“There was a rebel who kept transmitting,” Yates recalled in a whisper...He kept on transmitting for years after the program ended, even though no one answered.”
“There was no world afterward,” the hermit declared in a thin, haunting voice. “We had to make do.”
The words brought Yates out of his trance. “No world?”
“Down below were all those Chinese, destroying everything Tibetan. On the other side of the mountains were all those who had given up fighting, who were becoming new kinds of Tibetans,Tibetans as Indians, Tibetans as Nepalis. If we wanted to stay the way we were, we had to become invisible.” Dakpo rose and reverently dusted the top of the radio with a rag.
...”I thought about telling old Kundu that the Americans were gone, never to come back, that he should stop the transmissions.”
...”But he didn’t?” the American asked.
“Not for years.”
“What would he say?” Shan asked after a long silence, when he transmitted on the radio?”
“The first few years, he stayed on the run on the mountain, using a sleeping bag from the Americans, saying his mission now was intelligence...he would watch the highway, watch the Chinese army, then come up and report the movements...For a while he decided the Americans had changed the codes, or frequencies, and so he would turn the dials and repeat his number, announcing again and again that he was a sergeant in the Tibetan resistance army. In the end he would talk about the weather or read sutras*.”
“Sutras?” Shan asked.
“Eventually he realized it wasn’t the Americans he was trying to reach. He said it was something people didn’t always understand about radios, that even if the Americans stopped listening, the heavens always heard.”
---Eliot Pattison
The Lord of Death
The restaurant is a delight. There are sturdy pine tables and huge windows. The pizza comes with a scattering of fresh basil across the top. I sip my organic iced coffee and try not to dive into the pizza. My friend is late. I don’t care. It is enough to be in this sunny room while softly cool air drifts in through the open doors.
My friend hurries in. “Life,” she says, “detained me.”
We laugh. She is a poet, teacher, environmental activist and the mother of a twelve-year old,. She knows my story, knows that forty years earlier, I was so detained by life I didn’t think I had one.
We eat and talk about our work, magic, and our mutual senses that the brittle surface of our comfortable American world is crazing. “Windshield glass,” she says. “One second there was that little ding in the corner; the next second, you can’t see.”
But the basil is fresh and pungent, the coffee is the same, so we toast our good luck and move to different topics.
That night I read Eliot Pattison’s new novel, The Lord of Death. It is set in occupied Tibet.. I read about Chinese practices that have been refined far beyond waterboarding---electrodes clamped on nipples and testicles, injections of mind-twisting drugs, beatings administered until the detainee is almost dead. And, for those who are particularly recalcitrant, there is “cerebral pasteurization” in which holes are drilled in the Tibetan’s skull, electrical wire inserted into certain pocket of cells and the ON switch flipped.
Now.
All of this is occurring now.
I finish reading the book, go to the computer and find the website: www.savetibet.org. There are photos at the bottom of the home page. I go to the photo album A Great Mountain Burned By Fire and click on a picture of Lhundup Tso, lying curled in fetal position on a stone courtyard. She was sixteen when she was killed when Chinese police opened fire on unarmed protestors in Ngaba. I think of the recent outcry over Neda, the young Iranian woman shot by Iranian “security” forces. There was no international outcry when Lhundup Tso was murdered. Not from a failure to give a shit, but because the photo didn’t go viral.
I click through other photos. One word occurs again and again. DETAINED. Jamyang Kyi, writer, singer and broadcaster - DETAINED. Norzin Wangmo, who spoke on the phone or internet about Tibet - DETAINED and imprisoned. Lobsang Kirti, 27, monk, who printed and distributed leaflets--DETAINED.
A dear friend wrote me recently. He was concerned about my work load. He wondered if I shouldn’t concentrate on the deadlines for the two books I am writing, and let these weekly Dispatches go for now.
I wrote him back. “Writing the Dispatches is my life-line to my real work.”
They are my sutras. Help them go viral. More than the heavens need to hear.
*sutra - an ancient teaching--not a sermon, but a conversation The Buddha told his listeners and students to question and to test his teachings like a jeweller would test yellow metal.
http://www.savetibet.org/index.php?q=gallery&g2_itemId=390
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Sunday, June 28, 2009
if
you never read anything again in your life, read this.
If you catch me whining about my privileged plight, send it back to me.
I'm so lucky.
love, me
Terry Pratchett's Alzheimer's Speech in Full
this is bristol.co.uk ^ | March 13, 2008 | Terry Pratchett
Posted on March 16, 2008 11:56:20 PM PDT by Hetty_Fauxvert
My name is Terry Pratchett, author of a series of inexplicably successful fantasy books and I have had Alzheimer's now for the past two years plus, in which time I managed to write a couple of bestsellers.
I have a rare variant. I don't understand very much about it, but apparently if you are going to have Alzheimer's it's a good one to have.
So, a stroke of luck there then!
Interestingly enough, when I was diagnosed last December by those nice people at Addenbrooke's, I started a very different journey through dementia.
This one had much better scenery, interesting and often very attractive inhabitants, wonderful wildlife and many opportunities for excitement and adventure.
Those of you who's last experience with computer games was looking at Lara Croft's buttocks might not be aware of how good they have become as audio and visual experiences, although I would concede that Lara's buttocks were a visual experience in their own right.
But in this case I was travelling through a country that was part of the huge computer game called Oblivion, which is so beautifully detailed that I have often ridden around it to enjoy the scenery and weather and have hardly bothered to kill anything at all.
At the same time as I began exploring the wonderful Kingdom of Dementia, which is next door to the Kingdom of Mania, I was also experiencing the slightly more realistic experience of being a 59 year old who finds they have early onset Alzheimer's.
Apparently I reacted to this situation in a reasonably typical way, with a sense of loss and abandonment with an incoherent, or perhaps I should say, violently coherent fury that made the Miltonic Lucifer's rage against Heaven seem a bit miffed by comparison. That fire still burns.
I want to go on writing! Admittedly, that means I have to stay alive.
You can't write books when you are dead, unless your name is L. Ron Hubbard.
And so now I'm a game for real. It's a nasty disease, surrounded by shadows and small, largely unseen tragedies.
People don't know what to say, unless they have had it in the family.
People ask me why I announced that I had Alzheimer's.
My response was: why shouldn't I?
