Twin Flames, Burning Man and Burning Woman

Journey to California

We had no problem making our way to the gate, no traffic at all. It was sort of spooky being in the desert in that harsh environment low on water and knowing that cars break down. As we were pulling out of the gate, a woman ran out of nowhere and told us that she was stranded. Her boyfriend who she said was black was unfairly arrested by police and she needed bail money to get him out of jail. Dusty did not hesitate to pull out a hundred dollar bill, and pass it to her.

The last sign we saw at the end of the Burning Man 2001 exit was a line from Shakespeare: ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” I used that line in my Meaning of Water poem I wrote as part of an epic poem about the American War in the Middle East in 1990 entitled: The Sagan Saga and the Search for the Gaia Messiah. It was a story about unrequited love. Seeing that verse as we exited the Burning Man gates acted as an omen for me. The Ages of Man were all about unrequited love. Were we driving now to a new age of fulfilling love?

We were hungry so we went to eat at Empire, the small town outside of Black Rock Desert. It was such a small town, a nowhere sort of place, but seeing the gas station and the convenient store, I realized we were back in civilization. We were back in the evil Empire, an imperialist power that was based on clear cuts, strip mining, and wage slavery. Last year in Empire, Dusty said that he had brought the Burning Man earrings. I lost the one he gave me somewhere on the playa during the burning Mausoleum. He wanted to buy another pair, but at the store, we discovered that didn't sell them anymore.

After shopping, we decided that he should call Mary, and tell her that he was bringing someone with him to prepare her for my visit. I'm sure that she could tell by his voice that something was up. Then, we went to eat breakfast at the local diner. We were so dirty and smelly, but so much in love that it didn't matter. Other Burning Man folks were eating there as well. You could tell by just looking at them who they were, and who the straight people were. They were the clean people. I couldn't believe that this was really happening to me, that I had found someone who wanted me in his life, and who was willing to break up with this present girlfriend in order to be with me! It seemed unbelievable!

When we got back into the camper, I asked him about Mary. Why was their relationship not working? What was wrong? He said that he brought the camper in Massachusetts to have space without her. He explained to me that she was in a desperate situation when she couldn't find a place to live while she was working with him at Green Peace. He told her that she could live with him for a few days until she found something else.

When she moved in, he wasn't ready to have a committed live-in relationship with her. But he felt that she couldn't survive on her own. So, he didn't have the heart to throw her out. He bought the camper with credit cards that he had no intention of paying back. He decided that he had to leave the East Coast because of his debts. Now he was into go the outlaw mode of existence because when the Green Peace offices closed down, he couldn't find another job that supported the ecology. Mary asked to go with him on his journey to the West Coast. He let her. They were on the road for a year and a half before they ended up in Humboldt County, California. During that time, he recorded several CD's of his music that he played with his solar-powered guitar on the public lands across the United States.

He asked me how I felt about him now that I knew he was an outlaw. My last boyfriend was the Arcosanti lawyer, and I couldn't stand his conservative politics and attitudes. He would have never, never taken me to Burning Man. When I asked him to take me to the Mother's Day protest at the Nevada Test Site, he said he had to take is ex-wife out for Mother's Day lunch. That was it! I had had enough of the lawyers in the world. Now, it was time to try an outlaw.

I asked him to tell me more about his relationship with Mary. He said that he didn't like the way she kissed. Their sex life consisted of her giving him blow jobs, and she like him to give her orgasms through her clothes. They rarely had intercourse. Well, I thought, they certainly didn't practice sacred sexuality! That sounded horrible to me! He said that she was a really dear woman and was devoted to him, and he didn't want to break her heart. She also didn't like to dance with him and he loved to dance. And they didn't really co-create or do rituals together. He played for me a tape they created with his music and her rap. It was difficult to listen to it even though I thought her message was a good one, it just wasn't poetic or visionary. But maybe I am just being critical of the tape because I wanted him to create tapes with me.

We talked and talked about his life, his involvement in Green Peace and the anti-nuclear movement, and about my life all the way to Mt. Shasta Lake. I wanted to go to Mt. Shasta and climb it because I had heard about its mystical powers, but instead we walked down to the lake. There was trash all around it, and there was a dam holding back the water. The lake needed a lot of help. We took off our shoes, waded in, and did a ritual to the waters of the Earth. Had I really found someone whom I could conduct sacred energies with? Oh Goddess, how much I needed to find my twin soul. Don't let this be a crash-and-burn love affair!

