I was linked to a great article via What’s Your Grief? blog: The Day the Man Came to Burning Man (link to LA Weekly).

It’s a tear jerker, if inspiring as well. I was surprised because I have more than few friends who go to Burning Man every year and no one mentioned this. I have to assume they were not privy to this particular event, which is a shame.

I did not know about the Temple either. It’s a lovely concept, and makes me more determined than ever to get to Burning Man some year.

While it’s clear that the Temple is meant to be a spiritual place, it is also a secular one, created not to speak to deities but to offer a place where people can, instead, speak to their grief. And that is what made the event described in the LA Weekly article so profound: absent an overt reliance on paranormal entities or rituals, it was a simple communion of grief, a profound act of witnessing by those bystanders to the grief of the officers and the family there to honor the memory of Special Agent Michael Dwayne Bolinger.

For those of us who do not lean on religion or a faith in the supernatural, events such as these prove the value of ritual and tradition. The connection we feel in moments such as these are naturally profound because they are emotional, primal, and shared.