At Esalen 2016, everyone at the retreat was broken up into small groups to discuss very heady stuff for some long stretch of time, and I had the profound honor — and risk — of being in the same group as Larry. I had gotten pretty comfortable talking about heady Burning Man stuff by that point, but I’d never really held forth in front of Larry, and I began to realize I might be in some professional jeopardy if he didn’t like what he heard. I must have done okay, though, because at the bathroom break, he invited me to use the bathroom at his room nearby instead of walking all the way back to the central building. Suddenly, I was walking through the gardens on a sunny autumn day at Esalen, chatting with Larry Harvey about whatever.
That was just the start, though. Larry lit up a smoke on his balcony while I was in the bathroom, and when I came out, he clearly had no intention of leaving anytime soon. I mean, we were standing on a cliff at Big Sur, the sun was getting low, and the waves were crashing uproariously 30 feet below us… it was a pretty good place for a smoke break.
The beauty of the scene started to draw us deeper into conversation, much deeper than we had ever gone before (we hadn’t gone deep enough for him to so much as know who I was before). We got to talking about new love, which had been his experience lately. He told me he was about to bring a new partner to Burning Man for the first time, and he was nervous about it. So I told him about bringing my new partner to Burning Man, how we talked about it at the outset, how we made our needs clear, how we decided to share experiences or take time for ourselves, how we debriefed at the end… and then I fast-forwarded to the happy ending where we’re married now. Larry seemed relieved to have some concrete ideas to roll around.
That’s the story of how I gave Larry Harvey advice about bringing a new girlfriend to Burning Man. It seemed pretty normal in the moment, but by the time we were trudging back through Esalen’s garden to resume the heady discussion, the waves of how wonderful Larry had just been to me had crashed over my head. I realized I was holding my breath, and I let it out.