Our very own Tina Nanez made the recent pilgrimage to the playa for the most otherwordly festival on the planet: Burning Man. Burning Man is an eight day festival in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada terminating on Labor Day weekend. Those that descend on the playa participate in creative expression, community building, and self-reliance. Tina was one of the some 50,000 in attendance this past Labor Day weekend.

Before she went, I stumbled across a great perspective on Burning Man in Conde Nast’s new business imprint, “Portfolio.” It detailed how businessmen have been attending Burning Man, typically a radical event, including such past attendees as Amazon C.E.O. Jeff Bezos, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Google C.E.O. Eric Schmidt. One executive related how he went since the experience opened him up to innovation and creativity, believing that when he came back he was returning a better executive. Read more at: http://www.portfolio.com/executives/features/2007/08/27/Executives-at-Burning-Man

However, I sat down with Tina to see what the experience was like first hand, and immediately got the sense that it was a wonderland of creativity that must have been like candy for the mind. In particular, she related how one night, a large truck came onto the playa, and stopped in the very middle, suddenly opening up and exposing hundreds of lightsabers while blasting the theme to Star Wars. Bicycles descended on the truck, glow sticks and streamers trailing behind them, nobody able to get there fast enough to engage Jedi playfighting. She related how to see the kids faces as everyone was suddenly in a galaxy far, far away was unforgettable.