I have always been really interested in different festivals throughout the world. In highschool I did a project all about different festivals and one of the festivals I read a lot about was Burning Man. Burning Man is known to most as a crazy hippie fest where everyone gets naked and sets a big wooden dude on fire. What they don’t know about it, is that Burning Man is an attempt to create a sort of liberal thinking utopian society, if only for a week.

I stumbled across a spectacular essay/article about one journalist, Seth Stevenson’s, “dispatch from the front line of travel” to Burning Man.

This “outsiders” view of the inside of Burning Man really helped me to see the allure of the odd, the allure of going to this strange festival and stepping outside all the comfort zones that ever previously existed. People are crave community, the sense of feeling as if they are part of a group. Essentially, that’s all Burning Man is… a bunch of people getting together to have fun TOGETHER. All the bells and whistles of Burning Man might at first seem like the main allure to the festival, but I agree with Stevenson. The central allure for Burning Man is the same that all festivals have: coming together to celebrate and have a good time to create a unified culture in the melting pot that is America. And should we really need an excuse to let a little of our crazy out and dress up like a centaur? You decide…