I am the Rabbit

Forty years and 2500 miles ago, I hauled myself and my three kids free from Welfare when I found work in a nursing home in New York state. 

Recently I learned I didn't get a job in the little Mojave Desert town where I live. I had already applied for everything else that was available.  At sixty-eight, I found myself hauling my tanking credit cards and drained savings back to welfare.

    I am not alone in any of this. This fierce stretch of rural California may be a microcosm of unemployment, mortgage foreclosures, and inflated gas prices. My neighbors are lower middle-class, working-class, working poor
-– AND unemployed in all three categories.

    The rich don’t retire here.  Cobalt mountains cradle our soft desert twilights. But triple digit temperatures and double digit winds don’t make for Nouveau West cachet.

    My neighbors and I swap stories at the gas pump … the jack of all trades in the beat-up El Camino who tells me gas prices have cut his wages in half. The woman who glares at the pump and says, “I’m supposed to be thrilled to pay THIS per gallon.  They play with us like mean dogs with a rabbit.”

    My neighbors do more than grouse.  The grocery clerk, the folks in the Social Security waiting room, the receptionists at the Welfare office … the people of this gorgeous battered place simply ask each other, “What do you need?”

    It sounds to me like a blessing, but I wonder why they say it.  They have the right to glare at the old guy stalling the check-out line when they’re trying to make minimum wage cover a week of groceries. But they don't.

    My guess is that a day at 109-degrees cooks the arrogance out of everybody.  A 45 mile an hour scorching wind knocks the starch out of any stuffed shirt.

But more than anything, I suspect, it’s because we all know we are the rabbits.  And we don’t want to be mistaken for the mean dogs.

Contact Mary: bstarr67@gmail.com

Welcome to the Age of Nugacity

We are living in the Age of Nugacity. This, from a word-a-day service
a friend once gave me:

nugacity

PRONUNCIATION:
(noo-GAS-i-tee, nyoo-)
MEANING:
noun: Triviality; futility.

ETYMOLOGY:
From Latin nugax (trifling), from nugari (to trifle).

Last night, after I had read in the LA Times and on Yahoo about Adolf
Hitler's Olympics unfolding in Beijing, I took myself out to the
Joshua tree and watched the moon's slow progress toward the mountains
(which is, more accurately, the earth's falling into day) and I said
to That which contains us, "I am so sorry."

It is astonishing to me that the moon, the old tree, even the lights
of human dwellings slowed my breathing and brought a little peace. I
was able to sleep.

I woke this morning to sadness. Immediate. Inexorable.

Later I read this poem:

All night I could not sleep
Because of the moonlight on my bed.
I kept on hearing a voice calling:
Out of Nowhere, Nothing answered 'yes.'

- Zi Ye, translated by Arthur Waley, *A Hundred and Seventy Chinese
Poems

How much we have all forgotten---the Chinese, the Americans, every
global victim of the Great Hypnosis...

I Offer

I am a free-lance writer, editor and writing teacher. I begin to think about credentials and balk. You can google Mary Sojourner to find my books and articles, my NPR commentaries and writing conference gigs. Here is what is important:

Last night I walked out over the desert, into light that went from too much to burnished to cool gray. I was heading back when I saw a jade-green snake coiled in a perfect circle. Its head was slightly raised, its tongue testing the air.

A few seconds later I found a delicate feather, downy white near its spine, barred cream and brown toward its tip.

I had spent the day fighting various ghosts of "what if". The snake and the feather slowed my heart.

I bring to publishers, writers and students my willingness to walk out over the desert alone; to watch the ground; to look up; and to fool the various ghosts of "what if". Those phantoms block beauty. I teach my students how to float with them.

I teach for writing conferences, in private circles (will travel throughout California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado; you organize your circle and bring me in), and one-on-one through e-mail, phone and/or face-to-face meetings. $175. for an initial individual consultation (my written suggestions on maximum of 20 double-spaced pages) and 30 minutes phone time. I work with fiction, essay, poetry and the transformation of journal writing into what comes next... My fee for writing circles depends on location, number of writers and length of time.

I edit that which needs a razor's edge and respect.

