If the timing of these monthly columns seems irregular (early in the month one time, “just under the wire” other times), it’s because I truly wait for inspiration before I write. This month it was getting late in the game, so I hoped my recent travels—to Los Angeles, Reno, and Chicago—might provide the spark of an idea. As I left Columbus early last Thursday, I overheard a conversation between a 7-year-old girl and her slightly older brother. They were debating whether the fluid a plane was discharging was fuel or water. The self-assured girl asserted, “I know it’s gasoline because I can smell it. I have a very good smelling technique.” Cute story but no possible Academy analogy, and, although surprising my daughter later that day in Los Angeles for her 27th birthday was fun, it didn’t really supply any Academy “ah ha!” moment either.
I then advanced (as opposed to going on a “retreat” or “retreating”) to Verdi, Nevada with Optometry and Vision Science (OVS) Managing Editor, Kurt Zadnik, and Fellow/Past Academy President/Past AOF President/Current Editor of OVS Tony Adams. In between strategizing about our journal, we visited a construction site where Tony’s son, Lindsay Adams, is part of a team that is building a life-sized shipwreck for what he called Burning Man.
Burning Man began in 1986 and is now an annual, week-long event that occurs just before Labor Day in the Nevada desert. It clearly occupies the region, as we were in an antique shop on Saturday where the proprietress pointed out a tie-dyed dress, whispering that “it would be perfect to wear to Burning Man.” Poor Lindsay, as he had to put up with my interrogation at dinner that night, along the lines of “What exactly is Burning Man?” It’s described officially as “part of an experimental community [that] challenges its members to express themselves and rely on themselves to a degree that is not normally encountered in one's day-to-day life. The result of this experiment is Black Rock City, home to the Burning Man event.” Further, “Burning Man is a kind of Petri dish. Theme camps cling in fertile clusters to its latticework of streets, artworks tumble out of it, like pollen on the air. These nodes of interaction mutate, grow, and reproduce their kind, only to effervesce and spread across five continents.” Some of Burning Man’s guiding principles are radical inclusion; gifting; radical self-expression; communal effort; participation; and immediacy (as in “No idea can substitute for this experience.”) Lindsay embellished that website definition with descriptions of a five-mile radius, well-mapped city in the desert where 50,000 people pay an average of $400 per ticket and live for a week, relying on non-motorized vehicles for transportation. No money is exchanged at Burning Man, but bartering is endorsed and encouraged. He said outsiders have stereotyped the event as hippie-ish but asserted that the only thing in excess in Black Rock City is hugging.
So, how does this relate to our Academy? We form an annual, transient community too, for the better part of a week. This year it’s even in the desert! We don’t call it “Academy City”, but we could. We gift in the form of buying each other dinners and drinks, and we bestow the gifts of our knowledge and experience. We park our cars at our home airports and take taxicabs instead of riding bicycles. We hug—a lot—both physically and intellectually. We embrace: inclusion, sitting side-by-side with optometry students; self-expression in our scientific presentations, lectures, and symposia; communal effort in our extensive volunteer structure; and a deeply-held belief that our reach is international and that nothing substitutes for the immediacy of the professional and personal experience of our Academy’s Annual Meeting. You won’t get it by reading about it. You have to be there. As I imagine the Burning Man participants at the end of an exhausting, hot, dehydrating, energizing, enriching week, we too leave our Academy’s Annual Meeting each year recharged and, across the years, fundamentally changed as optometrists, vision scientists, and human beings.
To register for Academy Phoenix 2012, head to the registration webpage.
