No Spectators -- (?)

Today I went to No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man.  Walking through the Renwick humming the sounds of the gongs, writing remembrances on the wood temple, lying on floor pillows to watch colored lights, I was more than a spectator.  We all were.  It turns out the exhibit's title "No Spectators" comes from a Burning Man tenant that states no one's a spectator when the line between audience and performer is blurred; everyone becomes a superstar.

Though it fit the experience, something about the tenant nagged at me enough to photograph the wording and revisit it again now.

My sister got married in June, and the year leading up to her wedding, she and I journeyed all over southern California searching for the dress.  The two of us would be hours from home, rifling through gowns and snapping pictures to analyze later (since she loved *every* dress she put on and hated *every* dress the day after).  Afterward, we'd go to lunch and have a flight of mimosas, or discover a whimsical floral mural, or order lattes with our (to-be) husbands' faces on the foam (LA after all...), and snap selfies.  Something subtle shifted between the taking pictures of her in dresses and taking pictures of us with our whatever-props.  I couldn't put my finger on it, but each time we posed, I felt a hair further from her -- even though our shoulders still touched.

A month or so later, on my way to Kaia Joye's bachelorette party, I stopped in LA at The Happy Place I'd been reading about for months, a pop-up museum of happiness.  The temporary building housed huge rooms of playful yellow everything, giant signs, music, mirrors, balloons, upside down rooms, candy, enchanted gardens -- the stuff happiness is made of -- so throngs of people could playfully walk through and snap pictures along the way.

So we did!  Carrie and I peeked expectantly around each corner, climbed in the m&m covered shoe, danced in the tinsel, played in the mirrors, grabbed balloons, ate candy -- all of it.   (And jumping into the yellow ball bit at the end of the rainbow *was* pretty much perfect 12-year-old-fun).

      

 

But even while we were walking through, while my brain kept yelling this is awesome!  look at this room!  you're having so much fun! my heart wasn't quite with me.  It was the same subtle post-wedding-dress-shopping uneasiness I'd felt before.  I felt a little... lonely.  It made no sense:  I was with Carrie; we'd just played for a whole morning; but.... something felt off.

I thought it over for the rest of the day.  

The entire museum was oriented around taking selfies -- yes, I knew that.  In fact, the purpose of the museum was to capture yourself surrounded by colorful whimsy-joy.  

The thing about a selfie, though, almost always, is that it implies an audience, someone who is not present.  So instantly, when the masses of us doing the happy things whip out our phones, we cease being in the room where we're holding the strings of balloons and instead pose for the faceless (or very face-specific) audience we plan to post our pictures for later.

Selfies disrupt the present.

So when I'd take scenery selfies with my sister -- to show Ben later, or post, or send to our mom -- in some slivered way, I'd leave my sister's company.  

Instead of actually being with Carrie in the museum, climbing ladders to a land of magical marigolds, I was trying to figure out how to capture the spongy yellow carpet under our feet or the threaded blossoms though my phone.

Reading it again, the Burning Man tenant is actually admirable: let's all be present and participate rather than holding back to watch.  

But the message is also so familiar, it's the insistence of our culture to forever blur the line between audience and performer -- why sit back if you, too, can be a superstar?

Near and Far

Ben and I are sitting in the driveway.  The night's dark and breezy, sticky with humidity.  We're watching wildfires across the bay make the sky glow.  Every few minutes flames flare bright orange above the ridge line of the foothills.

Someone somewhere is evacuating, while, again, California burns.

I must have been only half asleep this morning, when sometime in the dark I jolted awake to a trembling.  In my half consciousness, I felt my stomach lurch in fear as I waited and ran through scenarios of where we'd go.  I've been following the quakes in Indonesia the last couple of days.  Nothing more happened.  Later I looked it up and found there had been a small earthquake in Long Beach, big enough to feel -- or sleep through.

Our worlds are so untouched until something breaks them.

I marvel at this over and over again.

It doesn't matter how much we know about pain, read about it, even witness it in friends, nothing prepares us for our own two-footed world cracking.

Every day when one's world is whole, another's is cracking -- or even crushed -- constantly and all at once, ocean to sea spray, everywhere.

Yesterday my sister and I met halfway in Los Angeles to go to museums (which, incidentally, are mostly all closed on Mondays).  I've been to lots of parts of LA but never really downtown.  Where we were, every fifth person (literally) was homeless, asking for a dollar, or ranting, lounging against a wall, or pushing a cart too heavy to navigate down the narrow sidewalk.

Years ago I spent a lot of time with the homeless community here.  Almost all my time.  It was a year of unanswerable questions that wrenched my heart constantly: how to help? could I help? was reintegration the goal? how to combat addictions, and why?  how to speak through mental illness?  was real healing possible? what was hope? what were real needs?  who was safe? who was the good guy? The list went on for pages.

Since I've moved back here, I haven't reconnected consistently with that community -- it's dispersed, much has changed, my kids are bigger and busier, I started a business -- for so many reasons.  I think about that every day.

The strangest thing walking through LA yesterday was feeling that I was seeing homeless people for the first time in my life.  I saw each person in stark relief: a woman crouched by a doorway with greasy hair and filthy feet wearing bright flip flops, she had tan muscled arms and smooth red painted nails; the boy-man with my brother's eyes in dirty jeans with a tired face, who lifted his eyebrows when I passed, as if to say, "sucks, huh?" and it did.

Maybe it was a revelation, a rare moment of sight, or maybe just cold water on my face -- whatever it was, I kept thinking, "we let other humans live like this right in front of our faces.  How can we let other humans live *outside* with no showers or bathrooms or toothbrushes.  How can we let other humans, who look like our moms, push dirty blankets down the street and pull recycling from the subway trashcan so they can have a few bucks?  How do we walk by -- rush by -- without even looking at them?

The wind is calmer for the moment, and if I didn't know the fire was there, I wouldn't see it at all.  A moment ago, the flames reared over the crest and must have towered stories high.

Inhale.  Exhale.  Sight.  Blindness.  Wholeness. Fragmentation.  How to stay near when we are far.