You can reach me at bstarr67@gmail.com

Down the road

****

WORDSMITHING: they say

Father, father, we don't need to escalate
You see, war is not the answer, for only love can conquer hate
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some lovin' here today
What's goin' on what's goin' on, what's goin' on - what's goin' on
Heah, what's goin' on - what's goin' on, oh, what's goin' on - what's
goin' on...
---What's Goin' On?
Marvin Gaye, 1971


I fall in love with the old times
I never mention my own mind
Let's f..k the world with all it's trend
Thank god, it's all about to end...

They say it's all about to end...
---They Say
Scars on Broadway, 2008

"Thank god, it's all about to end..." That's got to be an old broad
talking or an angry geezer. Daron Malakian just turned 33. He was
lead singer for hard rock band, System of a Down. He now fronts SOD.
They Say registered 100,000 downloads when it went up free on ITunes.
Four years ago, Big Dog publisher, make that rabid Big Dog publisher,
Scribner's released my memoir, Solace:rituals of loss and desire
(this excerpt records a reading in Denver in 2002):

I paused and asked for questions or reactions. A young woman
in a bright red t-shirt raised her hand. "Something has been
troubling me for a long time," she said, "long before your reading. I
have two small kids. I am terrified for their future. I've been
taught that life moves in cycles of expansion and contraction. I see
growth exploding. Will there be a contraction? Are the cycles still
in place?"
I wanted to to say easily, " Yes, we move in cycles, our earth and
our huge little species are moved in cycles. It will all come out
just fine." But I remembered a moment from the day before and could
not. At an off-ramp gas station in Colorado Springs, a furious kid in
a pick-up truck had squealed out of the lot, his back tires tossing
rock like shrapnel. Ev had vice-gripped the door handle of his truck.
"I want to go after that kid and beat the shit out of him," he said,
then shook his head. "Which makes me him. We are all spinning out."
I lsat on the edge of the stage.
"I'm deeply afraid," I said, "that the incredible speed at which
most of us are moving is carrying us out of the natural spiral. We
have exceeded some inner and outer gravitational pull. We are flying
out of control."
"But, where," she said, "is the hope?"
Before I could answer, her friend stood. She was a woman in her
early forties,
impeccably groomed, hair cut beautifully, her feet in polished
top-of-the-line cowgirl boots. I would have said we were about as far
apart as two women can be. And then I saw the pain in her eyes.
Her words came slowly. I had heard them three other times on this
trip, once at the Albuquerque reading, once during a radio interview,
once between old friends. "My only hope," she said, "is that some
day, maybe even soon, our species will be gone."

Four years since Solace was published. Six since I listened to
those mothers longing for hope. Thirty-six years since Marvin Gaye looked
deep into the terrified heart of America and asked, "What's Goin' on?"
Every day I hear someone say: "It's coming apart. This cannot
continue." They speak about home foreclosures, gas gouging,
unemployment, food banks stretched as thin as Depression potato soup,
the obscene flaunting of wealth by them that got it...
You can say "It's coming apart." Or you can say "It's goin' down."
And, the question I ask myself every day is this: "Where do I stand?
And, when it's gone down, where will any of us stand?"
A friend read my last column and wrote: Your last column in LIVE
troubled me. Your current sojourn in the desert sounds more like an
austere and lonely exile than a fresh start set some distance from a
casino. Is there anything I can do to help you?
His last sentence is the beginning to the answer to the question:
Where will any of us stand?
For all of us.

************
WORDSMITHING: with all due respect

        The planet isn't going anywhere; WE are!   
                    ---George Carlin
            by way of old comrade, Bob Katz (Lippman)

        Western laziness consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so that there is no time at all to confront the real issues.
        ---Sogyal Rinpoche

    I am lazy.  I am compulsive.  The real issues hung out with me for a couple years.  They would not go away.  I couldn’t.  The real issues worked on me.. They used sand-paper and evisceration.  When they were finished I was a parchment bag of bones and not knowing.
    I cast my bones into the future.  They brought me here.  This place is merciless.  Molten.  These times even more so.  No work.  Frightened people. 
    And still, around 6:30 in the evening, the light cools.  I step out my door and am immediately in the presence of radiant sand, dark mountains and human debris.  I am in the Mojave Desert..  I set out.
    Three nights ago I came across a pale yellow cabin.  The windows were boarded up.  One nail held the door shut.  There were words painted in flamingo pink on the door: 
       
PEOPLE!  If you are the ones that stole the chair,
                go ahead and break in again.  There is nothing left to
                steal.                                     
        Hey, Dougie, here’s the phone number...
            ...call...
            ...if you want...a shower.
       