We spent the night in some California forest. We were going to sleep outside until we laid down snuggled together and then heard the growl of a cat—a big cat. The next morning we got up at dawn to drive the rest of the way. Before arriving, he stopped at a health food grocery store to call Mary again. When I went to the ATM machine to get out money since I had none, I asked him how much I should take. He answered, “As much as you need to get out of town.” At that moment, I wondered about his love for me because didn't he say he would drive me back to Arizona? Could he be bringing me to his house in order to make Mary jealous and regretful that she didn't go with him to the festival? What was going on here?

We got back into the camper, and he said we had another hour to go before reaching his home. I told him that if he didn't want to go through with it, then he could let me out at the bus station and there would be no hard feelings. He said that he didn't want to ever let me go, he loved me.

Before going to his place, we stopped at the Humboldt Redwood forest. Walking through the woods, we were in ecstasy. We were as high as the trees. We were floating on the clouds at the same time as we were grounded in the bodies of the other. All I could think of was that it was Gaia's love story. Dusty said that the story is greater than we think and I believed him. All I could think of was that I had met my match, a man who will defend the wildness, a man in touch with the poetry of the inner self. It was a perfect balance! Were we experiencing erotic mysticism? Was he a man I could practice partner yoga with? It sure seemed that way.

But the hard part of our journey was just beginning. To tell a woman whom you have been having sex with for four years that you have a new love would not be easy. Again, I asked him if he was ready to do it. He said that he was ready if I was ready. If not, Mary was a good companion for him in many ways, and he would stick with her. In hindsight that was another clue that he wasn't over Mary. If he had come to the conclusion that she was not right for him, then he couldn't go back to the old reality with her no matter what.

Is it Home?

As we approached his house which was way in the forest up in the mountains around Garberville, he pulled into a drive way that had no trespassing signs all over it. Now, he said, he was having butterflies in his stomach. His house wasn't the nice friendly place that I had imagined it to be; one could say it was the opposite of his Enlightenment Camp. Then, he pulled up next to a high fence with Beware of the Dog signs as well as No Trespassing signs on it, and a lot of junk in the front yard. As we pulled up, he said that if I didn't like it here, he would follow me anywhere, but he wanted to be with me. Mary hearing the camper pull up, ran out of the house and greeted us. Dusty introduced me as Moonshine the woman whom he loved. She wanted time with him alone. While they talked, I sat in the kitchen feeling completely out of place in another woman's home. Mary was a beautiful woman, tall, slender, with beautiful green eyes and a friendly smile. She was a refined intellectual New Englander.

What in the hell was I doing? It was like I was coming down off an LSD trip, and it was starting to be a bummer. This was not the way to be with a new lover. I made a mistake by coming here. He needed to get out of one relationship before getting in a new relationship unless he wanted to be polygamous. But, he told me that he was not interested in having a sexual relationship with Mary. He wanted her as a friend, not as a lover. I knew, though, that when he got back home, there would be major pressure by her to get back together with her. But I knew if we were experiencing a twin flame relationship, then her persuasion would not be able to stand in love's way. What idealistic thinking I had that day!

He came back into the house pretending to love me and that everything was OK in their relationship. She now understood all the complaints he was having with her. They were going to have to be together for at least three more months because they were in the business of growing of marijuana together. Half of his crop was her crop.

He explained to me that they were in the medical marijuana business which meant that they had a doctor say that they needed marijuana for medical reasons. He needed it for asthma and to help him overcome the stress of civilization, and she needed it for PMS and to cope with the stress of civilization. This allowed them to legally grow several plants of marijuana for their own use. But, of course, they grew an entire greenhouse full of it, something like 32 plants. He said that marijuana was like gold. As long as they had marijuana, they had money. He loved the stuff. He even started the Cannabis Reform Coalition while he lived in Boston because he felt it wasn't fair to criminalize the growing of pot.

What he and Mary were doing was revolutionary. He said that half the county was growing it, and there was even a radio station in Humboldt Country that was devoted to spotting where the police helicopter were flying to warn growers to close their greenhouse doors. The worst that could happen to them he said was that the police could come in, see the doctor's orders allowing them to grow marijuana, and then chopped down all but a few plants. Of course, that would be disastrous for them economically. But he said it could happen.

They had to move out of the house at the end of the month because the owner of the property and him had gotten into an argument. Dusty explained how his landlord had a big operation going. On top of the hill, there was a two-story house that the landlord gutted out. With greenhouse lights run by generators, they were able to grow marijuana there. He started working for this fellow in his greenhouses when he was desperate for money. For compensation for his work, their agreement was that Dusty could grow his own crop on the land, and live in one of the houses until November first. That meant that Mary and he had to find another place in which to process the stuff once it was cut.

