Larry Harvey
Larry Harvey
Larry Harveyis the main co-founder of the Burning Man festival, along with his friend Jerry James. What started in 1986 as a summer solstice evening ritual burning of their artistic creation of an effigy of a man with a group of just a dozen people at San Francisco's Baker Beach soon became an annual event that over 4 years grew to more than 800 people. In 1990, in collaboration with the SF Cacophony Society, the event moved to Labor Day...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCelebrity
CountryUnited States of America
faith people
I've learned never to expect people to be better than they are, but to always have faith that they can be more.
adopted age cope farm felt grew isolation lived looking parents people
I grew up on a farm in Oregon, an adopted child, with one sibling, and parents the age of all my peers' grandparents. We lived in isolation from the people around us, and it was always a struggle to cope with as a child. The heart can really expire under those conditions. I always felt like I was looking at the world from the outside.
nature surprised
I'm actually a very shy person. You'd be surprised how many leaders are shy. They're not all extroverts by nature.
black chance gives rock
Black Rock gives us all a chance to heal, to become ourselves.
baker bohemian eight figure late lit maybe product san
When I was in my late 30s, I lit a figure on fire on Baker Beach in San Francisco. It was me, a friend, and maybe eight people, tops. There wasn't any premeditation to it at all. It was really just a product of San Franciscan bohemian milieu.
avoids cultural good hard history ourselves relationship society terrible worst
It avoids a self-conscious relationship to the act. We live in the most self-conscious society in the history of mankind. There are good things in that, but there are also terrible things. The worst of it is, that we find it hard to give ourselves to the cultural process.
contact dictate immediate terms themselves wonderful
They become the keepers of the mystery. They place themselves between the communicants of the religion, and the immediate experience. And then they dictate the terms on which you can have contact with this wonderful mystery. We don't dictate those terms.
aim beyond experience immediate people threshold wholly
We take people to the threshold of religion. Our aim is to induce immediate experience that is beyond the odd, beyond the strange, and beyond the weird. It verges on the wholly other.