At one burn, someone very special had just died, and so people that knew him thought of it as sort of honoring his passing to another realm. The embers rising u

At one burn, someone very special had just died, and so people that knew him thought of it as sort of honoring his passing to another realm. The embers rising up in gusts of wind looked like fireflies or little spirits dancing upward into the night sky. At another burn, a bunch of us were just tired and angry and needed to let out all our negative energy, and were overjoyed to dance around the man howling and crying and releasing everything pent up. The fire consumed and carried it all away. It's also very hypnotic and transportive to just stare into the flames for hours. It brings us all together and helps us connect to each other. We can mentally/spiritually put anything into that fire, different for each of us, but all of us are connected in the same experience. Why is it a man? Well at regional burns it isn't. It might be a temple, a pony, something else. The form doesn't matter. At the end of the day, we just burn something big to bring everyone together.