Another marijuana grower said that they could use her house for six months. She was off to Hawaii for six months after the harvest. The more he talked, the more I could see how economically tied to Mary he was. Even though he said that we could build a new life together and he would go anywhere in the world to be with me, the truth was he was going to stay in Humboldt County and be a marijuana grower. It was clear to me that marijuana was his first and really only love. He was married to Marijuana even though I wanted to deny that fact.

Mary was also co-dependent on him. She didn't drive his camper and she had no car of her own. Town was ten miles away on a curvy road that would be dangerous to ride a bike on. When I asked her what she did while living in Western Massachusetts, her answer was that she helped Joe. She never criticized his habits, but was an enabler. She didn't smoke the stuff herself, at least not when I was there, nor was she a drinker. He was also a drinker, not a big drinker-- around two beers a night. And then in the morning he couldn't get going without his shot of coffee which she made for him each morning.

I didn't mine causal marijuana use when people took it as a way of bring community together, more like a sacrament than a habit. If it wasn't for the damage smoking it does to my lungs, it would be my communal drug of choice. When I was fifteen, I started smoking pot when I was attending girl's school in Charlottesville, Virginia. Since that time, I had had spells when I was a pot head, stoned all day and all night, and periods when I didn't smoke at all. I had given a great deal of thought to what I thought about the substance.

For me, during the times when I was a pothead, after a while it felt that I was walking around in a cloud. This cloud caused a residue over my brain that didn't allow me a full range of emotions. It retarded emotional grow from happening and also, now that I was getting older, I didn't want to do anything to my brain that would hurt my short-term memory. At the half way mark of my life, that is, if I lived to be in my 90's, memory was too important to me. And I knew how psychologically addictive pot could be. I wanted to be able to cope with the stress of civilization without the use of pot because I knew that being stoned made me less of an activist and more of a paranoid personality, impotent to change the status quo.

In my life I had already lived with drug dependent people. Did I really want to do it again? As far as the idea of being more creative when one is high, I found from years of experimentation with the drug, that I am more confident in my creativity when I wasn't under the influence than when I was stoned. From what I could gather about residents of Humboldt County was that it was a rather paranoid community that lived behind fence, gates, and no trespassing signs. Dusty even said I should not wander through the woods onto other people's property because marijuana growers had guns to protect their crops from thieves. It was a sick culture. Dusty agreed with me about this, but he said until cannabis was free and not going through persecution that the “war of drugs” was causing, then it would have to be this may. He said that marijuana people were creating a revolution. Looking at the way growers lived, it look as if they were thinking more about individual greed than supporting the resistance movement in Humboldt County among the tree sitters who were protecting the reminding Redwoods from the Pacifica Lumber Company!

I felt that the real revolution was to stop capitalism from destroying the ecosystems of the world by creating a Lovolution. People could understand that with or without smoking marijuana. Also, I had been to Amsterdam , and went to coffee houses where one could buy pot from behind the counter and smoke it in the café. What was revolutionary about that? Smoking pot in Amsterdam made me realize that the legalization of marijuana was not the revolutionary issues that could save our world.

Yes, it should be decrimalized and hemp plants grown for its fiber and alternative fuel. But should we encourage children that the way to be radical and enlighten your brain is by becoming dependent on smoking marijuana? I had trouble with that. Our problems lie in the spirit, not in substance! If marijuana growers could finance the real revolution, then go ahead and sell it for medicinal purposes. But if the growers were just buying the American dream with it and taking Hawaiian vacations with it, then so what! They were just as bad as tobacco growers. I couldn't tell what kind of pot growers Joe and Mary were at this point, the greedy kind or the visionary kind, but later in the morning when I mention building an income sharing community, neither of them went for that idea. Mary had ideas of getting refractive surgery so that she wouldn't have to wear eyeglasses any longer. She was the shave-your-legs type of woman, not the back-in- the woods hairy legs type.

Even after finding out what he did for money and how dependent he was on Mary, at this point, I still thought he loved me. I guess he was a good actor, or either the THC was causing hallucinations of love. Our first night at Mary's house we took a shower together. How tender of him to tell me that he loved me dirty and he loved me clean as the water washed the sacred dust away. Now we were back in civilization clean. It was time to sleep, but where? He said that he wanted to sleep with me. The room that was empty was the junk room, so we had no choice but to sleep in the front room where Mary could overhear our every move. She was already upset that we had taken a shower together. This was too much.

