Write to us at: playerandsassy@hotmail.com

Ten years of Burning Man, and what a wonderful experience. What a blast!! We met so many beautiful people and learned so much about ourselves, there is no way we could put a price tag on it! This site, BlackRockTribe.com, is about what we two found in Black Rock City. Chronicled in these following webpages is a general idea of our journey peppered with lots of photos and soon we will have many videos. (Even though there will be suggested links to videos, they are not up yet! That merely indicates where the video link is going to be! I hope to have the videos up soon.) The videos from 1997 are now up!

Our “playa names” are Player and Sassy. Here is our story, from 1997 through 2006. We attended Burning Man for ten years in a row, and there is little doubt that the experience had a profound affect on our lives, our relationship, our outlook on life, the life-long friendships forged in the Black Rock Desert, unbelievably rich memories bordering on the surreal, the acquisition of survival skills and how to make a camp, various construction ideas, philosophical ideas, our concept of “reality,” and our very comprehension of who we are as a species.

We are currently in the process of totally redoing this site, and it is currently being updated on a weekly basis. This page will note when it is finished. You can always learn more about Burning Man at the official Burning Man Website.

For us, Burning Man was about lots of friendly encounters with talented, artistic, and eccentric people that possess the most important thing a human being could possibly offer another, compassion. Burning Man offers an opportunity for people to experience evolving culture with out corporate mediation. This is why people go into the most unforgiving lifeless piece of the planet desert there is. I believe that these thousands of people trek to the bleak desert that is replete with dangerous dust storms and prone to flooding because Black Rock City is, or was, perhaps the last human vestige in our modern culture where we are enabled to experience, en masse, an interconnection with something that is larger than ourselves and difficult to perceive in our modern civilization full of media distractions and corporate propaganda.

In other words, Black Rock City was an unusual place in our modern mediated culture because here was a bubble of a separate reality where our traditional roles (that is to say, “traditional roles” for our culture) are discarded and replaced by tribal-like roles. You simply cannot be exactly who you were/are back in the default world! That identity is lost here, whether you like it or not and whether you even know it or not! You can actually redefine YOU. We are evolved for tribal roles - it is only in our global modern culture that we find such vast dysfunctional behavior patterns permeating every level of society on a global basis because we are forced into pre-formed molds that are antithetical to human nature. We didn’t evolve to be sitting at desks or standing at a cash register forty hours a week!!! Tribal roles are innate within our kind, our DNA.

In other words, in BRC humans can be humane to each other, without wondering if we can sell you something, or use you to buy something from - exchanging cheap meaningless slips of paper.

In other words . . . people in BRC can actually treat each other like, well, like people, drawing upon millions of years of evolution to find our own compassion for each other - and perhaps even more importantly, discover that compassion in you and me and “us” and “them” . . . because that is who we are. And indeed, it is compassion that makes us human. And compassion comes from the realization that we are one with each other, one with our tribe, and one with the universe.

Please support this website and my continuing research into culture by purchasing my book, Cultural Vision, which examines our basic inborn human need for a spiritual interconnection with:
(1) our planet, the land we live and depend upon, and the cosmos,
(2) other human beings and other forms of life, and
(3) our greater purpose within our communities (or tribe).

Enjoy Your Evolution.                                

Peace, Love, and Light,
-- Player (and Sassy!)

On to the Photo Year Index