EP 79 Shadow Shorts #15

Shadow Shorts #15 is out now! Recorded at BRC in 2025 participants were challenged to explain BM‘s impact in 5 minutes or less. Each Shadow Short is one person’s story, please enjoy this short story of how Burning Man has impacted and influenced people over time.

Meet MJ who explores the profound personal transformation and communal spirit fostered at the Burning Man festival. Through MJ’s reflections on her history of building massive art installations like the Temple, the narrative highlights themes of gender equality on job sites, the cultivation of deep gratitude, and the acceptance of life's unpredictability. The conversation underscores a stark contrast between the generosity of the festival's social environment and the "default world," illustrating how the event functions as a vital home for international connection and creative collaboration. Mj describes the enduring impact of the event's culture, framing these shared stories as a way to preserve the community's unique legacy.

Please visit https://shadowoftheman.buzzsprout.com/ for all of the details and links.

Email shadowofthemanpodcast@gmail.com if you want to be a guest or if you have any concerns about the show.

Please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen, it REALLY helps the show to even appear in search results.

Transcript

Copy

Before we start, I would like to ask your help to do two things. First, tell a friend or two who you think might like the show. And second, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. The more reviews the show gets, the more likely it will even appear in search results. Thank you, and now on to the show. 

They make the trek out to Burning Man for a week and a day. After a lot of work, oh, there's a lot of play. Party party drama, drama, drama. b****, b****, b****. Year after year, they come back to scratch that itch. They all say their lives have been changed. After many years, lives have been rearranged. That changes what this show is all about. You'll see the impact of Burning Man up and out. So sit back, relax, and cancel all your plans. These are the stories about the shadow of the man. 

Hello and welcome to the Shadow of the Man Show. I am your host, That Andy. This is a Shadow Shorts episode recorded at Burning Man 2025. You can tell because of the background sounds. Okay, I have to apologize in advance for the variable sound quality. The microphones are quite sensitive and it picked up some noise from handling and occasionally the speakers allowed the microphone to drift away while speaking. Uh the sound might be more variable than the studio recordings, but the stories are fantastic. Please enjoy.

Hi I'm MJ. I'm from New Jersey. I've been burning since 2014, although I missed 2024. I've had some real different experiences here at Burning Man that have had sort of different impacts on me. I came to build the temple in 2018, and I learned three things there that I will never forget. One, if I ever hear a man give a woman a hard time on a job site again, as long as I live, he'll never hear the end of it from I saw women do every possible job you could imagine from running heavy equipment to being a carpenter, electrician. I had incredible respect for the skills that I saw demonstrated by my fellow campmates. Second thing is I've learned to be a much more grateful person. This place hopefully teaches one gratitude in ways that nothing else you could find anywhere else could teach you. And three, You kind of learn real quickly that you don't have control over a whole lot of things out here. Not very different from our lack of control of most of the things in life. But here you can count on the generosity and kindness of everyone to support you. Not so easy to do in the default world, which is why this is home for me, you, and everybody else who's been here for a long time.

So is that what uh keep you coming back looking like you have

that's part of it and the friends that I made from all over the world all over the country this is an opportunity to see them that I don't wouldn't get otherwise and more than that this environment the social environment is just unlike anything that any of us can deal with on a day-to-day basis

so you don't have this in the rest of your life

I wish I did I live in a rather conservative place pretty traditional

um kind of old money rural.

So no, we don't have the sort of generosity that you see here anywhere and that's what makes this place so special.

Yeah. Do you ever do any regional events?

We've attended Loveburn a few years ago when it was still an official regional of Burning Man. It is no longer that

just a few years ago.

Um and we really had a good time there. Um some of the people involved here or people that we knew from here and vice versa. Um it's a wonderful event. We'd like to go to Play Deluego. That's the other one that's our regional.

Yeah, Delaware. I think they moved to West Virginia for a while and they've been traveling around a little bit,

but they've we've participated in another regional activity. A few years ago, the birthday cake was built by the Mid-Atlantic regional group. So, we did fire perimeter for them and help them on the build and they had actually come to Love Burn that same year before Burning Man to finish their construction and test their concept. So, we saw it twice which was really kind of fun.

So, you've worked on you said like Temple Build here

and then I worked on the Folly in 2019. I I I don't want to boast but I was extremely proud that the lead carpenter on Galaxia invited me to join his carpentry crew to build the folly.

Wow. Really? I walked around about a foot off the floor for a week.

Yeah. So, it's still it's still to this day. Are you still involved with like uh what you mean?

I have I have been involved in some other builds, but my health posed some problems in 2024 that caused me not to come and I was a little reluctant to try and weather two weeks out here given my physical condition. So, um I I did help our camp get some infrastructure in place that they didn't have before of which I was very happy that it put up shade and it didn't fall down from any of the windows. So

that that's actually say something with the rain this year. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I was fortunate to have been taught how to build shade by the master shade builder of this place, a man named Nick Morgan, one of the founders of the Temple Builders Guild. And if you haven't spoken with them,

it would be I think you you and your audience would benefit a lot from learning about what they do.

Oh, yeah. I'd love to get intro they can go at the end.

I I truly think that your idea is a wonderful gift to all of us and I thank you very much for giving everyone a place to go and reflect on all the things they've learned and what they could learn from others who've been here before or after them.

Thank you very much.

My pleasure. Well, thank you for the interview.

My pleasure.

Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this show, please subscribe, rate, and view it on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen. The more reviews the show has, the more likely it will even appear in search results. Also, please tell a friend and share this show with anyone that you think might like it. Word of mouth reaches quite far, especially in the Burning Man community. If you would like to contact us, please send an email to shadowofthemanpodcast@gmail.com. You can also follow Shadow of the Man on social med. media at Facebook, Instagram, Blue Sky X, and YouTube. The links for all of these are available at shadowoftheman.com. Feel free to use any of these social media accounts to provide any feedback you might have. Your thoughts on the show are greatly appreciated. Thank you and see you soon for a new episode of The Shadow of the Man.

Thank you for listening to this latest show. We Have to make another one. So, got to go. Don't worry. For next month, we already have one in the can. Very soon, you'll be listening to a new Shadow of the Man.