I remember when people died "of a long illness" now we call cancer by its name, and as every wizard knows, once you have a thing's real name you have the first step to its taming.
We are at war with cancer, and we use that vocabulary.
We battle, we are brave, we survive. And we have a large armaments industry.
For those of us with early onset in particular, it's more of a series of skirmishes.
My GP is helpful and patient, but I don't have a specialist locally.
The NHS kindly allows me to buy my own Aricept because I'm too young to have Alzheimer's for free, a situation I'm okay with, in a want-to-kick-a-politician-in-the-teeth-kind of way.
But, on the whole, you try to be your own doctor.
The internet twangs night and day. I walk a lot and take more supplements than the Sunday papers. We talk to one another and compare regimes.
Part of me lives in a world of new age remedies and science, and some of the science is a little like voodoo.
But science was never an exact science, and personally I'd eat the arse out of a dead mole if it offered a fighting chance.
Fortunately, I have the Greek Chorus to calm me down
Soon after I told the world my website fell over and my PA had to spend the evening negotiating more bandwidth.
I had more than 60,000 messages within the first few hours.
Most of them were readers and well-wishers.
Some of them wanted to sell me snake oil and I'm not necessarily going to dismiss all of these, as I have never found a rusty snake.
But a large handful came from 'experienced' sufferers, successfully fighting a holding action, and various people in universities and research establishments who had, despite all expectations, risen to high places in their various professions even while being confirmed readers of my books.
And they said; can we help? They are the Greek Chorus. Only two of them are known to each other and they give me their advice on various options that I suggest.
They include a Wiccan, too. It's a good idea to cover all the angles.
It was interesting when I asked about having my dental amalgam fillings removed.
There was a chorus of ? hrumph, no scientific evidence, hrumph???., but if you can afford to have it done properly then it certainly won't do any harm and you never know.
And that is where I am, along with many others, scrabbling to stay ahead long enough to be there when the cure, which I suspect may be more like a regime, comes along.
Say it will be soon - there's nearly as many of us as there are cancer sufferers, and it looks as if the number of people with the disease will double within a generation.
And in most cases you will find alongside the sufferer you will find a spouse, suffering as much. It's a shock and a shame, then, to find out that funding for research is three per cent of that which goes to find cancer cures.
Perhaps that is why, for example, that I know three people who have successfully survived brain tumours but no-one who has beaten Alzheimer's???although among the Greek Chorus are some who are giving it a hard time.
I'd like a chance to die like my father did - of cancer, at 86.
Remember, I'm speaking as a man with Alzheimer's, which strips away your living self a bit at a time.
Before he went to spend his last two weeks in a hospice he was bustling around the house, fixing things.
He talked to us right up to the last few days, knowing who we were and who he was.
Right now, I envy him. And there are thousands like me, except that they don't get heard.
So let's shout something loud enough to hear. We need you and you need money. I'm giving you a million dollars. Spend it wisely.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1986843/posts
If you catch me whining about my privileged plight, send it back to me.
I'm so lucky.
love, me
Terry Pratchett's Alzheimer's Speech in Full
this is bristol.co.uk ^ | March 13, 2008 | Terry Pratchett
Posted on March 16, 2008 11:56:20 PM PDT by Hetty_Fauxvert
My name is Terry Pratchett, author of a series of inexplicably successful fantasy books and I have had Alzheimer's now for the past two years plus, in which time I managed to write a couple of bestsellers.
I have a rare variant. I don't understand very much about it, but apparently if you are going to have Alzheimer's it's a good one to have.
So, a stroke of luck there then!
Interestingly enough, when I was diagnosed last December by those nice people at Addenbrooke's, I started a very different journey through dementia.
This one had much better scenery, interesting and often very attractive inhabitants, wonderful wildlife and many opportunities for excitement and adventure.
Those of you who's last experience with computer games was looking at Lara Croft's buttocks might not be aware of how good they have become as audio and visual experiences, although I would concede that Lara's buttocks were a visual experience in their own right.
But in this case I was travelling through a country that was part of the huge computer game called Oblivion, which is so beautifully detailed that I have often ridden around it to enjoy the scenery and weather and have hardly bothered to kill anything at all.
At the same time as I began exploring the wonderful Kingdom of Dementia, which is next door to the Kingdom of Mania, I was also experiencing the slightly more realistic experience of being a 59 year old who finds they have early onset Alzheimer's.
Apparently I reacted to this situation in a reasonably typical way, with a sense of loss and abandonment with an incoherent, or perhaps I should say, violently coherent fury that made the Miltonic Lucifer's rage against Heaven seem a bit miffed by comparison. That fire still burns.
I want to go on writing! Admittedly, that means I have to stay alive.
You can't write books when you are dead, unless your name is L. Ron Hubbard.
And so now I'm a game for real. It's a nasty disease, surrounded by shadows and small, largely unseen tragedies.
People don't know what to say, unless they have had it in the family.
People ask me why I announced that I had Alzheimer's.
My response was: why shouldn't I?
I remember when people died "of a long illness" now we call cancer by its name, and as every wizard knows, once you have a thing's real name you have the first step to its taming.
We are at war with cancer, and we use that vocabulary.
We battle, we are brave, we survive. And we have a large armaments industry.
For those of us with early onset in particular, it's more of a series of skirmishes.
My GP is helpful and patient, but I don't have a specialist locally.
The NHS kindly allows me to buy my own Aricept because I'm too young to have Alzheimer's for free, a situation I'm okay with, in a want-to-kick-a-politician-in-the-teeth-kind of way.
But, on the whole, you try to be your own doctor.
The internet twangs night and day. I walk a lot and take more supplements than the Sunday papers. We talk to one another and compare regimes.
Part of me lives in a world of new age remedies and science, and some of the science is a little like voodoo.
But science was never an exact science, and personally I'd eat the arse out of a dead mole if it offered a fighting chance.
Fortunately, I have the Greek Chorus to calm me down
Soon after I told the world my website fell over and my PA had to spend the evening negotiating more bandwidth.
I had more than 60,000 messages within the first few hours.
Most of them were readers and well-wishers.
Some of them wanted to sell me snake oil and I'm not necessarily going to dismiss all of these, as I have never found a rusty snake.
But a large handful came from 'experienced' sufferers, successfully fighting a holding action, and various people in universities and research establishments who had, despite all expectations, risen to high places in their various professions even while being confirmed readers of my books.
