The Wheel of Time Returning to Black Rock City after a years absence, it sometimes feels as if one had never left the desert. Within this changeless world time seems suspended. We build the same city, we burn the same Man, and by these actions we are changed.
Ritual time is cyclical time and quite unlike the ordinary measure that divides our daily lives.
This year, as the Millennium approaches, the Burning Man Project will create such a cycle in the Black Rock Desert. Our plan in 1999 is to inscribe a giant wheel of time around an axis formed by Burning Man. The perimeter of this circle will be divided into 60 units, creating an enormous clock dial spanning nearly half a mile of desert terrain. Black Rock City will, in turn, surround this clock. Circumferential streets, which run the length of our city, will be named after the planets that orbit our Sun.