"Burn," she said.

In a few hours I will begin my trek to the Burning Man festival. Last week, I was unexpectedly let go from my job of the last four years. The firing was a bad scene; I was one of the founders of said company. Over the last two weeks I have been running into friends and co-workers who know my work there and it has been a confusing and conflicting period. Various friends and co-workers know various elements and interpretations of the events that led to my dismissal. Most of them are friendly with both my former business partner and me, and are trying to remain neutral since “facts” are always up for interpretation and no one’s really sure exactly what really went on between my partner and me. Indeed, I don’t blame anyone for his or her impartiality. Even I’m not sure how two old friends who worked side by side for years can have the sort of falling out that he and I seem to have had. I am avoiding any and all details of the event, as they are not relevant and would only be my biased and subjective take on the scene anyway, but suffice to say, I feel I was wronged, as apparently do many others, but that’s life, business is business and we all need to move on to bigger and better things.

So I burn. I do hope that this trip, the longest solo journey I have ever been on, will both provide me answers as to how I have come to this point, what decisions I might have made differently, and what was also simply unavoidable and out of my realm of control. But more than answers to the past, I’m hoping this trip will show me something about my future, what lays ahead, what new goals to set for myself, and how best to choose a positive path that will allow me to put the past in perspective and use all the wonderful and difficult experiences I’ve been through, to create something new and wonderful.

“Burn,” she said. A friend of mine, DJ Goldilox, she’ll be at the festival, unexpectedly dropped out of the ether about six months ago, essentially showing up on my doorstep after years and years of us not having seen each other. She had been to the West Coast and Europe, married and divorced, and, as we caught up with each other’s life stories, she kept coming back to telling me about the Burning Man Festival. I HAD to go, she repeated. You need to, “Burn.” I made excuses that my job was way too demanding for me to take off the 2-3 weeks necessary to check out the festival this summer. I had already planned a trip to Italy (which was wonderful and up to this point the most awe inspiring trip I’ve ever been on, there’s something about sitting on a 2600 year-old Greek Altar in the ruins of an ancient temple watching the sun set over mountains hiding Etna in the distance…), bla bla bla, excuse, excuse, excuse.

Fate has a funny way of forcing its hand.

“Burn,” she said. And so I will. Baptism my fire, a cleansing of the soul, a fiery Phoenix and rebirth and one hell of a road trip to and fro’.

If I have time before I leave I will post a bit of an itinerary and may be able to make occasional posts from the road, but I don’t expect to have very much access to the ‘net over the next 3-4 weeks.

Peace.