Extraordinary: As night falls, a flame comes alive in her hands. By day, she seems to be in perpetual state of prayer.

Land in Reno. Set your GPS coordinates to 40°45’13.83”N, 119°16’37.20”W, and drive across the desert, straight into an art festival where 40,000 people come together every year in a community based on gifting, participation, and “radical self expression.”

You are ready to experiment with the creation of a transient city that doubles as an art gallery sprawling across the Black Rock desert, 120 miles north of Reno, Nevada.

Crossing over from the real world to the surreal dreamscape of art installations music, you take in the costumed individuals who have suspended their understanding of the world as they know it to engage in building this experimental community. This is an assault on the senses that you have waited one full year to feel.

There are no appointments to keep, no time markers, no deadlines to anchor you to the outside world. Your cell phone signal will disappear, leaving you free to roam, reflect and absorb the wonders that you will see as the sun disappears from the darkening sky.

You pull out the bizarre costume that you have stitched or pulled together from the items in your wardrobe that make your friends gasp. There is no dress code, but there is purposeful dressing designed to contribute to the idiosyncratic feel of the existence you now embrace. Back home you went freewheeling through your imagination for an outfit and came up with a headdress made of fairy lights and African fabric, or you may have stitched Che Guevara flags onto a long skirt to form a revolutionary ball gown (the theme for 2009 was evolution and several camps reinterpreted it as revolution).

You have brought a lot of water and food onto the playa because there is nothing to buy here. You grab a massive bag of grapes as you head out. You hand out small bunches to people to give them a healthy jolt of energy. The heat is beginning to recede as a gentle breeze sweeps the playa. A camp fashioned from vegetable crates for structure and mutli-hued sarongs for shade is putting up the ten principles of Burning Man. Two in particular catch your eye:

“Gifting

Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift giving. The value of a gift is unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value.

Decommodification

In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience.”

You read on because you are fascinated that someone has given a voice to the reverberations deep inside your soul:

“Participation

Our community is committed to a radically participatory ethic. We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation. Everyone is invited to work. Everyone is invited to play. We make the world real through actions that open the heart.”

Your eyes tear at the endless possibilities of exporting this world beyond the borders of Burning Man. A girl you just met sees your reaction, spreads her multi-colored, winged arms and says: “Welcome home.”

You are distracted by a double-decker bus disguised as a birthday cake, and another that has been turned into a flame throwing dragon, and another that has taken on the persona of a pirate ship. You find yourself following the mutant vehicles over to Robot Heart that is booming out experimental sounds that you can only thrill to. Then, without warning, Robot Heart rolls off across the playa to play to people amassing on the other side of the semi circle of camps and villages structured around an effigy that will be burnt down. Art is democratic here. This entire enterprise serves as a gargantuan art gallery. The art is interactive — you can touch it; you can climb it; you can shelter in it. The institutionalized world and all its preconceived notions about art are challenged here. Across the pitch dark playa, curious shapes are floating around you — moving light installations? Creatively altered golf carts and bicycles. Most of the offerings on the playa are music-focused, and they roll around the playa playing to you — you don’t have to subject yourself to the painful process of having a bouncer give you the eye-sweep before letting you in. There are no tickets, no velvet rope, no performance times and there is definitely no seating system.

Your costume is how you will explore aesthetics on a communal level and allow fellow burners a visual treat. You have delved into the inner sanctum of your imagination to create an outfit that rejects the commercialism that surrounds you and wear versions of that expression of your inner self all week. Throw a fur coat on top of that (temperatures falls to 7 degrees Celsius and then rises again to 37 degrees during the day) and you are set for the night.

The sky begins to lighten and you see slivers of the sun stealing slowly over the playa. The mellow light will first silhouette the mountains that surround the ancient lakebed. Then a glow will caress the sand, warming the playa till you are forced to seek refuge in the cooler climes of your camp, where those who have air conditioned RV’s throw their doors open to welcome the burners who don’t.

Days later, an effigy of a man will burn. The next day the temple of tears, where burners write messages to loved ones who have left this world or pin letters about something they want to forget, with be engulfed by flames. At the Burning Man airport, a twenty- something year old with dust-caked shoes walked toward a private jet, his backpack, sleeping bag and yoga mat strapped to his back. “How was it?” the pilot called out. The man raised both arms, turned two thumbs up and said “A Perfect Burn!”

My sentiments exactly.

Taking the Burning Man ethos beyond Black rock Desert.

Burners Without Borders: What they say about themselves: BWB coalesced from a spontaneous, collective instinct to meet gaping needs where existing societal systems were clearly failing.

— Visit: http://www.burnerswithoutborders.org