Shura was sitting next to me when I took this photo at the temple burn in 2007. This year, we are taking her ashes to the temple burn. We miss you, Shurabee...

Off to the playa in the morning. Burn #9. Love to you all, and see you on the other side!

Photos from Beloved are up at Flickr. The sweetest of the sweetest!

Next stop...Burning Man!

I finally posted last year's Burning Man photos on Flickr! Just in time to start getting excited for this year.

The Man burns in 25 days!

But first, Beloved. I am really looking forward to this!

Fairies visited my street...

Summer is here! No time for cameras and computers; too busy playing!

The Temple of Kukulkan.

"On the Spring and Autumn equinox, at the rising and setting of the sun, the corner of the structure casts a shadow in the shape of a plumed serpent - Kukulcan, or Quetzalcoatl - along the west side of the north staircase. On these two annual occasions, the shadows from the corner tiers slither down the northern side of the pyramid with the sun's movement to the serpent's head at the base." ~From Wikipedia.

Photo set from our recent trip to the Yucatan Peninsula is up at Flickr.

Submitted for Photo Friday: Sunshine.

We visited Isla Mujeres, Playa Del Carmen, Tulum, Coba, Valladolid, Piste, & Chichen Itza.

Dancing through the dawn on the playa...

Submitted for Photo Friday: Dawn.

Lots of friends who traveled to the Shambhala Music Festival in Salmo, B.C. last weekend have been talking about our our experiences there, and the theme of our musings has been "has it changed, or have we?"

Here are a few observations, written originally in an email to my friend Ariel (who arrived on Friday with her husband Andreas, and then left on Saturday afternoon and go camping in quieter places instead):

"Shambhala as an experience as a whole was amazing. The festival itself wasn't. But my personal travels through growth and transformation and evolution were profound, and in a lot of ways the setting of Shambhala was integral to that work; Shambhala outgrew us, and we outgrew Shambhala.

I hate being the one saying "it was better back when...", but in this case, I can't help but notice the difference between Shambhala when we started going and Shambhala now. There are literally almost twice as many people now, and they produced four times more litter and chaos. They are younger, and I don't just mean younger in years, but less evolved, less conscious as a collective. The music was younger. There was a lot of pop club music, music with dirty bass and dirty words. DJ's with giant egos and bigger mouths (dirty mouths), and they weren't using their big mouths to share any community values or anything that matters at all. The intention of "Shambhala" was missing. For as much as I've always been in the back laughing on the inside at "prayerformance," I'm also now keenly aware that I miss the intention behind those rituals. Shambhala didn't feel sacred to me at all this year. It felt totally mainstream. It felt like Spring Break in Florida.

I know that all of those chaos elements have always been there, but I felt it strongly this year: we have evolved. Shambhala has devolved.

And that's fantastically fine...at least, our own evolution is. It's great being a grown-up. It's great having purpose and values and vision. I'm grateful for every day of my life that's taken me step by step further away from that pandemonium of ego and disharmony, and closer to my source, my own higher being, closer to my dear and evolving friends, closer to my real community, closer to all that really matters. So it was really poignant to be in that place at this time, as it was an amazing physical reflection of growth. And I am glad to be growing.

That said, sunday was better than the rest of the weekend. The musical IQ increased substantially, the crowd was smaller, and the collective consciousness was raised a notch. Sunday felt a touch closer to the way I remember Shambhala in earlier years. We did still get in some great music and dancing, and it was sweet to connect more deeply with the few of us that stayed."

So, I won't be back to Shambhala next year, and that's ok. Honestly I went this year with the intention of saying goodbye anyhow; I already knew I was ready to move on to doing other things with my time and money. I'm glad I had one last romp through the still-magical sound stages, trails, and waters of Shambhala, and, I'm ready to move on.

I have been thinking for the past year or so about my evolution through so many years of being a festival kid, and have had a sense for at least the last year that it was time to slow down. I did go to a couple less festivals this summer, but I didn't have clear reasons for choosing some and declining others. I think I do now.

I don't really ever see myself giving up music or dancing or celebrating with my tribe. These gatherings are integral to my community, my spirituality, my heart. And, I feel myself being drawn much more to the events that really have heart, the ones with intention, the ones where real conscious connections and social evolution are being made. For the most part, I'm feeling these values in the smaller events. Blooming Heart on Oracas Island this year was really the highlight of my summer: intimate, intentional, heartful. I also felt our community strongly bonded at Prosperity again (it has always been and remains a favorite). And although I missed it this year, in past summers, Ariel & Andreas' summer campout at Sacred Groves has always hit the spot. The last Oracle Gathering of the sequence, also this summer, felt full of heart and community too. And although it's not smaller, I'm also again feeling the draw of Burning Man, which has annually shown me the faces of god and centered my soul (despite its 50,000 participants, this festival has managed not only to hold closely to its values and intentions, but to spawn whole community movements based on these principles...amazing.) So I'm not washing my hands of festivals, but it is my intention to choose fewer festivals, and to choose those with the most intimate & heart-felt of intentions. It's the people and their intentions that make the festival, not the DJ's, not the sound systems, not the visuals.

