But we can try to give you some flavor….

Transformus is an outdoor camping experience of radical self-expression, radical self-reliance, art, revelry, interaction, music, performance, and community.  It’s a place to depart the world of commodification, transactions, suspicion, and distance that characterize our existence in the default world.  It’s a place to be yourself, express yourself, and delight in the company of your fellow freaks, visionaries, and travelers.  To laugh, to be delighted, to be mystified, shocked, repulsed, astounded, thoroughly confused, exhausted, exhilarated, and to BE MOST DEFINITELY NOT BORED.  This is not, most definitely not, strip malls and subdivisions, punch clocks and local news, commutes and everything else horrible which saps the soul’s energies.

You’ve done your homework, got all of the food-beverages-camping gear you need to survive, and you’ve put together costumes, artwork, a DJ set, a dance routine, or a comedy schtick.  You’ve signed up for volunteer shifts, you are part of a theme camp, you’ve made 100 little paintings to give away, you’ve got boxes of sweet potatoes to cook and share, you’ve been practicing your smile.  You are so freaking ready.

Transformus is a place for you to play, to dance, to splash under a secluded waterfall at midnight.  It is a place to have an ear of “Welcome Home” corn flung through your open car window on the slow drive up a dirt road.  A place to walk the plank heckled by pirates into a deep, refreshing lake in the height of the afternoon heat & humidity.  A place to explore miles of trails through the hilly woods of a 750 acre private reserve.  A place to meet the most amazing people in the world who strangely happen to live just 8 miles away in the default world.  This world is Transformus.

Transformus is regional event inspired by the principles and experience of the Burning Man Project.  Like Burning Man, you will see, hear, touch, smell and taste things you never have before. It is a feast for the senses, an almost overwhelming experience of the new.  Unlike Burning Man, Transormus is held in the luscious, temperate rain forest of the mountains of western North Carolina.  Those who have been to Black Rock City will marvel at the moistness, greenness, and sloped-ness of it all.  Unlike the playa, at the height of mid-day heat, there are not none but two swimming ponds to choose from, and miles of streams and pondlets stretching up into the cool shady woods of the valley’s branches.

A short fifteen miles off the interstate, you’ll wind your way through a quiet farming community on the way to our own private Idaho.  You pull off the local road through imposing gates, and drive alongside a picturesque mountain stream on a dirt driveway to the greeter station.  After the greeter station the road gradually slopes up, the default world wilts away, and fields, terraced orchards, ponds and quiet forest glens appear and open up.  The road branches, there are different parts of the valley to explore.  This place is big.

And its filling up quick.  All around there is a ferociously fresh energy of people unloading gear, setting camp, building artwork, striking off to explore.  A half dozen burners stop to offer you help setting up your camp.  Someone wanders by offering a plate of bacon and orange slices.  An art car manned by costumed aliens, cowboys, and zombies drifts by slowly sound system in full effect.  You begin to get an idea of how seductively freakishly awesome this thing is.  Somehow you made it, and its only just about to begin.

As the sun goes down, and the heat fades, the place starts to crackle and sizzle.  You suit up in a ridiculously silly costume, not yet understanding the mad hugs and new friends this simple bit of preparation will bring you.  Transformus comes online as the sun dips, and there are lights and sounds, costumes and DJs, glowing artworks and fire.  Sweet jesus is there fire.  You come across a band that has rigged their stage with sound sensitive fire cannons, you see the sexiest beings ever spinning fire to killer beats, you stumble on a dozen little nirvanas hidden here and there in the woods, enjoy enlightened conversation and sushi in a lakeside yurt, you dance till you’re going to drop, jump in the lake to cool off, and then dance and dance some more.  Everywhere there is art, and performance, community, energy, and way too many new friends to make in a night or even a month.  You realize that the patterns of eat, job, eat, drink, sleep, rinse, wash, repeat, repeat, have been dulling down your essence, and that there is a whole new level of creativity, community, and adventure that hasn’t seemed possible since the unbridled rangings of childhood imagination.  There are these others, who feel same, and bear gifts and inspire.  As the fires burn and spin around you, you realize, you are deep inside somehow a burner and you are BURNING, and burning it well.

As you wander back to crash in your tent at dawn that night or the next, you are thinking of all you have seen and done, and you are thinking that this is insane, this is mind-boggling, that you are here, and your tribe is here, and you have all connected in this wonderful way at this amazing event.  Everyone has brought something special to the burn, we are all making this for each other.  The experience of the event is the greatest gift and you are receiving it and you are giving it at the same time and loving every second of it and desperately wanting not to need to sleep but still eventually needing the sleep, maybe after 18 hours, or two days, or whatever, you do not, YOU DO NOT want to let it go, you explore a bit more feet now dragging, but sleep eventually we all must.

And hopefully as you drift off, just as others are waking and brewing the most delicious smelling coffee, you think to yourself how wonderful, and you dream deeply of how to amp up your contribution by orders of magnitude for next year, you toss and turn with dreams of a million mad plans to entertain and inform your brothers and sisters

The next day you get up and lazily wander the endless acres and you notice something.  This is downright intimate, you never thought of 1500 people as intimate.  And there is a civility, and an engagement, and some downright Southern hospitality that comes with this intimacy, and with the repeat encounters.  This is not a monstrous anonymous crowd.  The ethereal being with angel wings and glowing eye makeup that you danced with last night is frying pancakes three tents down.  You walk down the city’s main roads and are greeted with knowing smiles and murmurs of appreciation for your contributions.  This is not a stadium crowd, this is tribe, family, friends.  It is the moment of opening Christmas presents endlessly extended by the immense size of your new family.

And only as you drive home on Sunday or Monday thinking of the immense pageantry of Saturday’s effigy burn, will it occur to you, that it needn’t be just a weekend in time.  There was something there so precious and valuable, so absolutely vital, and that back in the default world, you need to connect with these people, you need to take this spirit back with you, there’s no reason to give it up, you cannot and will not give it up.

You realize, if you make the effort, things needn’t ever be the same again, and that this is the greatest gift of all.  And as it hasn’t happened yet, you have your suspicions and doubts, but maybe, just maybe, up there everything simply changed for you for good.

See you on the mountain my brothers and sisters, it all starts there……