My most legendary moment from Alchemy unfolds after clambering atop a box truck to watch labyrinth walkers from above.

*The Alchemy Afterburn Glow*

From my chilly Cheshire Cat perch, our temporary city unfolds around me. The sky harbors a warm glow from the night’s effigy burn, fire poofers still echoing playfully from camps and art cars across a sonic mishmash of DJs and revelers.

It’s a little darker in our neighborhood by design, and before me, the lights of a labyrinth dedicated to the emotion of belonging are…magnificent.

From this height, I gain perspective on the 13-hour build from days earlier. The two standing mirrors set just so to define the center. The green and yellow paths spiraling out. I rejoice in the precision of points pulled out from the center, remembering the sun beating down as I pulled the rope taut, eyeballing the symmetry.

I remember my campmate April delivering tiny trays of cheese and crackers and hydration reminders, Journey and Wizard talking story as they unroll strands of solar LEDs along my carefully placed rope. I want to join their conversation, I want to walk the city as it’s being built, I want to be everywhere all at once, but creating the initial orientation and paths of a labyrinth—an activity my friends have dubbed “sandpipering”—is nonverbal space for me.

To recenter myself in flow, I tune in to the camp playlist we’ve collaborated on. I step back to where the two entrances will go and look north, imagining the bold geometry inspired by a pattern in Tunisia’s Great Mosque of Kairouan. I take a shade break and mentally rotate and stretch or shorten points.

Also, I’ve just been informed by city planning that I need to allow for an additional setback at the NE corner of our lot to accommodate emergency vehicles, should they ever be needed.

This alters my footprint, and I’m rejiggering the design on the fly. Colors get switched in this process, turning the outer perimeter from red to purple.

Days later, from my bird’s-eye perch atop the box truck, I LOVE the change. The red solars are bright, but their longer wavelength pales beside the mesmerizing sparks of purple that capture the eye.

The outer petals are…less crisp…than in my sketches. I remember my energy flagging about seven hours in, then powering up about ten hours in when a stranger offered to help. His fascination and easy, earnest assistance galvanized me to stake major points to the ground, preserving our hard work from winds and feet.

Creating art and community are the two things I love most about a burn.

For me, art explores vulnerable spaces, and I need a certain type of container to go as deep as I crave. My last two major light labyrinth installations have been dedicated to shame and resignation, and while I actively seek out belonging, unlike these two, I still struggle mightily with what it feels like to belong and be longed for.

For example, I adore each and every one of my campmates, and I know they long for my presence around the campfire near the labyrinth’s entrance. My box truck perch feels risky, both physically and socially…Before I can spin out in social anxiety, the pattern reminds me that belonging is felt not just in the togetherness but in the spaces.

I need this vantage to process, and tears well up, just realizing that acting on this need in this container with these people won’t result in ostracism.

At the entrance, I hear walkers debating whether to enter the labyrinth single file or to split up and take the adjacent paths. My own words echo back from other mouths…

“There’s no right or wrong way, but THAT way is very satisfying…It means you’ll travel together around the perimeter, split up to have your own adventures, and spiral around each other to meet in the center…Which path should you take? It really boils down to whether you want to walk the rainbow forwards or backwards!”

I watch pairs and groups hold hands or dance side by side, and then their exclamations as paths diverge. Some couples linger here, heads bent in earnest conversation. Hugs are given. Farewells, as if before a long separation.

Sometimes this catalyzes a race to the center, others slow down. People call across the pattern to each other for reassurance or to describe their experiences: one traverses from purple through blue and green while the other moves from red into orange and yellow.

Sometimes, it’s nothing but kazoos, chickens, or a tinny, recorded voice announcing, “Lizard.”

Delighted shrieks of reunion ring out in the center. People high-five, dance, hug, eye-gaze, sob, primp in the mirrors, do acrobatics, take selfies, have heart-to-hearts, break out flow toys, cast lights on the signs surrounding the center, duel or cast spells with the flashing magic wands that my campmate Brandy provided for walkers to light their way.

The variations in how they interact with the labyrinth astound me, and yet, I spot patterns in this pattern.

The spotlit mirrors Wizard has built for the center really help people feel seen. They reflect self-awareness. They create context.

My first walk was a solo journey, and I remember turning a corner and gasping at coming face-to-face with myself.
My second walk, with my husband and love of my life, where the corner-turn revealed us standing side-by-side, each to the other.
My third walk, with all of Camp SandWitches, came as a delighted surprise…

I proposed a camp walkabout on Friday, after every SandWitch arrived. I meant visiting the city together, and everyone else thought I meant a group labyrinth walk. In hindsight that seems so obvious and obviously marvelous, I can’t believe it never occurred to me.

And it is a shiny, spectacular, shouty, dancey, disorienting, playful, effervescent joyride of a walk. From the one comes the two, from the two come the ten-thousand things. I am honored and humbled. I can’t form complete sentences. I am swept away by belonging off into the night.

Atop the box truck, I really have to pee. I’m not ready to leave my perch yet, so I dangle my weary ankles over the edge, feel the smooth lines of a carved wooden bracelet, and don my prismatic glasses. A group is exiting the center, and one walker assures:

“This is the way. We get to walk their path, and they get to walk ours.”