Revealing our Visions

The next morning she said that she didn't sleep at all, and now she could not eat anything since yesterday was the worst day of her life. The situation we were in was making her sick. She loved Joe, and she wasn't going to stop loving Joe. She wanted to live with him forever. Now that she was aware of the problems he was having with her in their relationships, things could change. She asked us not to show affection for each other around her, and that she requested that we sleep in different rooms. Of course, I didn't want our erotic attraction to be suppressed by her, but Dusty went along with her request. She wanted to know more about my communal vision. After breakfast she wanted us to spend time sharing with each other what our visions on how we all could live together. We agreed to such a meeting. After she fixed him his coffee, we sat down, and discussed our future together.

She wanted us to go around the room and tell each other what our visions of the future were, and what kind of community we would like to live in. Thinking about this now, I realize that he already knew her vision, and more than likely agreed with it since they had been living together so long. Mary started by telling us that she would like to live in an anarchist intentional community that engaged in learning survival skills in the woods of either Oregon or California.

Presently, she and Joe had been talking about buying a piece of land together so that they could grow marijuana. While living in Western Massachusetts, they had been looking to be part of an intentional community. They explored becoming members of the Sirius Community. But after Joe found out that marijuana smoking was not allowed inside of rooms, he didn't want to live there. No one was going to tell him not to smoke pot. Later on, she told me that Joe wouldn't travel outside of the USA because he had to take his marijuana with him, and it was too risky to get on the jet with an illegal substance. What a serious habit he has, I thought to myself. Could I live happily with a man who is so addicted to pot that he couldn't travel outside the USA?

When it came time for me to say my vision, I was visualizing a resistance community somewhere in the back woods of Northern California. It is an income sharing community. One of its sources of income would be growing of marijuana. We would be actively involved with tree-sitter organizations who are working to save the rainforests by non-violent means. We would practice some opened form of community building activities on a daily bases conducting rituals to Gaia, the planet Earth, for social guidance.

As the community grows, we could design green architecture with permaculture gardens to house us, and start a school for children to teach them about the Lovolution. We would teach them not only about how to construct an ecovillage by actually living in one, but that the real challenge would be to build an ecocity where millions of people could live successful together in harmony with the biosphere. When I said the word children, Joe looked disgusted at me. He said that he didn't want to live with children. I knew that he had put up his daughter for adoption, so he must not like to be around children! I must have said a bad word to him.

He said that he would just like to bring in a one or two more people into our group, do a radio show, and get ready for next year's Burning Man. Burning Man was what he was living for throughout the year. He said that while we were working on harvesting the pot crop, we could be recording radio shows for next year's Burning Man.

Mary said that she wanted to work with Joe on the show. If she couldn't have his affection, then she wanted to be the primary partner in his show. They had been talking about the show for years, and now she wanted to make it happen. It was her show, not my show. He told her that it could not work unless it was all of your shows. If we wanted it to work, we could not be possessive about it. The show needed to be center of our community's goals.

We had all the equipment and technological knowledge to make it happen. Now we just had to learn how to work with one another. Joe asked us to talk about the sex problem, and bring it out in the opened now that he was with two beautiful women who loved him. He wanted us to work it out among ourselves.

Mary looked shock. What? It was a shock to me too because I thought he wanted a monogamous relationship with me. Well, I was willing to see where the energy flowed. If he wanted to sleep with Mary, then I had to get beyond jealousy, the way that Dieter Duhm, the German philosopher preached. What I wanted most was community, and a way to communicate to the public. In order to do that, I had to let go of my ego and get beyond jealously.

Dieter thinks that jealousy is not a sign of true love, but of possessiveness. I was beginning to see his point. Love had to flow. If he wanted to sleep with Mary, then I had to let him go and be happy with myself. Jealously was a lack of self-confidence and insecurity, seeing people on the material level, not on the spiritual level. True love could only exist with free love. If he truly loved me, he would choose to sleep with me, not her. It seemed like a test. He loved us both, then he needed to say it to us, and then for us to decide if we both wanted to love him.

What I really wanted was for a man to love me for who I am including my ideas and philosophy of love and peace. If Dusty, couldn't love me on that level, then I would rather him be with her than with me. I wanted more than anything to find a musician whom I could work with so that we could combine his music and my poetry. This had never happened to me before, and now we had a chance to do this. But Mary insisted that the show was her idea, and that she was to be the primary partner regardless of our sexual passion. I thought that if we were all three going to do it together, then let's call it Lovolution Radio and run it by consensus. We would all be responsible for the programming. Mary didn't like that idea. Since we couldn't come to an argument because of the power struggle, we decided to drop the conversation and go somewhere.

I wanted to go to the ocean and Mary wanted to go to the river. Joe said that since Mary was suffering from love sickness, then we should go to the river. We put on our bathing suits and to our surprise, Mary and I were wearing the same black bathing suit. It was as if we were in the bathing suit competition for the beauty queen, and you know who would win!

