The Ten Burning Man Principles, Number Five

Here is one of the more thoughtful and thought-provoking concept descriptions: Radical self-expression arises from the unique gifts of the individual. No one other than the individual or a collaborating group can determine its content. It is offered as a gift to others. In this spirit, the giver should respect the rights and liberties of the recipient.

Radical self-expression is really a dangerous thing to promote. You don't see our government promoting radical self-expression. On the contrary, many entities which claim to be in support of the arts are actually agents of censorship. This concept is very progressive, and that's part of why it is hard to articulate and hard to understand. When people dig in and find their own self-expression, the uniqueness, often the unique silliness, of their offering is staggering. Walking through the city and out across the open playa through the art installations, you can see a constantly changing array of expression.

Bicycles are turned into animals, fairies, and mechanical wonders. People on stilts dressed as insects fight with sticks that look like giant q-tips. Self-expression takes forms other than visual, too. Groups come together to make a grassy lawn to sleep on, sheltering it in a dome against the elements. One camp displays a landscape of pink flamingos, no statement intended, just the icon of two-dimensional birds standing on one foot.

There is so much expression here it tends to open people up to new ideas about what they might bring. By the last few days of the week the conversation is going on all over the city, "What will I do next year?" "How can I do it better?"

The environment itself prompts a certain kind of self-expression. For people who stay the entire eight days or longer, comfort is an important consideration. Within that criteria, though, an amazing scope of creativity emerges again. Colorful and imaginative ways to cover one's head in a dust storm. Brilliant additions to the bike lighting realm create their own forms of art, as bicycles travel in herds with similar lighting. Even the need to be able to find your friends in the darkness, amidst thousands of others at one of the big burns, engenders a special creation of hat gear with lighting that the group knows as their own.

One of the friendliest forms of expression comes late in the week, when the street signs start to disappear. The city keeps morphing and changing as camps arrive and come apart, so the street signs are sometimes the only way you know where you are. After the burn of the man on Saturday night, most of the signs are suddenly gone. I've never seen anyone take a sign, so I'm not sure why this happens, but they do disappear. Within a few hours, people are redecorating their corner with new signs made from whatever they have at hand. I bicycle through intersections, loudly thanking anyone around for being expressing such good citizenship.