And they said; can we help? They are the Greek Chorus. Only two of them are known to each other and they give me their advice on various options that I suggest.
They include a Wiccan, too. It's a good idea to cover all the angles.
It was interesting when I asked about having my dental amalgam fillings removed.
There was a chorus of ? hrumph, no scientific evidence, hrumph???., but if you can afford to have it done properly then it certainly won't do any harm and you never know.
And that is where I am, along with many others, scrabbling to stay ahead long enough to be there when the cure, which I suspect may be more like a regime, comes along.
Say it will be soon - there's nearly as many of us as there are cancer sufferers, and it looks as if the number of people with the disease will double within a generation.
And in most cases you will find alongside the sufferer you will find a spouse, suffering as much. It's a shock and a shame, then, to find out that funding for research is three per cent of that which goes to find cancer cures.
Perhaps that is why, for example, that I know three people who have successfully survived brain tumours but no-one who has beaten Alzheimer's???although among the Greek Chorus are some who are giving it a hard time.
I'd like a chance to die like my father did - of cancer, at 86.
Remember, I'm speaking as a man with Alzheimer's, which strips away your living self a bit at a time.
Before he went to spend his last two weeks in a hospice he was bustling around the house, fixing things.
He talked to us right up to the last few days, knowing who we were and who he was.
Right now, I envy him. And there are thousands like me, except that they don't get heard.
So let's shout something loud enough to hear. We need you and you need money. I'm giving you a million dollars. Spend it wisely.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1986843/posts
Burn This
The news is heavy...there are beasts loose that make the long walks,
Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Bhopal and Chernobyl pale in comparison.
---Barry Lopez
from his eulogy for Edward Abbey, 1988
...When we first moved here, pulled
the trees in around us, curled
our backs to the wind, no one
had ever hit the moon--no one…
From our snug place we shout
religiously for attention, in order to hide:
only silence or evasion will bring
dangerous notice, the hovering hawk
of the state, or the sudden quiet stare
and fatal estimate of an alerted neighbor.
This message we smuggle out in
its plain cover, to be opened
quietly: Friends everywhere--
we are alive! Those moon rockets
have missed millions of secret
places! Best wishes.
Burn this.
---William Stafford, 1993
from the Move to California
We begin with thanks—to Bob Katz for the Lopez quote and to Scottalatyl for the Stafford quote. We continue as “we”, because it is imperative at this time that we understand we are not alone. We are in the company of countless others---creatures, plants, minerals; we are not at the top of the heap. We are dispersed throughout a divine and temporary mix. We remember we are dangerous.
Last week I walked through rose-gray light to the Deschutes Public Library. I went upstairs and took a seat with perhaps sixty other people lucky enough to live in Bend on this particular June night.
It had been ten years since I had last seen the compact man whose hair had gone gray, whose face was gentle. Barry Lopez stepped in front of us. “Thank you for coming to hear me,” he said
He read a story remarkable for the mysteries and hard wisdom hidden in its its austere elegance. He read of a marshland in Northern Nevada and violation and the failure to listen to the old knowledge of the people who have lived here long the colonizers.
When he was finished, he called for conversation. I’d brought two tapes recorded at Edward Abbey’s Memorial Service. I gave them to Barry and told him the bones of information the Hopi elder, Ferrel Secacaku had given a few of us in Spring 2008.
Barry listened. Then he spoke of watching Barack Obama receive the elders of the Civil Rights movement---and young African Americans born a decade after those battles. He spoke of Obama as an agent for transition.
My turn to talk was over, so I did not tell him and those around me that the Obama administration had recently opposed the Supreme Court reviewing the case of thirteen Southwestern Native American tribes vs. the Snowbowl ski resort. The ski resort had been granted permission by a lower court to make artificial snow from treated wastewater on one of the San Francisco Peaks. The tribes were hoping to appeal that decision at the highest level. They know that the act of making snow from wastewater on their sacred mountain is equivalent to pissing on the main altar at the Vatican.
I did not stand and tell those around me that the San Francisco Peaks are the holy of holies for the Hopi tribe. Their Katsinas live on the mountain. It is there that the Holy Ones make rain and snow. I stayed in my seat and I listened to Barry Lopez call for deep community, for listening to the old knowledge of indigenous peoples.
I thought of that which was loosed among us twenty years ago, and how the beasts have devoured so much. I studied Barry Lopez’ gentle face and, behind him through the huge windows, the delightful downtown of Bend, Or. I understood that it was hard from that vantage point to see the cracks continuing to open out in what we might believe is our world---and the beasts that have come through them and are with us.
Burn this.
Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Bhopal and Chernobyl pale in comparison.
---Barry Lopez
from his eulogy for Edward Abbey, 1988
...When we first moved here, pulled
the trees in around us, curled
our backs to the wind, no one
had ever hit the moon--no one…
From our snug place we shout
religiously for attention, in order to hide:
only silence or evasion will bring
dangerous notice, the hovering hawk
of the state, or the sudden quiet stare
and fatal estimate of an alerted neighbor.
This message we smuggle out in
its plain cover, to be opened
quietly: Friends everywhere--
we are alive! Those moon rockets
have missed millions of secret
places! Best wishes.
Burn this.
---William Stafford, 1993
from the Move to California
We begin with thanks—to Bob Katz for the Lopez quote and to Scottalatyl for the Stafford quote. We continue as “we”, because it is imperative at this time that we understand we are not alone. We are in the company of countless others---creatures, plants, minerals; we are not at the top of the heap. We are dispersed throughout a divine and temporary mix. We remember we are dangerous.
Last week I walked through rose-gray light to the Deschutes Public Library. I went upstairs and took a seat with perhaps sixty other people lucky enough to live in Bend on this particular June night.
It had been ten years since I had last seen the compact man whose hair had gone gray, whose face was gentle. Barry Lopez stepped in front of us. “Thank you for coming to hear me,” he said
He read a story remarkable for the mysteries and hard wisdom hidden in its its austere elegance. He read of a marshland in Northern Nevada and violation and the failure to listen to the old knowledge of the people who have lived here long the colonizers.
When he was finished, he called for conversation. I’d brought two tapes recorded at Edward Abbey’s Memorial Service. I gave them to Barry and told him the bones of information the Hopi elder, Ferrel Secacaku had given a few of us in Spring 2008.