I was ten years older than she was. My wrinkles were deep, and there was fat around my thighs. As this story gets more and more competitive, it is getting less and less about love! We went down to the river. They warned me that the water had some sort of bug in it that made your body itch if you stayed in the water longer than ten minutes. Oh Gaia, how much I wanted to be walking with him hand and hand by the sea, rather than be in this sexual competition!

We walked along the river until we came to a labyrinth. We walked through it slowly, and then laid by the river bed. She was on one side of him, and I was on the other side of him. He had to move his head side to side in order to look at one of us. It appeared to me that he was spending a lot more time gazing at her body than at mine. "Remained calm," I said to myself. She is a tall, slender, beautiful, fertile woman, and I am pre-menopausal graying woman who was beyond child bearing urges. Now who would most men go for? Only a man who could see beyond the flesh, and see the wisdom I embody would want to be talking with me. I wasn't sure if he could see beyond my flesh. A number of buzzers were flying in circles above us. “Why?” I asked. “Who amongst us is dead?”

Then Mary took off her swim suit and jumped in the river. Joe followed her. Not wanting to look like a prude, I followed suit. I was the best swimmer of the three of us and could swim circles around them. We were all swimming in different directions, until I said to myself, why not swim over to him? Isn't that where I want to be? At this time Mary was sitting in the side of the river. When I swam over to him, he grabbed me, and pulled me in towards him so that we were straddling each other, our genitals touching for the first time. It felt more like domination, than tenderness and true desire. He was acting lustful. I could see Mary on the side looking very upset that he was grabbing me. I thought it was insensitive of him to be lusting for me like that, not only because of me, but because of her.

The following day I spend most of the day cleaning up the junk room so that we could have a place to sleep out of ear distance from Mary. The junk was composed of most of Dusty's stuff, dirty clothes, books, tapes, shoes, tech equipment, CDs, computer stuff, etc. It was a wreck. I was organizing it while he was in the greenhouse with Mary working on pruning and spraying the pot plants.

During the clean up, I found an old wallet of his. When I touched it, it fell apart, cards falling to the floor. They could have been my cards. They were library cards, grocery cards, and other pieces of information from Western Massachusetts. It was as if we had been living parallel existences because my wallet was filled with the same cards two years ago before I moved to Arizona. They had moved out West the same month I moved out West, August 1999.

Then I came across his Nuke Buster Video Tape that he had made for the Citizens Awareness Network (CAN) led by Debbie Katz. One of this last projects Joe did in Western Massachusetts was that he went on a caravan with CAN to Barnwell, South Carolina where nuclear waste is shipped from the Northeastern power plants. While on the trip, he produced video tape. It was at the same time I was working on my nuclear power, waste, and weapons paper after being inspired at the New England Action Camp. What parallel existences we had! To think we never ran into each other!

Friday was the day Joe did his personal ritual to the mountains and the ocean. He invited me to join him around dusk. When the time came, we went to the top of the hill to the front of the fake house. It was here that he gives homage to the four directions. We got on the porch of the house to give praise to the East. It overlooks the forested area. He told me that I would start to see flashes of lights as generators for pot greenhouses would start being turned on. As he said that, I started to see flashes. He said that most of the time he did the prayers in silence, but since I was with him, he would try it out loud. I thought that was a good idea since he needed to practice speaking out loud if he wanted to do a public radio show. Also, he and Mary had gotten into poor speech patterns with each other saying “you know,” and “like I mean” in every sentence or two.

He said that I could start. I started out by saying a prayer to the forest, and to the resisters of the world who were trying to save the environment by changing our consumerist lifestyles. Joe stopped me and said that I was doing it wrong. He then proceeded to talk about the natural elements. I can't really remember what he said because I was feeling hurt that he couldn't appreciate what I said. Why didn't he like me praying for the war resisters and environmentalists of the world? He then went around to the other directions as we moved to different locations on top of the hill. When we got to the direction overlooking the Pacific Ocean , he asked me if there was anyone still in my heart.

Again he wanted to know if I had any secret lovers buried in there. I told him that I had healed from my past lovers, and I was here now in front of him in love with all life on Earth flowing through us! I asked him the same question. Again he told me about the woman whom he had unrequited love for which taught him a great deal about love. He told me about another relationship that ended up in a pattern of eating ice cream, smoking pot, and having sex. In that relationship, he gained 50 pounds. But now he was in love with me… totally in love! I asked him about Mary. He told me what he had told me before. He wasn't interested in her sexually, but if we wanted to create a community, then let's see if we can work with her. “But you don't love her?” I asked. With that he lifted me up in the air and said that I was the most spiritual woman he had ever been with. I was the right woman for his next stage of art.