BEWARE OF SNAKES!!!
   
I began to try the door and stopped.  It was not the possibility of serpents that stayed my hand.  It was the certainty that the lives of the people who had written on the door were none of my business.  It was the dozens of abandoned shacks, houses and trailers I’d found near Twentynine Palms, the currents of lost hope and despair that seemed to wind through those phantom neighborhoods and the stories I knew needed to belong to people who might have lost everything.
    I walked east. I’d gone no more than fifty yards when I saw a ripple of jade and gray gleaming in the sand.  The snake lifted its head.  It flicked its tongue and tasted what might be coming toward it.
    I stepped back.  “Sorry,” I said.  “This is your neighborhood.”

    I went through old papers that evening.  I hunted nothing.  What I found was an invitation as big as the hopes of people building a homestead cabin and as precious as light swimming along a rattlesnake’s curves.  
       
          January 1, 1990: On January 14, I will turn 50.  Please join me and a few friends for a birthday witness at the proposed uranium mine site near Red Butte.  No present, please.  Bring music, food and the willingness to stand outside the wire fence that still encloses the intentions of a Denver mining company, a company a few of us stopped cold.  Love and Respect, Mary
   
There was the the hand-drawn map still incised in my heart.  And, there were the memories of a miracle.  A few of us had caravanned over frozen dirt roads.  Bob Katz drove his truck.  I drove mine.  We parked outside the concertina wire.  The head-frame and the workshed had not been taken down---in case the price of uranium went up, in case the Havasupai and a few of us forgot.
    We heard dogs barking.  I walked up to the locked gate.  Bob opened the truck doors.  “Let’s do it,” I said.
    I’d brought two tapes:  Aretha Franklin singing “R.E.S.P.E.C.T., and the Gaden Shartse monks chanting a Tibetan Buddhist prayer for the Earth.  Bob slid in a tape and turned up the volume.
    “Wait a second, “ I said.
    A door opened.  Two dogs barrelled out of the workshed.  Their fangs were bared. “Hit it,” I said.
    The low thunder of the monk’s chant moved out into the air.  In that instant, the dogs went silent.  They dropped to their bellies.  They crossed their front paws, lowered their heads and looked calmly up at me.  They did not move, even when their owner walked up; even when he asked us what we were doing and we said, “Praying.”; even when he said, “O.k.”; even when the chant faded out and the black diamond of Aretha Franklin’s voice glittered over our heads---and we began to dance.

Jaybird

for Jaybird

And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse

Not shaking the grass.

---Ezra Pound

Letters, Arizona Daily Sun, December 20:
Dear stranger who returned my wallet, I’m in a down-town restaurant thinking about how this diner, in the nearly ten years I’ve lived in Flagstaff, has served everybody: tourists, folks off the Rezzes, visitors up from the Southern sprawl, ragged wanderers in off the cold streets; me and my dead friend, Jaybird. I’m thinking about this bone-cold time of the year, of endings and beginnings. I’m thinking of Jaybird, of his lonesome death and how his life was far from lonesome.
Where’s the wallet come in? I lost it the night of Jaybird’s memorial service. A bunch of us told stories in a smoky room. People spoke of their sorrow that his death had been just a cold fact in the local paper. I decided to write my piece of his story instead of saying it. When I went to my truck to get money for Jaybird’s memorial stone, my wallet was gone. Dark parking lot, shaky neighborhood, oh well. I came home, called the cops, waited and thought about Jaybird’s story.
I knew him briefly. In that short time, he did nothing but give. He heard I was working on a novel about Viet Nam vets and he found guys who wanted their stories told. He listened when I needed to talk about my own small inner war. He heard I was spiritually lonely and showed me a photo he had takien that he believed showed the presence of God. He carried it with him for months and when our paths weren’t crossing, gave it to a friend to give to me. All of that, but most of all, he told his story with absolute honesty.
His story? The truth? Prison. Drugs. Booze. Serious physical damage. Pain beyond what most of us will every face.
His story? Truth? A recovering life of compassion and williness. Sobriety. Teaching himself to read and write---in his 40’s. Tears and belly laughter. Pain endured and transformed. Wisdom given. He would love that I am passing this on.
Stranger, you were kin to Jaybird when you called and said you’d found my wallet and wouldn’t tell me your name. I wanted to send you a thank-you. Flagstaff and Jaybird and my imperfect recovery have taught me that.
So, I’ll give half of what I would have given you to Victim Witness and half for Jaybird’s memorial stone. Thank you stranger. Thank you Jay.

