You are the center you seek

This year’s theme was really special to me. Axis Mundi is the center of the world, the point where earth and sky meet, where different worlds touch, and everything seems to orient itself around a single center.

Finding my place or finding my ‘center’ has been a big recurring theme for me the past few years and this years theme helped me take the time to face it and process it and that made me realize , What if the center isn’t somewhere we have to find?

I know what it is to arrive somewhere searching for belonging and leave feeling farther from myself. I know what it is to place too much of my sense of safety, worth, and direction in the hands of other people and to ultimately discover how disorienting it can be when the people or places we hoped would ground us don’t.

For a long time, I think I imagined “finding my center” as finally finding the right place, the right people, the right community, or the right version of my life and it would be somewhere I could arrive and finally feel whole.

Burning Man has a strange way of making us search. We willingly go to a brutal environment looking for art, adventure, belonging, transformation, each other and different or undiscovered versions of ourselves.

I found myself using the burn as a place where I was constantly searching for one thing or the other until finally, the playa stopped being a place where I was looking for something outside myself and became a place where I was learning how to return to myself.

After a rough burn that left me feeling more disconnected than ever, I returned and found belonging, extraordinary people, and a community I love but I realized that none of that could be my center.

That journey became this pendant!

On the front is a compass without a clear north, south, east, or west. It can’t tell you where to go but every direction leads back to a crystal in the dead center.

I debated for a while on whether or not I wanted to put the text on it or have the image speak for itself and decided that I often need clear reminders and went for the text.

The crystal is there in part because my playa name is Bextra for a reason and I’m a big fan of sparkles and generally being as extra as possible but it also has a much deeper meaning for me because the center is not meant to be empty and it specifically needed to be something meant to catch light and to reflect it differently depending on who’s holding it, where they’re standing, and how the light finds them in any given moment and despite any of those conditions or the way the crystal reflects, the message still remains.

The Man being the axis in the middle also has a lot of meaning for me, it’s a reminder that the magic we find on playa can be with us anywhere and anytime but it’s also a reminder that you can carry your axis with you and YOU can become a place you return to.



The center was inspired by some affirmations that I needed to constantly remind myself over the last year:

You can lose your bearings without losing yourself.

You can be changed by the people you meet without handing them the compass.

You can wander very far from your center and still find your way home.

But also being your own center does not mean you are meant to exist alone and that is what inspired the back design!!

When you turn the pendant over, the compass becomes a spiral, with reaching hands. Because I realized that same center that grounds us is also the place from which we reach toward one another. We give and receive. We hold and are held.

My hope for this gift was for it to ultimately be a gift of the message that it took me a long and messy journey to find:

You do not need to earn your place here.

You do not need to become someone else before you are worthy of belonging.

No person, place, relationship, or destination holds the missing piece that will finally make you whole.

You are not lost simply because you do not know what comes next.

And really that wherever life takes you, there is a place within yourself you can return to. With a wish, I suppose, that when you forget where it is, perhaps someone will reach out a hand and help you find it again and when you stumble upon someone who is lost, you can lend them a hand too.

Ultimately, the TLDR of the story is that YOU are the center you seek but we all need each other to remind us of that and we’re ultimately all walking each other home”