After seeing the first star in the evening sky, we went inside. He cleared off the kitchen table and he got out his tarot cards. This was part of his Friday ritual. Mary, he said, use to read the cards, but she got bored with it, and no longer participated in the tarot readings. He laid the cards on the table. One of the last cards was lovers. That certainly made sense to us. When he read the card that he said represented Mary, she over heard him, and ran down the stairs.

They started arguing until she went back up the stairs. Next he read the card that represented him. It had to do with the artist. The book he was reading from said that the artist ruthlessly pursued his art. He said that card represented him because he was ruthless when it came to art, he said, just like I was ruthless. “No,” I retorted. “I am not ruthless. I don't want to be ruthless. My goal is to cultivate compassion, not to be ruthless.” But he insisted I would do anything for my art, and that I was ruthless, just like him. Was he trying to project his desires onto me? Then, later he said that we had different interests, accusing me of being an academic, wasting my time traveling all around the world looking at ecovillages. “What?” I said. “I'm not an academic! You have the wrong idea about me! Why don't you look at my writings over the Internet and you will understand more of where I am coming from.”

This house was off the grid. Dusty put solar collectors on the roof, but the batteries were dead, so when nighttime fell, we were in the dark except for candles and oil lamps. To turn on the computer, one had to go outside, and turn on a gas generator. So, that was what he did. Sitting at the computer together, I confessed that I was scared of looking at each other's web page because once we saw what each other was doing mentally, then our love might fade. He said that there was nothing to worry about because he loved me. But I said that it could be possible that our web pages don't complement each other. He kissed me and typed in his web address, www.halligenic.com.

I liked his web site. His psychedelic artwork was posted. His work with cannabis reform was there, along with a section about Burning Man. There was a place where one could download his music and order CDs, and there was a guest book. When we got to my site, there is a lot of text. So he was going to have to go through it at another time. When we got to my image gallery, the first image he saw, a collage about Jesus and mind control, he said he didn't understand it. He said that he would look forward in studying my Web site later after I went back to AZ.

Frustrated, Alienated and Isolated Individuals

We turned off the computer. Mary came to the ground floor and we listened to music and talked some more about living alienated lives. Dusty and Mary didn't play taxes, nor did she pay back her student loans. The outlaw life was the only one for them because they couldn't find a way to make enough money supporting their selves other than through selling marijuana. She said that she didn't know what was going to wake up the world to what it was doing to the environment. I said that while I was at the University of Massachusetts, I had visions of imploding the School of Education. That place was brainwashing people into consumerist's values rather than teaching people to be creative, and to live together in arcologies.

So, I wanted to get everyone at the School of Ed to make a circle around the ugly asbestos-filled building, imploding it as a symbol of the end of the age of capitialistic, Christian education. The implosion would be a symbol towards a movement for world peace, global justice, and environmental sensitivity. Mary said that she and Joe had thought about ______ buildings. I understood her frustrations and had heard other unhappy, disenfranchised Americans say the same thing. If our ideas and visions could not make it on the airwaves, then how do we get our messages across? We declare, maybe we could become a cell of resistance in the back woods of California.

Dusty handed me a shot of a drink which he said he gave out at Burning Man. While I was drinking it, I could feel it going through my system. It felt like poison. Then, I started to feel sick. He, then, confessed that he gave that same drink to someone at Burning Man who said that after he drank it, it left his “dick in the dirt.” Then why did he just give it to me? He acted as if he was a shaman, giving out psychedelics, but really he seemed like an irresponsible pseudo-shaman. I was feeling very sick asked for a bucket, and vomited in it. He slept with me that night.

On Sunday afternoon it was time for them to get ready to go to a meeting with the pot grower who offered to rent her house to them while she was in Hawaii. Mary explained to me that it was very important that this place come through because they had to have a place to cure their pot. She was expecting a couple to move into her house. There was only one bedroom, but if we all wanted to move in together, she could get a yurt and live outside the house. But it was best if her name was on the sublet. She said I shouldn't even go to the meeting.

So, off they went. While they were gone, I cleaned up the bathroom and made dinner. It took them a while to get back even though they said that they would be back in a few hours, it seemed more like four hours. Now, I realize that they probably got back together during those hours because when it came time for us to go to bed, he said that he wanted to sleep alone in the front room. I closed my door to go to sleep, and when I opened it up again, he was hugging her. I gently closed the door. Now, I knew where his heart was. All the time it was with her. Had I been nothing more than his Burning Man play toy?