Barry listened. Then he spoke of watching Barack Obama receive the elders of the Civil Rights movement---and young African Americans born a decade after those battles. He spoke of Obama as an agent for transition.
My turn to talk was over, so I did not tell him and those around me that the Obama administration had recently opposed the Supreme Court reviewing the case of thirteen Southwestern Native American tribes vs. the Snowbowl ski resort. The ski resort had been granted permission by a lower court to make artificial snow from treated wastewater on one of the San Francisco Peaks. The tribes were hoping to appeal that decision at the highest level. They know that the act of making snow from wastewater on their sacred mountain is equivalent to pissing on the main altar at the Vatican.
I did not stand and tell those around me that the San Francisco Peaks are the holy of holies for the Hopi tribe. Their Katsinas live on the mountain. It is there that the Holy Ones make rain and snow. I stayed in my seat and I listened to Barry Lopez call for deep community, for listening to the old knowledge of indigenous peoples.
I thought of that which was loosed among us twenty years ago, and how the beasts have devoured so much. I studied Barry Lopez’ gentle face and, behind him through the huge windows, the delightful downtown of Bend, Or. I understood that it was hard from that vantage point to see the cracks continuing to open out in what we might believe is our world---and the beasts that have come through them and are with us.
Burn this.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Heading North
Despite the best efforts of the Mojave to hold me fast with its beauty and dear people, I leave today for Bend, Or. Thanks to my son, Matt; and my beloved friend, Fred K., every object I own is in a 5X8 trailer and my Vibe.
I carry with me the silhouette of the Joshua Buddha, 395 sightings of the moon; pressing my face to the rough bark of the old Joshua west of my cabin and breathing in its fine scent and the kindness of friends and strangers. I carry, too, the solid joy of knowing my second novel, Going Through Ghosts, will be published by University of Nevada Press in Spring 2010; and being half-way through writing, She Bets Her Life: women and compulsive gambling.
When I came to this medicine desert, I was one month away from my last casino bet. I was in the grip of recurrent opthalmic migraines. And raw terror. And no hope. I knew it had something to do with the withdrawal from the gambling that had had become my refuge and my reason to live.
I found a group of gamblers who didn’t gamble. I listened to their stories and heard my own. But they said little about the ferocious nature of gambling withdrawal. I hunted the internet, ordered books, but nowhere could I find information about the terror I was walking through.
I began writing She Bets Her Life. Slowly, my pain began to ease. Slowly. I came across information that made sense of the fear that at times had seemed a descent into psychosis. Slowly, I found the women of Scheherezade’s Sister occupying my thoughts and emerging on the page. The Sisters are a circle of women who meet once a week for Double Decadent Brownies, good coffee, talk and listening. Each of us, like Scheherezade, tells stories to save her life. We grant ourselves a reprieve of twenty-four hours, no more, no less---again and again.
I take the Sisters with me. They are becoming as dear to me as my Mojave friends, D. and D. I owe them and this desert for my life. I owe them this book.
My email stays the same. bstarr67@gamil.com
Up the road, m
I carry with me the silhouette of the Joshua Buddha, 395 sightings of the moon; pressing my face to the rough bark of the old Joshua west of my cabin and breathing in its fine scent and the kindness of friends and strangers. I carry, too, the solid joy of knowing my second novel, Going Through Ghosts, will be published by University of Nevada Press in Spring 2010; and being half-way through writing, She Bets Her Life: women and compulsive gambling.
When I came to this medicine desert, I was one month away from my last casino bet. I was in the grip of recurrent opthalmic migraines. And raw terror. And no hope. I knew it had something to do with the withdrawal from the gambling that had had become my refuge and my reason to live.
I found a group of gamblers who didn’t gamble. I listened to their stories and heard my own. But they said little about the ferocious nature of gambling withdrawal. I hunted the internet, ordered books, but nowhere could I find information about the terror I was walking through.
I began writing She Bets Her Life. Slowly, my pain began to ease. Slowly. I came across information that made sense of the fear that at times had seemed a descent into psychosis. Slowly, I found the women of Scheherezade’s Sister occupying my thoughts and emerging on the page. The Sisters are a circle of women who meet once a week for Double Decadent Brownies, good coffee, talk and listening. Each of us, like Scheherezade, tells stories to save her life. We grant ourselves a reprieve of twenty-four hours, no more, no less---again and again.
I take the Sisters with me. They are becoming as dear to me as my Mojave friends, D. and D. I owe them and this desert for my life. I owe them this book.
My email stays the same. bstarr67@gamil.com
Up the road, m
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Sendings
...and I lift my glass to the Awful Truth
which you can't reveal to the Ears of Youth
except to say it isn't worth a dime
And the whole damn place goes crazy twice
and it's once for the devil and once for Christ
but the Boss don't like these dizzy heights
we're busted in the blinding lights,
busted in the blinding lights
of CLOSING TIME....
---Leonard Cohen
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.
Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
---The Guest House
Jelaluddin Rumi, translation by Coleman Barks
I woke this morning from a strong dream. I took my coffee out to the back of this cabin. There was a waning 2/3 moon above the old Joshua tree. Doves and sparrows swarmed the bird feeder. I opened my notebook to write the dream.
I heard my son yell. "Coyote!" The young black cat was hunting lizards. Coyotes hunt young cats. I looked up. Coyote ambled from east to west about twenty feet from me. The beautiful arrowhead face. The calm gaze. The deliberate settling into the shade of a blossoming creosote.
I began writing the dream. "I am in a dark interior. I know the place. It is the old city, an old life and an old love..."
Twenty minutes later, I wrote the last line: Oh," she says, "I was with him two years ago. That's over."
I look up. The coyote is gone.
Tonight, the uneaten black cat is curled up on a red cushion. I am back from a long sundown walk. Nighthawks had hunted in the soft air. My friend called as I walked. She told me of speaking river to a committee of drought. I headed west as she told me the story, my eyes on the ground to avoid the sun’s blood glare. Something shone in the sand. I stopped. It was a perfect owl feather.
I crouched and picked it up. "I just found an owl feather," I said. "You are Minerva."
She laughed.
“It’s yours,” I said.
The signal began to break up. We said goodbye. The nighthawks arced around me. Nighthawks. The merciless surgeons of twilight.