I wrote Jaybird’s memorial letter in 1994. That Christmas friends and I went to a Laughlin casino. I played twenty dollars in nickles, twenty dollars in quarters and twenty dollars in dollars. When the money was gone, we went to the lavishly insipid buffet; my Cockney friend repaired to the bar; my other friend and I walked along the river. Everything seemed bejewelled and perfectly shabby and poignant.
Christmas morning, I bought bad coffee and sat on by the river. I listened to Alvin and the Chipmunks sing Jingle Bells over the casino outdoor speakers. It was still dark. I watched airplane lights race across the opposite shore, lift slowly and ascend. The dark began to soften above the far mountains. I knew I was the happiest I had been in years.
That was the beginning of my affair with slot machines. It gave me greater ease and fun than any lover I have every known. At first, my friends and went twice a year; then once a month; and then, I went alone---once, twice, three, four times a month. I tried to quit even though I didn’t want to. I loved the game, the casinos, the workers. I found stories there I would have found nowhere else.
Jaybird’s ghost has been watching over me. He might have carried me through the loss ot the Flagstaff I loved so dearly and to a hard-scrabble California town. His ghost must have sat beside me a week ago when I put my hand up in a little room of brave people and said, “I’m Mary and I’m a compulsive gambler.”
Jay, thanks again. I will pass it on.

3 Work

3 White

Mojave sunset
I study the persimmon sand

a tiny jawbone
a downy plume the length of my thumb

there is no quartz
no plastic shard

but when I look up
the moon is a sliver of lace agate.


3 Cinnabar

mercurial

apricot to molten above the western mountains

fooprints (mine)

what burns imperfectly

all of that
there is no need for more

And still I find more in the desert in which some believe there is Nothing: the words My Mission printed carefully in pencil at the top of a sheet of notebook paper; a poem in a child’s scrawl:

the lepercon

It is somthing
green. And it’s
somthing not
mean. His
face is not green. he
is not a
king. He lives
In green.

It starts with
an L and
it ends with
N

There is a tattered scrap of a large print bible in which I find unintended inspiration:
hail
“Sun stand thou
and thou Moon in the vau
And the sun stood still, and
until the nation took
their enemies. Is this not written

What I am not finding in this generous desert is work. I am not alone in this nor in the fury a gas pump has begun to inspire..

A friend calls while I am walking in the rose-gold light. She speaks of the necessity of doing her part of the greater work in partnership with the elements; in partnership with Water, Earth, Air and Fire. I stop in the blue shade of a Joshua Tree and listen. The gibbous moon hangs above the southeastern mountain range.
“Metallurgy,” she says. “Permaculture.” I move out of the shade onto an old mining road. I remember teaching the 2004 Desert Writers Workshop and what emerged:

Metallurgy

Three women sit at the end of the long table in a cabin south of Moab. There has been an early October snow. The light is dove gray. There is a fire in the woodstove.
The women have known each other less than a week. They are writers. One of them has taught. The other students and teachers have gone to their rooms, or in to town to unwind from four days of intense work.
The room is so quiet they can hear the fire popping in the stove and the sound of wet rain on the big windows. A woman says something. Another responds. And then, as though they have moved toward the moment from the instant they each decided to stay at the table, each woman tells the others that she was sexually violated when she was a little girl. Their voices are calm as they speak of finally remembering, of puking and howling and, only a week ago, one of them watching in horror as a new date set his hand on her child’s thigh.
“Three out of three,” I say. “One hundred per cent.”
I think of my solitary walk before dinner. The western sky had boiled with clouds. Their light was sulfurous, brilliant as the edge of a new-honed blade. I had imagined a hot spring below the clouds, its waters dangerous and beautiful, its mineral steam billowing up.
I had imagined sky and earth were foundry and forge. For making weapons, weapons made for cutting through. I imagined that to die by one of these blades would be painless. Death would be finished as soon as begun. I wondered why my mind roiled as the sulfur-yellow clouds did. Why violence simmered beneath my spirit.
I look into the bright and ferocious eyes of the two other women. Sky blue. Cloud gray. I am surprised that I do not express fury.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I am so sorry.”
This is the nature of true metallurgy. This is the nature of women’s work.