The next morning when I got up, I went outside to meditate. I didn't want to be in the same house with them. I was very, very skeptical of his love and intensions. Maybe he brought me to California so that he could play games with Mary. It was Monday. Our plan was for me to leave Wednesday, and then in a few weeks, Dusty would come to help me move to Northern California to join their lives. I told him that I wanted to leave as soon as possible. He said that he didn't want me to leave at all. He was jealous of Len and Bruce and all the other men in my life. “What,” I thought to myself, “jealous of Len?” He knew we were just friends! All this jealousy; it was jealous that caused him not to contact me years ago in Amherst when I gave him my poem, the Way to Neutopia. If he had really respected my work and understood the value of the poem, then wouldn't he have contacted me anyway? Would he have let his girlfriend's jealously stop him for doing music to my verse?

Before getting on the bus to go back to Arizona – a long ride of 36 hours, we went out to breakfast. On the way into town, I asked him if he wanted both of us. He said that it did cross him mind, but he was in love with me. He was planning on sleeping in the separate room from her until I got back. Then, he would be sleeping with me. At breakfast, we held hands as he told me that what he really looked forward to was working together. He had been seeking a lyrist for his music, and how he had found me. I told him that I had been searching for a musician, and how I had found him.

With the money I had gotten out of the ATM machine when I first got to coastal California when he told me to take enough money to get out of town, I used that money to buy the ticket to Arizona. He must have know that he wasn't planning on taking me back to Arizona like he promised me at Black Rock City. He couldn't leave the pot crop for another week. He had to be there in case of spider mites. He already had to use pesticides on the plants while I was there. He said he was sorry that he couldn't leave, but that Mary couldn't do it all herself.

Before getting on the bus we hugged, kissed and danced. We couldn't stop dancing. Still thinking that we were in love, I got on the bus, and took a seat. As the driver started pulling from the station, I shot the peace sign at Dusty. After a few waves, he shot the peace sign back to me—but I wondered if it was sincere. Watching him, I wondered if he was thinking as the bus pulled away, “Yes! Neutopia is done! Now I can go back home and get a blow job from Mary! You don't have to like the way a woman kisses to get a good blow job from her!”

September 11, 2001

It was long drive to Phoenix with a long lay over in San Francisco. I didn't feel like thinking about much when I was on the bus. I didn't want to read or talk to anyone. I just stared out the window. We traveled all day on September 11 th. The morning of September 12th we arrived at the Phoenix bus station. It was there, over the TV, that I learned of the bombing of NY and Washington, and that the US was into another war. In Northern California, the night before we talked about _________something to make a statement about the state of the world and now this! Other people were feeling the oppression the way we were feeling it! And we were Americans, not foreign terrorists!

How sad for the world that so may people were feeling that their voice could not be heard other than through violence. I was a pacifist and had a vow to non-violence resistance and Lovolution. We could not defeat the Bomb through violently overthrowing of the American government. We needed an enlightenment miracle that evolved us beyond the nuclear family and patriarchal structures. But how was this to occur if three environmentally minded people could not figure out a way to live together in love? In “Terrorism and Love,” Dieter Duhm writes, The “New Left” failed 30 years ago, not because of the superiority of an outside enemy, but because of their inability to live together. We knew how to fight together against the state, but we did not know how to live together. We knew what we fought against, but not what we could stand up for. We had eagerness and our struggle, but we did not know the fundamental of love and community.” Could it be that by creating a new kind of city and culture is the way to discover the revolutionary spirit? If only Black Rock City was a year around city of resistance and true love!

I got back to Prescott, AZ. after the three day bus trip, hoping I would have an email or a phone message from Dusty. But, I came home to nothing. Afternoon passed. Still there was no message from him. Had he already forgotten me, the woman who she said the loved over and over again? Maybe. So I called him to find out if my intuition was right. It was a quick conversation.

After I left, he said Mary and him made up. They were more in love with each other than ever. Their sex problems had been worked out. She learned how to kiss and they were in bliss. He would not be coming for me. He thanked me for making their relationship work out. He knew what was best for him and Mary was the best woman he could have in his life. He wouldn't forget what happened to us at Burning Man, but it was only a festival fling and nothing that could last outside Black Rock City. He didn't like me on a day-to-day basis. He didn't like my ideas. When I asked him which ideas he didn't like, he said it was my openness. He and Mary were very private people. They were uninterested in building a community with me. He liked playing music to nature in national parks using solar energy. He didn't want to perform for audiences and he thought that is what I wanted to do.

When I asked about the radio show, he said that I could write him my ideas about it. If he liked them, then he would use them. When I asked about doing poetry and music together, he said that I could send him my verse through a wave file over the Internet. We didn't have to be physically together to do music. But I insisted that the best way for us to combine our gifts was when we were together improvising off of each other's energy. He replied that I don't know anything about music. Sending my verse over the Internet would be just fine.