I cut away. Three bags of what once seemed indispensable go to the Joshua Tree Hospice second-hand store. I throw away pages of thirty-year old writing---warnings about our cruelties to each other and the earth that have turned out to be oracular; the epiphanies and sorrows of a woman waking to the reality that she had regarded herself as “less than” for most of her life; calls to awakening, to knowledge, to action. I tear each page in half. This is a ritual annihilation.
There will always be more words. As long as I draw breath. The words come through. I release them. Loss is the essence of a sending.
I go forward. North. This desert has been demanding and generous. There have been no work and few friends. There have been glare and molten heat. There has been nowhere to run from loneliness, inexorable aging and the imperatives of the only true teacher---the body. There have been Deborah’s open gaze; the good silence of the Joshua Buddha; my youngest son’s intermittent presence, and constant wit and kindness; dawns and twilights infused with mineral light. Through all of that, I have come home to imperfect shelter and been grateful.
Next Wednesday I drive north alone. I will go home to a little one bed-room house in downtown Bend, Or. There is a wood-stove and a half cord of lodgepole pine. Forests stretch to the south. I will live in a city---and the company of tall dark trees.
I am already lonely for the hard Mojave. But, that is the nature of a sending.
which you can't reveal to the Ears of Youth
except to say it isn't worth a dime
And the whole damn place goes crazy twice
and it's once for the devil and once for Christ
but the Boss don't like these dizzy heights
we're busted in the blinding lights,
busted in the blinding lights
of CLOSING TIME....
---Leonard Cohen
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.
Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
---The Guest House
Jelaluddin Rumi, translation by Coleman Barks
I woke this morning from a strong dream. I took my coffee out to the back of this cabin. There was a waning 2/3 moon above the old Joshua tree. Doves and sparrows swarmed the bird feeder. I opened my notebook to write the dream.
I heard my son yell. "Coyote!" The young black cat was hunting lizards. Coyotes hunt young cats. I looked up. Coyote ambled from east to west about twenty feet from me. The beautiful arrowhead face. The calm gaze. The deliberate settling into the shade of a blossoming creosote.
I began writing the dream. "I am in a dark interior. I know the place. It is the old city, an old life and an old love..."
Twenty minutes later, I wrote the last line: Oh," she says, "I was with him two years ago. That's over."
I look up. The coyote is gone.
Tonight, the uneaten black cat is curled up on a red cushion. I am back from a long sundown walk. Nighthawks had hunted in the soft air. My friend called as I walked. She told me of speaking river to a committee of drought. I headed west as she told me the story, my eyes on the ground to avoid the sun’s blood glare. Something shone in the sand. I stopped. It was a perfect owl feather.
I crouched and picked it up. "I just found an owl feather," I said. "You are Minerva."
She laughed.
“It’s yours,” I said.
The signal began to break up. We said goodbye. The nighthawks arced around me. Nighthawks. The merciless surgeons of twilight.
I cut away. Three bags of what once seemed indispensable go to the Joshua Tree Hospice second-hand store. I throw away pages of thirty-year old writing---warnings about our cruelties to each other and the earth that have turned out to be oracular; the epiphanies and sorrows of a woman waking to the reality that she had regarded herself as “less than” for most of her life; calls to awakening, to knowledge, to action. I tear each page in half. This is a ritual annihilation.
There will always be more words. As long as I draw breath. The words come through. I release them. Loss is the essence of a sending.
I go forward. North. This desert has been demanding and generous. There have been no work and few friends. There have been glare and molten heat. There has been nowhere to run from loneliness, inexorable aging and the imperatives of the only true teacher---the body. There have been Deborah’s open gaze; the good silence of the Joshua Buddha; my youngest son’s intermittent presence, and constant wit and kindness; dawns and twilights infused with mineral light. Through all of that, I have come home to imperfect shelter and been grateful.
Next Wednesday I drive north alone. I will go home to a little one bed-room house in downtown Bend, Or. There is a wood-stove and a half cord of lodgepole pine. Forests stretch to the south. I will live in a city---and the company of tall dark trees.
I am already lonely for the hard Mojave. But, that is the nature of a sending.
Dry
1
One week of intensive addiction treatment for free. I was poor. I knew it was time to take a break from main-lining my favorite drug. The clinic was famous. It was the favorite place for more than a few You Know Whos to dry out. I was one of the Who the Fuck Are Yous.
I drove south from Flagstaff on a brilliant June day. My drug-of-the-season had written from Algiers to say that It wasn’t working. Though our age difference wasn’t a problem, the generational difference was. “You’re horrified by political and cultural crap I just take for granted,” he wrote. “Hey, I grew up with it.”
My heart went hollow. Nothing new. That organ should have been not much more than a cicada shell. So, when the invitation came for a week of free shrinkage, food and shelter in a desert town, I thought Why not? Hardly the thought of a woman who had reached, as they say, bottom.
I found myself sitting in windowless rooms with people whose hearts were far more dessicated than mine. It occurred to me that being addicted to the millisecond when the guy I wanted bent in to kiss me for the first time, was a luxurious misery. I looked at the other drawn faces, the earnest eyes of the therapist and wanted only a window through which I could see the desert---in which ocatillo were blooming like slender torches.
After we had all cried and raged and earned a little temporary peace (call me a cheap date), I left before the free and intolerably fat-free dinner. The temperature had dropped to ninety-five. I walked out a paved road till it became dirt. A dry river-bed lay to the southeast. I dropped down into it and stopped. Shadows had begun to ease in. A boulder that might have been a two-ton garnet lay ahead of me in the shade. I sat down.
The river curved to the east. I lasted a few minutes on the boulder before the mystery beyond the curve, as always, drew me forward. There was the root-lace of a young cottonwood, snake tracks, a shredded 4-inch-high heel gold-lame sandal. And a few hundred feet downriver, there was another curve in the bank. I went.
And went. Around curves into the fading light, into gray-blue shadows pouring across me like mercy, into forgetting why I had come there. It was growing dark and yet there was always another curve.
I moved forward. There was a patch of damp sand. The scent of monsoons under a dry sky. A tiny pool reflected what was left of the light.
The Hassayampa River runs above and below the Arizona desert. You could take that as a metaphor, I almost did. Then in that instant of seeing the sky shining in the sand, I understood that metaphor was drier than the boot-tracks I’d left behind me. I bent to the tiny pool, traced its edges and ran my wet fingers over the stream of loneliness that ran from my throat to belly. An arc of silver rose just above the eastern mountains. I stepped into my footprints and walked back to my motel.