Metallurgy. Taking one’s place in the perfect pattern of Water, Earth, Air and Fire. Not fixing, but mending so that there is always the hair-line wound that admits the light.
The surrendered will always have our work.

Terra Incognita

I have become a ghost in a ghostland.
TERRA INCOGNITA
1. Cabin Becoming a Crow

Seven years ago my best friend and I drove East on I-40. We were headed for a writing conference in central Oklahoma. When we saw the Cuervo highway exit in New Mexico, we pulled off. It was time for coffee. What better place to drink my friend's fierce dark brew than a dirt road on which we might be attended by fierce dark birds.
There were no ravens, but there was an old New Mexico cemetery. The tombstones were melting back into the rose-gray dirt. The inscriptions were in Spanish.
There were stone lambs weathered to gray lumps on some of the markers. What dates we could make out told us that the bones gone to pure mineral under them had been the bones of ninas y ninos.
The names of the grown-up dead might have been given in hopes of bestowing virtues and blessings. Fulgencio. Rosendo. Adora. Epifania. Dulce.
Shining One. Path of Fame. Beloved. Manifestation. Sweetness.
The oldest stones were carved with roses and crosses and circles. There was a rusted iron grill around a family grave. Faded plastic roses glowed pink and pale orange in the mid-morning light. The silence was crystalline.
We drank our coffee, talked and were quiet; then we gathered up the plastic flowers that had blown into the ditch between the cemetery and the dirt road. We scattered them on the oldest graves, and on the most recent burial. There was no last name. Only this: Juan. Our brave son. 1950-1968.
We headed back on the dirt road. A town rose on the hillside to the east. We drove slowly up through its six streets. Lights burned in perhaps five of the twenty houses. We wondered who lived there. We made up stories that the families left were the grand-children of vaqueros and miners. We imagined asking about buying a house, and learning that only those from the original familes would be allowed to own property in that place. We were good at telling stories. We drove, always, on roads of worship and imagination.
-space break-
This winter I drove east to visit my daughter. I was alone. It was midnight by the time I came to the Cuervo exit. I was tired and the moon was just past New. I pushed through the last miles to Tucumcari and slept in the Buckaroo Motel. I woke to a thread of pale green seaming the eastern horizon. A mother cat and her teen-age kittens twined around my ankles as I went for coffee. The owner's young daughter ran to get me milk. The cats and I drank our breakfasts in the chill air.
I timed my return trip so I could visit Fulgencio, Rosendo, Adora, Epifania, Dulce and Juan. I slept again in the Buckaroo Motel. Again, the mother cat and three kittens who lived in the laundry next to my room greeted me as I brought my coffee to the stoop. For a few minutes, I felt less alone.
I drove west in the growing light. By the time I came to the Cuervo exit, the sky behind me was soft tangerine. I found my way past the hill-side houses and pulled up to the cemetery. There was a new fence around the graves. A road had been bull-dozed up to a new gate. Epifania's marker had been set upright. A vase of roses tilted at its base. The flowers were frozen. I righted the vase.
Again I gathered plastic lilies and marigolds from the ditch and scattered them over the graves. Again I drove back through the little town. All the houses but one were breaking apart into the earth and air. The authorities had tacked Condemned signs on the doors. There seemed to be only one story to tell about Cuervo. It was the story echoing in my smaller life.
-space break-
This morning I woke to bone deep cold. The fire in the woodstove was dead. I went to the woodpile in my front entry. I bent to pick up a log and saw that the floor under the edge of the woodpile had crumbled down into the dirt below.
Cuervo surrounds me. My cabin is becoming earth. Air. A crow.

