Seeing Through the Eyes of Love

This talk was given at Burning Man's 2016 TEDx event. The event was scheduled to run from 8pm to midnight. Because of technical challenges, my talk, the closing talk of the evening, took place at 2am. I had enough coffee in me to fuel an entire camp. I am grateful for the volunteers who faced many challenges to pull off such a great event in the middle of nowhere.

Xanthi Pinkerton of Trinity Cathedral created a video with my Burning Man Blessing and photos I took at Burning Man and Trinity Cathedral.

Burning Man makes the cover of The Living Church (with my photo!) 

Here's the article:

http://livingchurch.org/behold-man

Prior to going to Burning Man, I was featured in this article in the Sacramento Bee

As well as this TV news report:

I was invited to speak at the Sun Valley Wellness Festival. This was my second opportunity to speak at this remarkable event. Last year I spoke about Christian spirituality.  I believe it was the time first someone was invited to speak about Jesus and Christianity at this festival.  This year I spoke about my experiences at Burning Man.  It great a great experience.  Last year I spent much of the weekend visiting friends.  This year, I stayed at the Inn and participated in the festival.  

Friday night I listened to Jewell.  

Saturday was MC Yogi and David Whyte.  I had lunch with MC Yogi and his DJ Brandon.  That night they had an amazing concert and we danced for hours.  Sunday was my talk and Marianne Williamson.  There were so many other great speakers, but I needed to work on my own talk.  It was a very rich weekend.  

Sun Valley Property News focused on the festival for their June issue and included an article on my talk using my own pictures.  It's the first time my photos were published in a magazine.  

The Wellness Festival folks published a couple of clips of my talk, including one of me blessing someone in the audience. 

I was asked to speak to the Sacramento Buddhist Meditation Group at their weekly Sunday evening meditation meeting. This talk took place after 40 minutes of silent meditation.

I returned from Burning Man Saturday evening, September 5, and preached about the experience on Sunday morning. The sermon was posted on Facebook and quickly became the most popular sermon I ever posted.  Here's the video.

This sermon was much longer than I usually preach.  The congregation was eager to hear about my experience and I didn't have the time to prepare a sermon that did justice to the experience in a briefer form.

Shortly after arriving home after dropping my Captain America son off at the West Point Prep School, my amazing hippie, dread-locked, tattooed, I'm-more-of-a-Buddhist, 22 year-old daughter asked me, her 53 year old Episcopal Priest father to go with her to Burning Man.   I love the constant adventure of parenting.  And I love my daughter.  (And truth be told, part of me has always wanted to go to Burning Man.) So on Monday I will be going to the Playa so Laura and I can experience our first Burning Man together.

When my wife Andrea saw the list of things we needed to bring in order to survive, she commented that it was longer than her packing list for her deployment for Afghanistan.   In addition to all the regular camping supplies one needs, you have to build a shade structure so you don't bake when you are trying to nap in the day in the blazing sun and heat.  So I have learned how to build a monkey hut.