2
My road pal Everett and I sat in my beater truck in the parking lot of a Salt Lake City Circle K at 6 on Easter morning. Rain sluiced down. I’d picked Ev up in the SLC bus station twenty minutes earlier. We were fueling up before we took off on a six day casino and desert roads trip.
He turned on the radio and handed me two donuts and a big cup of near-useless coffee. “Hard to believe the Mormons made it out here without drinking decent coffee,” he said. “They must be...” The mellow sound of NPR cut him off. “Here goes,” he said. Bob Edwards brown-sugar voice said, “And, here is Susan Stamberg with NPR commentator Mary Sojourner.”
Instantly I knew I was hunkered down in one of more than a few intersections of heaven on earth. I listened to Stamberg interview me about my short story collection, Delicate and I figured I was one of the luckiest women in the world. I’d self-published the book. Her interview guaranteed I’d sell a few. And kick some corporate butt, since I’d vowed to sell the book only in independent bookstores. How much more could a carbed and caffeined woman want?
The radio voices faded. I started the engine. “Forward,” Ev said, “into the gorious unknown.” A few hours later we touched down in the Rainbow casino in Wendover. By the time we’d gambled until our eyeballs spun, snarfed down three plates of the all-you-can-eat Spaghetti Special@ $3.99 and listened to Damien and Natalie Lowe tear up the lounge with old Jackie Wilson tunes, I figured I’d landed in the second intersection of the divine and the corporeal. And, knowing there would be more seemed almost than I could bear. Almost.
Three hundred bucks and a scant night’s sleep in our hypothetically free room later, we headed west and north on the second most Lonesome Highway in America. Ev drove. I rode shotgun, which meant hunching over the topo map, tracing lines we knew were dirt roads and saying gleefully, “Turn here. Turn here.”
There was the abadoned double-wide near Montella and a battered kitchen table full of polaroids of dark-haired people with Basque names. There were mountains named Ruby. There was the joy of mutual nickle dalliance in Jackpot and the misery of three rotting Blue Grouse carcasses at the end of a dusty road. And then, we were headed west to the north portal to the Black Rock Desert.
We spent two days in the Black Rock. We saw two other trucks and almost no planes or contrails. We wondered if we had fallen into a crack in the world. Then we knew we had.
We’d been checking out the dark seams in the eastern mountains. We had long ago learned that In a landscape that seemed too dry for life, what seemed to be shadows on a mountain’s flank were often the entrances to water and lush green and tiny pale blossoms that seemed more light than flowers.
The dirt road faded into a two-track and was gone. We parked, hoisted our day packs and headed toward what we could now see was a hidden canyon in the low range. “Check this out,” Ev said. He pointed just ahead at what might have been a shadow in the sand. “Water.” Not quite water, but a patch of damp sand. And trickling into it from the mouth of the canyon, a tiny stream.
“It’s under us somewhere,” Ev said. “Let’s go see where it starts.”
We followed the stream up into the little canyon. There was a big cottonwood, rusted-out bedsprings of an old camp and the stream racing wild as any bigger river over cobbles and twigs. Ev went ahead. I crouched by the water and remembered an old lover Dead Bill teaching me to read rivers, not on the water, but by watching barrow ditches after a hard desert monsoon. “Look, there’s an eddy, there’s a rapid, there’s the smooth stretch.” We had tossed leaves into the brown water and watched some of them make it, some of them sucked to their end in a killer hole.
Ev called back to me. “You won’t believe this.” I came around a curve in the canyon and found him pressed against a water-fall no wider than his out-stretched hand. “This is it, this is where it all begins.”
“Yeah,” I said, “the Beginning.” He laughed. “Grooooovy.” We both knew that my cosmic take is stronger than his. He stepped back and I leaned back into the cool water. Ev looked up.
“No,” he said, “I’m wrong. It all begins up there. That’s an easy climb. I’ll let you know what I find.”
He spidered up the canyon wall and over the edge. I heard his delighted laughter. He looked down at me. “Who knows where it all begins,” he said. “The stream runs across a bare stretch where it shouldn’t be possible for water not to dry up. There are little flowers. You’d love it. Too bad your back is fucked. I’d spot you but there are a couple tricky moves.”
“Thanks,” I said, “for the pep talk.”
He grinned and backed away. I took off my shorts and shirt and sat in the damp sand beneath the waterfall. I don’t know how long Ev was gone. I don’t know if I drifted into a small dream or not. There was a hawks’ cry. There was something scritching in the rocks behind me and I was completely without fear or longing.
What I remember most is that when Ev returned we walked back down the canyon and followed the stream till it was gone. And that whole time, we were quiet. What was between us didn’t need words, only shadows and shifting light, only watching the color of the sand go from umber to pale gold.
3
Now, fourteen year laterI know more about how a dry streambed might be in the aftermath of a flash flood. I know there is a way a woman can be stripped down to bare grit. I know that she can survive, pick through the debris left by the flood and keep what didn’t kill her.
I live in a cabin on a mesa in the western Mojave. It is early March and seventy degrees. An old Joshua Tree rises behind the back of my cabin. I moved here in June. My first act on coming to the cabin was to free the Joshua trunk from a snare of rusted barbed wire and brads left by a previous ingrate. My second act was to stash groceries in the fridge. My third was to head out into BLM land five minutes from my front door.
Mountains rose in all directions. The sand was red-beige. I moved through clusters of Joshua Trees and skirted the openings to burrows. There were plastic bags waving from the creosote, moony pebbles and luminous desert lilies. There were rusted-out truck chassises and kids’ school papers dated 2005 and, though it took me a while to catch on, there were watercourses lacing through all of it. And no water.
For three years it had seemed there was no moisture left in me. I’d been abandoned by every drug I’d ever loved and some I hadn’t. There was to be no more gambling, no ghost of a lover, no shelter in work, no shelter in my illusions that I was an honorable woman, no shelter in my own body---I was driven frantic by unpredictable frequent migraines. All my fixes had stopped working, a more absolute dead end than if I’d been simply soldiering through not using them.