So next year I'm going to follow my heart to fewer festivals, and choose them with care and intention. Goodbye, Shambhala (and hello Beloved?)

Thorny and beautiful; I feel like this sometimes.

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Full of gratitude. Life is beautiful!
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25 Random Things About Me, Continued (and the last re-post from this meme on Facebook):

25) My sister-in-law once said to my mom "I barely recognize Dawn each time I see her: it seems like she's always re-inventing herself." My mom replied that I haven't changed a bit since childhood, and that I'm still the same girl who had to try everything, join every club, play every sport, and explore all of life deeply. And that remains the ultimate truth of me: I'm a dabbler, a jack of all trades, master of none. The only constant in my life is change, and I like it that way. It's one big adventure, it's all been full of magic, and the ride's far from over. Thanks to all of you for playing with me, and I'm looking forward to the next chapters...

25 Random Thing About Me, Continued:

24) It would take another list of 25 things to begin to touch on all of the magic things and wondrous people that have crossed my path since then, but most of you who might read this already know that part of the story, and it's a work in progress, anyhow.

25 Random Things, Continued:

23) I first read about Burning Man when I was still married, in a coffee table book. My ex-husband thought I was nuts for wanting to go. After we got divorced, it popped into my head one day, so I found their web page (I can't say I Googled it, because it was pre-google), read everything on the site, and bought a ticket. It was 2002. I drove to Black Rock City in my VW Camper not knowing anyone, not ever having heard a single story about it, and with no pre-conceived notions about it. I arrived on the playa without a single costume, but with plenty of water and even some shade. It turned out that one of the great loves of my life, Jay Allen (who was at the time living in Budapest), had been the year before, so he invited me to join his camp of San Francisco web/tech geeks called the Vogons. Thus I was baptized into world of wonderful weirdness, super-smart geeks, mind-explosion, art beyond my imagination, soulful community without dogma, and many wonders yet to come.

25 Random Things About Me, Continued

22) While working as a high school counselor, I took a group of students to a career fair, and sat in with some of them during a session on nursing. I had been a school counselor for 5 years at that point, and had only finally been able to put my finger on what I was dissatisfied; I felt under constant pressure to fix things that couldn't be fixed. Nursing sounded so much more concrete, so I jumped ship and went to nursing school, while working full time as an EMT. It was a good move. Now I'm a Flight Nurse, and I get to experience some of the flying thrill that I was after when I wanted to be a Top Gun (see #9), I got over my fear of needles (see #4), and I still get to do work that really matters to people and makes a difference.

25 Random Things About Me, Continued

22) While working as a high school counselor, I took a group of students to a career fair, and sat in with some of them during a session on nursing. I had been a school counselor for 5 years at that point, and had only finally been able to put my finger on what I was dissatisfied; I felt under constant pressure to fix things that couldn't be fixed. Nursing sounded so much more concrete, so I jumped ship and went to nursing school, while working full time as an EMT. It was a good move. Now I'm a Flight Nurse, and I get to experience some of the flying thrill that I was after when I wanted to be a Top Gun (see #9), I got over my fear of needles (see #4), and I still get to do work that really matters to people and makes a difference.

20) I initially (briefly) met my eventual husband, Jon, at a sailboat regatta in Cleveland in 1995. His version of the story is that he saw me come in off the water from racing one day. I was wearing a shorty wetsuit with a bikini under it. When I pulled the top of the wetsuit down, he saw the bruises that were covering my arms and hips (Thistles are rather violent boats to sail), and said to his friend "That's the kind of girl I'm going to marry!" We met again in 1997 at another regatta, this time in San Diego, which was the beginning of a whirlwind 8-month courtship. He came to Seattle for the summer, then I moved to Phoenix (his hometown) for 9 months, then we sold his house in Phoenix, bought a beautiful 42-foot sailboat to live on, moved back to Washington, and got married in 1998.

21) It turns out that two-year-crushes from afar aren't actually a very good foundation for a marriage, and although we seemed like a good match on paper, Jon and I spent our entire two-year marriage in counseling, trying to get along while living in a space of 42 X 12 feet at its largest, and eventually divorced in 2000. I have not heard from him since the day of our divorce. That seems kind of weird, but I had done so much processing of it before it actually happened, that I was really ready to move on by the time it ended.