2. Hunting the Moon

 "Each generation receives a little capsule of
instructions, says Eisley, that passes through the
eye of the needle like a blowing seed.  They are
carried "through the molecular darkness of a minute
world below the field of human vision and of time's
decay."
       "They are transmitted from one generation to
another in invisible puffs of air known as
words---words that can also be symbolically incised on
clay.  As the delicate printing on the mud at the
water's edge retraces a visit of autumn birds long
since departed, so the little tablets in perished
cities carry the seeds of human thought across the
deserts of millenia.
                       ---Loren Eisley, The Star Thrower"
                      in Richard Wentz' The Contemplation of Otherness:
                      the  critical vision of religion.

       Barn's burnt down
               now I can see the moon.
                       ---Masahide

      All wisdom is rooted in learning to call
                things by the right name.
                       ---Kung-fu Tze


       I write on a tablet of light from a perishing city.
In its outskirts I could be anywhere:  Phoenix, Chapel
Hill, Seattle, Flagstaff.  In their outskirts, the
cities have perished.  Or been transmuted by the kiss
of vampires.
       Still, instructions drift through the eye of the
needle.  From Masahide.  From my younger self.  He
tells me there is radiance beyond charred black.  I have
fore-told my future.
       I once wrote:  "That double light of story and
connection has shone true---on the levelling and
subdividing of the hills and creeks of my childhood
home; on the gentrification of the neighborhoods we
hippies re-built in the heart of an Eastern city; and
even now, on Western towns and earth disappearing
before our eyes, eaten by insatiable hungers as
thoroughly as bone by cancer.
       Under that light, in pure gratitude, I offer story
and the possibility of connection, delicate and
essential as Desert Big Horn bones in an un-named
Mojave wash---or any first meeting."
       Over the last four years, the double light of story
and connection began to fade from my life.  In the
last year I came to doubt that it would do anything
but disappear.  A few friends; the Sacred Mountains; a
cluster of seven Ponderosa, one of them reduced to a
stump by the busy work of the forest service; the
double-trunked pine behind my cabin, the ancient alligator juniper in the meadow at the base of the mountains---women and men,
stone and trees have been my illumination, my medicine
and fragile tether.
       Two months ago I learned that the Hassyampa Insitute
for Creative Writing summer writing conference had
been killed.  For ten years or more, writers and
teachers have gathered in Prescott, Arizona for a week
of work and beauty.  A month ago, a gifted editor and
even more gifted friend told me that it had become
impossible to publish the books she loved; and then
another editor and friend said an identical
lament.
       I told myself that as long as my hand moved a pen
over paper; as long as my fingers moved words out
through computer keys, I was where I needed to be.  I
walked with friends, sat with the trees.  The dark territory in me
grew.
       And then, I was invited to a little desert town to
read and teach writing for a Land
Trust. I drove west between blue-black mountains.  I
was alone on the little two-lane till a beat-up
Eighties Ford truck appeared on the western horizon.
As the driver passed me, he slowed, grinned and raised
his hand.
       I waved back and pulled off onto mosaic hardpan;
climbed out and leaned against the car.  The mountains
to the south had begun to catch  pink-gold light.  It
seemed vital to know their names. There is always a
road atlas on the passenger seat.  I opened it and
studied the Eastern Mojave.
      Old Woman Mountains.
       I smiled as I had not for much too long.  Easily,
deeply.  I knew the barn was nearly burnt.  I knew
that somewhere down a dirt road there was an un-named
Mojave wash, and moon-white bones and an old woman
finding them.  I knew it was time to leave what had
once been my home.
       It was time to hunt the moon.
***********
3. Terra Incognita
                 
It is fate that determines the territory
of the heart.
                               ---Terry Tempest-Williams
                               Desert Quartet

              "She holds herself in the fire dying
               through the eleventh hour
               through the twelfth
               with the outrageous hope..."
                               Miriam Dyak
                               quoted in Ilse Asplund's
                               Eco-Feminism: Bridging the Gap