Ev and I had parted. I couldn’t blame him. A consuming affair and binge gambling had toppled the living architecture of my brain as though it was a row of dominoes. What had been left behind was a mean and boring woman. Nothing inside. Almost nothing outside.
I walked the desert every late afternoon and evening for 245 days. For months I carried a brain I wanted to tuck into the hollow in a Joshua stump and leave behind. There were no mirages. Just sand and rock, sky and wind. I’d run clean out of metaphors. I kept walking. Slowly, slowly, I began to see more and more. Rain fell four times. There was a blizzard and eighteen inches of snow. I kept walking.
By the third rain, a gentle rain, the delicate silver the Navajo call female rain I could smell wet desert. After the snowstorm, I found shining puddles and new channels in the dark sand. A stream of pure color ran down the north side of the highway - opal and rose sky running into the the wash below. A boulder held a pothole. I touched its surface and traced the lines of my face.
Last night I walked out to an old dead Joshua. I visit the tree most every evening. As you step off a dirt road and head southeast, you see what appears to be the gray shape of a hooded monk. I stopped and spoke. “I’m back, I’m glad you’re still there.” I moved forward. The Joshua Buddha did not move. Powerful concentration can be like that. Stillness. Only a soft breeze moving across your face.
Sometimes the transformation occurs within a hundred feet of the monk, sometimes sooner, sometimes later. Last night I was within thirty feet of the quiet figure when it became a bare stump jutting up from downed trunk of the Joshua.
The western light had gone saffron, the eastern mountains were pure dark. I bent to the stump and pressed my face to its rough surface. “Thank you,” I said. “You know.” I sat on the big fallen trunk. There is a deep crack in the bark. In it lies a tiny spine, the white bones perfectly articulated. I touched the spine, no more than a whisper of my fingers. “Glad you’re still here,” I said.
I drank water. The light cooled. When it was time to find my way back, I walked toward a sliver of waxing moon. There was just enough light to see dry watercourses and the lace-work of my own tracks. It happens everytime. No matter what new unmarked path I take across this desert, there is the moment when I move down into the dry bed of a tiny wash, find my footprints and follow them home.
One week of intensive addiction treatment for free. I was poor. I knew it was time to take a break from main-lining my favorite drug. The clinic was famous. It was the favorite place for more than a few You Know Whos to dry out. I was one of the Who the Fuck Are Yous.
I drove south from Flagstaff on a brilliant June day. My drug-of-the-season had written from Algiers to say that It wasn’t working. Though our age difference wasn’t a problem, the generational difference was. “You’re horrified by political and cultural crap I just take for granted,” he wrote. “Hey, I grew up with it.”
My heart went hollow. Nothing new. That organ should have been not much more than a cicada shell. So, when the invitation came for a week of free shrinkage, food and shelter in a desert town, I thought Why not? Hardly the thought of a woman who had reached, as they say, bottom.
I found myself sitting in windowless rooms with people whose hearts were far more dessicated than mine. It occurred to me that being addicted to the millisecond when the guy I wanted bent in to kiss me for the first time, was a luxurious misery. I looked at the other drawn faces, the earnest eyes of the therapist and wanted only a window through which I could see the desert---in which ocatillo were blooming like slender torches.
After we had all cried and raged and earned a little temporary peace (call me a cheap date), I left before the free and intolerably fat-free dinner. The temperature had dropped to ninety-five. I walked out a paved road till it became dirt. A dry river-bed lay to the southeast. I dropped down into it and stopped. Shadows had begun to ease in. A boulder that might have been a two-ton garnet lay ahead of me in the shade. I sat down.
The river curved to the east. I lasted a few minutes on the boulder before the mystery beyond the curve, as always, drew me forward. There was the root-lace of a young cottonwood, snake tracks, a shredded 4-inch-high heel gold-lame sandal. And a few hundred feet downriver, there was another curve in the bank. I went.
And went. Around curves into the fading light, into gray-blue shadows pouring across me like mercy, into forgetting why I had come there. It was growing dark and yet there was always another curve.
I moved forward. There was a patch of damp sand. The scent of monsoons under a dry sky. A tiny pool reflected what was left of the light.
The Hassayampa River runs above and below the Arizona desert. You could take that as a metaphor, I almost did. Then in that instant of seeing the sky shining in the sand, I understood that metaphor was drier than the boot-tracks I’d left behind me. I bent to the tiny pool, traced its edges and ran my wet fingers over the stream of loneliness that ran from my throat to belly. An arc of silver rose just above the eastern mountains. I stepped into my footprints and walked back to my motel.
2
My road pal Everett and I sat in my beater truck in the parking lot of a Salt Lake City Circle K at 6 on Easter morning. Rain sluiced down. I’d picked Ev up in the SLC bus station twenty minutes earlier. We were fueling up before we took off on a six day casino and desert roads trip.
He turned on the radio and handed me two donuts and a big cup of near-useless coffee. “Hard to believe the Mormons made it out here without drinking decent coffee,” he said. “They must be...” The mellow sound of NPR cut him off. “Here goes,” he said. Bob Edwards brown-sugar voice said, “And, here is Susan Stamberg with NPR commentator Mary Sojourner.”
Instantly I knew I was hunkered down in one of more than a few intersections of heaven on earth. I listened to Stamberg interview me about my short story collection, Delicate and I figured I was one of the luckiest women in the world. I’d self-published the book. Her interview guaranteed I’d sell a few. And kick some corporate butt, since I’d vowed to sell the book only in independent bookstores. How much more could a carbed and caffeined woman want?
The radio voices faded. I started the engine. “Forward,” Ev said, “into the gorious unknown.” A few hours later we touched down in the Rainbow casino in Wendover. By the time we’d gambled until our eyeballs spun, snarfed down three plates of the all-you-can-eat Spaghetti Special@ $3.99 and listened to Damien and Natalie Lowe tear up the lounge with old Jackie Wilson tunes, I figured I’d landed in the second intersection of the divine and the corporeal. And, knowing there would be more seemed almost than I could bear. Almost.
Three hundred bucks and a scant night’s sleep in our hypothetically free room later, we headed west and north on the second most Lonesome Highway in America. Ev drove. I rode shotgun, which meant hunching over the topo map, tracing lines we knew were dirt roads and saying gleefully, “Turn here. Turn here.”
