this prospect for a few more scenes that evening. Then, during a lull in the conversation, I casually stated, “Maybe you could mention to her that I kinda need to be chased, too.”

“Not gonna happen.”

I reluctantly accepted this reality, and thought about how I would work around it.

What I should have done was just agreed with the truth of that statement. It wasn’t going to happen.

I almost want to say that I don’t even know what’s involved in chasing someone, but the fact is that I do. And I don’t fucking like it.

Capture.

Contain.

Control.

We’re convinced that our own will to self-determination enables us with these capabilities to such a degree that we lose sight of obvious limitations.

Try breathing underwater. Let alone in outer space.

Most of us have trouble being in one place at one time. Let alone everywhere always.

I’m after my own limits.

I don’t want to put any on you.

She was from Alabama. As such, our group of friends called her ‘Bama.

It probably wasn’t my single favourite thing about her, but I really enjoyed that she got to Burning Man by convincing her mom she needed money for Christian Camp. As such, I have come to refer to Burning Man as Christian Camp.

Along the road onto the playa, beside a crawling chain of cars and trucks and vans and campers and campervans, there was one guy waving a homemade sign that read:

JESUS DIED SO YOU WON’T BE BURNIN’, MAN

It didn’t sit well with the three other people in our vehicle, and I would guess most of the other people along the road weren’t crazy about it either. Unless it was the intent of the sign’s author to almost literally preach to the choir, his creation was an unmitigated communications disaster. Although it probably resonated with however many people there were out there who, like me, have the benefit of a fairly robust Christain education. A failed indoctrination, one might say.

In turn, this group of us could then explain to our now somewhat-defensive travelling companions that the intent of this sign was probably not to condemn us for our week of desert idol worship. Instead, it was to remind us that what Christains actually believe is that Jesus sacrificed himself—really somewhat reluctantly—to save us from our own sins. So that, even if we happen to make some questionable choices at Burning Man, we’re not also eternally damned to the fires of hell. We are, in this view, only saved by grace.

That’s the narrow interpretation of it.

More broadly, and (much to the chagrin of my grandmother) arguably secularly, I found it to be a wonderfully generous reminder that compassion and forgiveness are infinite. Ever open to our acceptance, and ours to offer freely.

Sure, it’s a debatable assertion.

But not in my heart.

When the last car had passed, I’m sure my friend packed up his sign, hopped into his RV, and drove through the gate to join the party.