Hello hippies, I’ve just lived an incredible experience I’d like to share with you. This is mainly about how I felt about it, it’s about love, openness and acceptance. Maybe it inspires you to seek for something similar!

First, some updates about corona: I’m fully vaccinated. Science is a wonderful thing! I’m back in Germany and the numbers here are very manageable, which allows us to live a close to normal life.

I’m happy. Of course I’m happy. But to start life again, talking to people for hours, meeting them in parks, sitting straight on a picnic cloth, and sharing food, do we hug or not, why is this still a question, can I share my cigarette? Well, I’m healthy but there are still other diseases around right, oh man, my back hurts, my couch is much better, why did I come etc. etc. etc. I just wanted to write it here, that was a couple of tough months and only now I’m being able to turn off this mindset a bit and come back to some “normality”, you’re not alone finding this is difficult.

Well, now to the easy things: I’ve been to my first burner gathering this past weekend. What is a burner? You might have heard of Burning Man, the huge festival happening in whatever desert in the US, maybe even about the 10 principles that rules the event, but the kind I’m talking about is very different. It was a small event, less than 200 people, we camped in Germany countryside for 4 days and it felt like a parallel universe of pure love and kindness where everyone was doing their best to make everyone around them happier.

This festival wasn’t about getting high on amphetamines and alcohol and passing out while 180bpm music is literally blasting your tent out. I think that’s why people insist in not calling it a festival. This was about connecting with the inner you of people. I did this before, but I had no idea something in this scale was possible.

“[The Japanese people] are so crafty in their hearts that nobody can understand them. Whence it is said that they have three hearts: a false one in their mouths for all the world to see, another within their breasts only for their friends, and the third in the depths of their hearts, reserved for themselves alone and never manifested to anybody.”

From História da Igreja do Japão vol I pg 173, written by Father João Rodrigues, SJ.

I felt like as if people were living their third hidden heart openly, sharing it with whoever wanted to see it and take part on it. And that was exactly what I was looking for. After so many months of seclusion and loneliness - connecting to people - be them my friends, strangers, anyone, everyone, is what I strived for the most (even though it’s hard! It’s a bit of a contradictory feeling with this one that I talked about earlier. At the same time I want to open up and embrace the world, I want to curl up and lay on my balcony’s floor. But these feelings, they’re all here and are all valid, I’m just choosing wich one to follow).

To tell you one of the most brilliant things about this community I’d like to go on a little digression about myself: these past months, I happened to develop a really deep relationship with tattoos. I’ve been tattoing some friends and experimenting on myself, it’s a very meaningful experience to me and I intend to talk about it here once I’m able to do a tattoo trip! A couple of weeks ago I just got a new one done. It’s Haku from Spirited Away, to me it represents how important it is to accept help.

I’m a very strict person and to me is always hard to accept help from others, be them friends, family, strangers, anyone! I feel good helping others, but when asking for help I feel like I’m being cumbersome and needy. I know this is not healthy and I’ve been battling for months to change this tought process and even though I made some progress, it was still very far from a healthy mindset.

However, this burner showed me how rewarding it is to accept help, to open up and be fragile. By accepting help you’re not “being cumbersome” you’re bringing happiness to people who like to help. You are, perhaps, showing and recognizing your fragilities, talking about them, working on them, which allows you to become a better person. You’re also also connecting with people that are helping you, because they see these fragilities and they see themselves.

This experience showed me again how we’re all just humans, struggling with such similar things and striving for such similar things and being content with such similar things. There was people from all around the world in this festival, but it didn’t really matter where you came from, we’d connect the same.

I loved to see people’s third heart and to show mine. I’m thankful for all the beautiful souls that shared this event with me and made it so whimsical. Every and each one of them had their part. These hippies made a deep impression on me and now that I know that this is possible I’ll try to replicate it more often on the real world.

Thank you!

Many leafy and dusty hugs. 🍃🔥

I hope to see you all again and again and again.