There was the abadoned double-wide near Montella and a battered kitchen table full of polaroids of dark-haired people with Basque names. There were mountains named Ruby. There was the joy of mutual nickle dalliance in Jackpot and the misery of three rotting Blue Grouse carcasses at the end of a dusty road. And then, we were headed west to the north portal to the Black Rock Desert.
We spent two days in the Black Rock. We saw two other trucks and almost no planes or contrails. We wondered if we had fallen into a crack in the world. Then we knew we had.
We’d been checking out the dark seams in the eastern mountains. We had long ago learned that In a landscape that seemed too dry for life, what seemed to be shadows on a mountain’s flank were often the entrances to water and lush green and tiny pale blossoms that seemed more light than flowers.
The dirt road faded into a two-track and was gone. We parked, hoisted our day packs and headed toward what we could now see was a hidden canyon in the low range. “Check this out,” Ev said. He pointed just ahead at what might have been a shadow in the sand. “Water.” Not quite water, but a patch of damp sand. And trickling into it from the mouth of the canyon, a tiny stream.
“It’s under us somewhere,” Ev said. “Let’s go see where it starts.”
We followed the stream up into the little canyon. There was a big cottonwood, rusted-out bedsprings of an old camp and the stream racing wild as any bigger river over cobbles and twigs. Ev went ahead. I crouched by the water and remembered an old lover Dead Bill teaching me to read rivers, not on the water, but by watching barrow ditches after a hard desert monsoon. “Look, there’s an eddy, there’s a rapid, there’s the smooth stretch.” We had tossed leaves into the brown water and watched some of them make it, some of them sucked to their end in a killer hole.
Ev called back to me. “You won’t believe this.” I came around a curve in the canyon and found him pressed against a water-fall no wider than his out-stretched hand. “This is it, this is where it all begins.”
“Yeah,” I said, “the Beginning.” He laughed. “Grooooovy.” We both knew that my cosmic take is stronger than his. He stepped back and I leaned back into the cool water. Ev looked up.
“No,” he said, “I’m wrong. It all begins up there. That’s an easy climb. I’ll let you know what I find.”
He spidered up the canyon wall and over the edge. I heard his delighted laughter. He looked down at me. “Who knows where it all begins,” he said. “The stream runs across a bare stretch where it shouldn’t be possible for water not to dry up. There are little flowers. You’d love it. Too bad your back is fucked. I’d spot you but there are a couple tricky moves.”
“Thanks,” I said, “for the pep talk.”
He grinned and backed away. I took off my shorts and shirt and sat in the damp sand beneath the waterfall. I don’t know how long Ev was gone. I don’t know if I drifted into a small dream or not. There was a hawks’ cry. There was something scritching in the rocks behind me and I was completely without fear or longing.
What I remember most is that when Ev returned we walked back down the canyon and followed the stream till it was gone. And that whole time, we were quiet. What was between us didn’t need words, only shadows and shifting light, only watching the color of the sand go from umber to pale gold.
3
Now, fourteen year laterI know more about how a dry streambed might be in the aftermath of a flash flood. I know there is a way a woman can be stripped down to bare grit. I know that she can survive, pick through the debris left by the flood and keep what didn’t kill her.
I live in a cabin on a mesa in the western Mojave. It is early March and seventy degrees. An old Joshua Tree rises behind the back of my cabin. I moved here in June. My first act on coming to the cabin was to free the Joshua trunk from a snare of rusted barbed wire and brads left by a previous ingrate. My second act was to stash groceries in the fridge. My third was to head out into BLM land five minutes from my front door.
Mountains rose in all directions. The sand was red-beige. I moved through clusters of Joshua Trees and skirted the openings to burrows. There were plastic bags waving from the creosote, moony pebbles and luminous desert lilies. There were rusted-out truck chassises and kids’ school papers dated 2005 and, though it took me a while to catch on, there were watercourses lacing through all of it. And no water.
For three years it had seemed there was no moisture left in me. I’d been abandoned by every drug I’d ever loved and some I hadn’t. There was to be no more gambling, no ghost of a lover, no shelter in work, no shelter in my illusions that I was an honorable woman, no shelter in my own body---I was driven frantic by unpredictable frequent migraines. All my fixes had stopped working, a more absolute dead end than if I’d been simply soldiering through not using them.
Ev and I had parted. I couldn’t blame him. A consuming affair and binge gambling had toppled the living architecture of my brain as though it was a row of dominoes. What had been left behind was a mean and boring woman. Nothing inside. Almost nothing outside.
I walked the desert every late afternoon and evening for 245 days. For months I carried a brain I wanted to tuck into the hollow in a Joshua stump and leave behind. There were no mirages. Just sand and rock, sky and wind. I’d run clean out of metaphors. I kept walking. Slowly, slowly, I began to see more and more. Rain fell four times. There was a blizzard and eighteen inches of snow. I kept walking.
By the third rain, a gentle rain, the delicate silver the Navajo call female rain I could smell wet desert. After the snowstorm, I found shining puddles and new channels in the dark sand. A stream of pure color ran down the north side of the highway - opal and rose sky running into the the wash below. A boulder held a pothole. I touched its surface and traced the lines of my face.
Last night I walked out to an old dead Joshua. I visit the tree most every evening. As you step off a dirt road and head southeast, you see what appears to be the gray shape of a hooded monk. I stopped and spoke. “I’m back, I’m glad you’re still there.” I moved forward. The Joshua Buddha did not move. Powerful concentration can be like that. Stillness. Only a soft breeze moving across your face.
Sometimes the transformation occurs within a hundred feet of the monk, sometimes sooner, sometimes later. Last night I was within thirty feet of the quiet figure when it became a bare stump jutting up from downed trunk of the Joshua.
The western light had gone saffron, the eastern mountains were pure dark. I bent to the stump and pressed my face to its rough surface. “Thank you,” I said. “You know.” I sat on the big fallen trunk. There is a deep crack in the bark. In it lies a tiny spine, the white bones perfectly articulated. I touched the spine, no more than a whisper of my fingers. “Glad you’re still here,” I said.
I drank water. The light cooled. When it was time to find my way back, I walked toward a sliver of waxing moon. There was just enough light to see dry watercourses and the lace-work of my own tracks. It happens everytime. No matter what new unmarked path I take across this desert, there is the moment when I move down into the dry bed of a tiny wash, find my footprints and follow them home.
Saturday, May 16, 2009
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