I want to let you
know about something very special that happened to us at the Burning
Man festival (an art/radical self expression event held by 25,000
intelligent people in the Black Rock desert of Nevada each summer).
Galen and I were walking on the "playa" as the flat lakebed is known
and we came across this year's most poignant art installation, the
Mausoleum, a two story jigsaw puzzle wooden pagoda created by
an artist who lost both his wife and his artistic partner the previous
year. This installation was swarming with people, some crying. The
purpose of the installation was to allow people to inscribe names
of loved ones lost on the jigsaw puzzle pieces of the structure or
on wooden blocks. On the final night of the festival, this structure
was to be burned, sending tens of thousands of messages to the spirits
of those departed. In the very heart of the structure was an altar
on which the main repository of signed wooden blocks was placed. |
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Closeup of Douglas' dedication
You can
imagine the feeling I had when I noticed that wrapped around
that altar was a colored cloth (a towel, what else?) with Douglas
Adams' name inscribed there, dedicating the altar to him. This
honoring of Douglas by some kind, thoughtful soul, rekindled
my feelings for what happened and motivated me to capture this
for the record. |
More
on the Mausoleum
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