Another new perspective. Realizing this pattern invites participants to “walk a spell in someone else’s shoes”, as my grandmother used to say, I’m bawling.

The emotion, the connections, the magnitude of the gift I’ve wrought, spills down my face, and I’m snuffling and honking and scrambling for a handkerchief.

It’s all the feels as this wave of emotion ebbs and I’m suddenly giggling at an exchange below me:

“I like your frog costume!”

“I’m not a frog; I’m a lizard!”

“Oh! Terribly sorry! Didn’t mean to mis-species you!”

Alchemy hosts about 2,500 citizens, and once the sun sets, the labyrinth is rarely empty. This means most walkers encounter strangers.

When I went through labyrinth facilitator training, there was a whole section on how to guide participants into soft gazes and impart etiquette for what to do when meeting someone on the path, especially going the opposite direction.

Before me, people are figuring it out on their own, and I’m entranced by an exiting group spontaneously spinning “Beep boop bip!” around a group on their way in. This second group, on their way out, encounters a third and spins about them crying “Beep, boop, bip!” The third group adopts this, passing it to a fourth, and my jaw drops as the custom perpetuates past eight generations.

Belonging engenders shared rituals, from the profound to the silly.

I’m thinking about this as I finally clamber down off the truck and spot a scarred yellow flag staked to the middle of a petal. Earlier that day, while I was enjoying my morning coffee, someone walked purposefully to the center of the labyrinth while shouldering a yellow flag atop a wooden pole.

Every year, a citywide “game” erupts as individuals and camps vie to collect as many flags as possible. Much trickery, social engineering, and outright theft is involved, with many legendary stories surrounding the game’s origin and perpetuation.

A flag must remain visible, though it’s only fair game when not being held by a human. In the center of the labyrinth, this bearer looks around slowly before propping the flag up carefully along a mirror to adjust the drape of their top with both hands. Considering, they move the flag to the yellow mirror, then back to the green, tucking the flag into the mirror’s decoration so that it looks as if it belongs there. Satisfied, they walk the entire path purposefully to the exit.

The SandWitches debate what to do. “Kaz hates this game,” Cyn warns, “he’s going to be so pissed when he wakes up to find someone MOOPed* a flag in our camp!” Meanwhile, a passerby has spied the camouflaged flag and is hopping the labyrinth lines on a beeline straight to the center

“NOPE!” bellows Journey, “The person who left it there walked the whole path deliberately with intention. You have to do the same!”

As our would-be flag thief dashes to the entrance to complete the quest, I up the ante: “I cast Monty Python’s Silly Walks upon you, and you must silly walk your way to the center!” Our assailant doesn’t even complete duck-walking and pirouetting the full initial perimeter before giving up and stalking off in search of easier prey.

* MOOP stands for matter out of place, and ensuring that we leave no trace is one of the 10 principles of a Burning Man-style event.

When Kaz wakes, he removes the flag from the pole, hammers grommets into all four corners, dumps cooler water on a patch of ground next to his tent, pins the flag down, and calmly blowtorches the word “No” onto it.

“That’s my side of the tent,” Cyn shrieks in quasi-mock horror as the flag’s fabric sizzles and melts.

I’m surprisingly okay with Kaz firmly staking his finished product into one of the labyrinth’s petals. Belonging requires some powerful “No” energy. I have to be willing to say no to the people and containers that don’t align, to the voices in my head that tell me I’m not enough or too much to ever belong.

Also, no one steals our “No” flag. I find this terribly significant.

Making my way from the top of the box truck to our campfire, I pass the “No” to see people saying “Yes” to a hot cuppa from the Jasmine Dragon Tea House. The other art installation in camp, brought by Cheesecake and Jake, has been a deliciously shady nook for journaling, napping, and blending custom teas all week. One of my most technicolor moments was watching the sunset light vibrate through the delicate blossoms, greenery, and disco witch strands she strung.

I suggest some fresh ginger for the visitor’s tea blend, wander past the Grounding Patterns Elemental Station to catch the latest zen sand garden design, and nestle into a camp chair around the fire pit.

Sixteen years of burning, and this is the first time I’ve spent all night in my own camp (except for stepping out for the main effigy burn). It feels magnificent. I co-created this art, this community, and for this present moment, I want nothing more than to chant “the only way forward is through!” with the other SandWitches. To laugh. To storycatch. To belong.

Now that I’m back at home, I’m integrating all these experiences in an Afterburn glow:

I’m gazing at the dress someone gifted me one night because it matched my sparkly witch hat, how legendary it felt to head back out into the burn after an impromptu costume change.
I’m finding a home for the labyrinth pattern painstakingly embroidered by Wizard.
I’m researching krill puns, for reasons.
I’m cradling a cat with one hand and tracing the finger labyrinth I wood-burned with the other.
I’m nourishing myself, stretching my sore body, distilling the magic.

To Belong and Be Longed For

My most legendary moment from Alchemy unfolds after clambering atop a box truck to watch labyrinth walkers from above.

This alters my footprint, and I’m rejiggering the design on the fly. Colors get switched in this process, turning the outer perimeter from red to purple.

Creating art and community are the two things I love most about a burn.

Belonging engenders shared rituals, from the profound to the silly.

This Be-Longing