I wrote him several emails with my proposals, but he didn't even respect me enough to never bother to write me back. Instead, he blocked me from being able to access his Web site after I wrote a passionate love note to him in his guest book. He erased the message and the blocked me from being able to access his site. This marijuana grower, LSD tripper, long haired dirty hippie type used the same tactics of oppression that CBS, NBC, CNN, the CIA, NSA, FBI uses to stop messages about the enlightenment of love from reaching the heart of man. I sent him several poems in the snail mail that our love inspired for his radio show, but he never responded.

In Joe's mind was a dead woman. Before I left he said that the most important thing for us to practice was honest communication with each other. But he wasn't into communication or honesty with me. Perhaps outlaws and lawyers were really the same men, two sides of the same coin. He had money to burn because he sold pot. And he smoked his pot throughout the day and night in a pipe that looked like a chopped down Redwood tree.

After talking with him on the phone, I know that he would never come back for me. We would never be lovers again even at Burning Man. For me, Burning Man was about the burns the patriarchy had done to women's hearts of centuries. How could I see Burning Man as being about the art of love and peace, non-violent resistance or building a sustainable urban environment? I could not. Getting off the phone, I was in a daze. The worst of my fears had come true. The world was in war in the Middle East. Israel had 300 to 500 nuclear weapons. The USA had 3,000 strategic nuclear weapons on hair trigger alert and Dusty did not have the courage to be my lovolutionary hero. It was all an illusion, a THC pipe dream as the world was a step closer to World War III.

So there you have it folks, another story about a fool in love and where her foolish adventures led her, to another fool's pot garden, his exclusive nuclear family paradise surrounded by no trespassing signs and big fences to protect his privacy. Joe had picked the perfect pseudonym for his persona and lifestyle, Hallucigenia Sparsa, a long extinct sea worm. If only I could find a wise love! Burning Man was a movement that started as a result of a heartache. So was it surprising that it ended for me in a heartache?

Now I had to pull myself together and try to put on a happy face to travel around Arizona with Len. He was very sympathetic to me and never reminded me that he had warned me not to go with Joe to North California. Before our travels begin, I had to transform the earring that Dusty had given me. I brought a string of Tibetan prayer beads and put the deer bone amulet on it. Then Len and I conducted a ritual to the heartache of Burning Man.

With the jar of water I had brought back with me from the East Coast for my love ritual with Bruce which never happened, I opened up the jar reflecting on the waves of the Atlantic Ocean on the coast of North Carolina. A little boy helped me gather the sand before the wave splashed the water in it. His joyful, innocent face came into my mind. Next, I said a few words about love while putting the Burning Man ashes into the Atlantic ocean water. The ashes turned the clear water black, turning it a terrible color as if it has been polluted by the lies of our tainted love.

Burning Woman

Off we went to Montezuma's Castle, built by the Singague (Spanish for without water) farmers who arrived in the Verde Valley around 600 A.D. Walking along the path to the ruins, all I could think about was Burning Man, and the folly of Western Civilization. Those ancient people were able to figure out how to live collectively and sustainable in large villages. Was the key to their success that they were a matrilineal society?

Then it came to me, my artwork at the next Burning Man will be the art of self-immolation. I had tried every conceivable way to get my message to the public and find co-creative loving partnerships with my intellectual peers, but every attempt I made had failed. I was completely burned out with trying to find creative comrades. Burning Man needed to make the connection between art and politics, the artitics of reality and the only way I could think to do this was by the act of the burning flesh of woman, the connection between love, death, and the torture of living in a patriarchal society. It would be my final act of performance art on this Earth.

Before the Big Burn of the Man next year, I would douse myself with paint thinner and then light the match saying, “Stop Burning Humanity! End War Now by building a Black Rock Arcology!” Beside me away from the flames would be my story about Burning Man and what I felt he is doing to the world by ignoring the political realities and the erotic forces in our lives. Maybe, just maybe, then he will take notice of my work.

I had been reading a book about mysticism and came across an image of millionaires Lynette Phillips of Australia. In 1978, she set herself on fire in front of the Palace of the League of Nations. Before she set herself on fire she said, “I have a fiery wish to fight against the luxury and egotism of this world.” I had this same wish. I could not get the image of Burning Woman out of my mind. Does it take a Burning Woman to make the ultimate sacrifice to finally make Burning Man see what he is doing to the hearts of womankind? Or would such a burning woman sacrifice only mean that she is playing into the war games of patriarchal religions?