       Sometime in the next six months I will move to a
one-room cabin in XXXXXX, The Desert.  Sooner than later. Fate determines not only the territory of the heart, but its timing.
       "Why XXXXXX?, friends and neighbors ask.
      XXXXXX because there is a huge military base and
bombing range and that guarantees the little town will
never be regarded as charming by the rich and jaded.
XXXXXX because on my first drive through town there
were never more than five vehicles ahead of me at a
traffic light.  Those vehicles were bleached-out and
battered pick-up trucks and Eighties beaters with
windows tacked together from duct tape and plastic
wrap. And there were maybe a dozen traffic lights.
       I'm moving to XXXXXX, The Desert because my neighbors
(despite a city council that believes global warming
is a hoax) will be committed to keeping the town desert
rat's-ass.  They are already known for turning out by
the hundreds at planning and zoning meetings armed
with references to XXXXXX's General Plan.  And most of
them live in real houses...which are their first and
only homes.
       So far, I haven't heard of any absentee landlords,
though there is fierce debate about whether Walmart
ought to be allowed in.  The debate is not about taxes
or killing local businesses---most of the local
businesses are dug in deep as desert wildflower roots.
 The debate is about carbon foot-print: Is Walmart's
toxicity worse than the forty-five minutes to drive to
the nearest town with discount stores?
       I'm moving to XXXXXX, The Desert because when I asked
my ally there what kind of Big Money was in the
place---Old Money or New Money?, she laughed, "There's
no money, Big or otherwise."
       There are lots of artists and potters and musicians
in XXXXXX.  There are only a few writers.  And, there
is a deep hunger to write.  I will have work.
       Should I ever have enough to buy a house in XXXXXX,
The Desert, there are decent two-bedroom houses  for
$65,000.  Since I am not likely to be a buyer, there
are apartments for rent for $500..  The place could be
Flagstaff, Arizona 1985.
       My new home will cost $300. a month.  I'll
share kitchen and bath with my land-lady.  When I wake
in the morning, I'll look out on miles of golden
Mojave stretching to cobalt and buff mountains---in all directions.  I will be
held in a circle of granite and basalt---and rock whose names I have yet to know.
       And therein lies the essence of why I am moving to
XXXXXX, The Desert.  I woke the first morning of my
working visit to the place.  As always, I was
frightened.  My mind whirled:  loss, loneliness, not
enough money; age, the rotting publishing world.  I
opened the curtains over the north window.
       First light was amber on the creosote and cactus.  I
didn't know the names of most of the plants.  I wanted
that knowledge.  Second light fell on the first of an
aviary of birds.  I did not know their names.  I
wanted to.  And then, the top of the creosote went
red-gold.  I stepped out into warm air and looked
east.  The sun crested a purple-black range of mountains
whose names I did not know.
       I went into the cabin and picked up my notebook and
pen. I sat on the low stoop and made notes about
second light and nameless birds and red-gold creosote.
 It was the first time I had wanted to write in
months.  There were more question marks than words.
The lacunae were mysteries for the solving.
       The absences are the reason I am moving to XXXXXX, The
Desert.  They will save my life.

                       "I asked my seven year old daughter, 'What does the
               environment mean?'  She answered simply, "'It's the
               circle of life."
                        All things turning, one into the other, without division."
                               Ilse Asplund
                               Eco-Feminism: Bridging the Gap (1990)

(The name of the town has been changed to protect the
still-innocent.)

Hunting the Moon

"Each generation receives a little capsule of
instructions, says Eisley, that passes through the
eye of the needle like a blowing seed. They are
carried "through the molecular darkness of a minute
world below the field of human vision and of time's
decay."
"They are tranmitted from one generation to
another in invisible puffs of air known as
words---words that can also be symbolically incised on
clay. As the delicate printing on the mud at the
water's edge retraces a visit of autumn birds long
since departed, so the little tablets in perished
cities carry the seeds of human thought across the
deserts of millenia.
---Loren Eisley, The Star Thrower"
in Richard Wentz' The Contemplation of Otherness:
th ecritical vision of religion.

Barn's burnt down
now I can see the moon.
---Masahide

All wisdom is rooted in learning to call
things by the right name.
---Kung-fu Tze


I write on a tablet of light from a perishing city.
In its outskirts I could be anywhere: Phoenix, Chapel
Hill, Seattle, Flagstaff. In their outskirts, the cities have perished.
Or been transmuted by the kiss of vampires.
Still, instructions drift through the eye of the
needle. From Masahide. From my younger self. He
tells me there is radiance beyond charred black. I
fore-tell my future.
I once wrote: "That double light of story and
connection has shone true---on the levelling and
subdividing of the hills and creeks of my childhood
home; on the gentrification of the neighborhoods we
hippies re-built in the heart of an Eastern city; and
even now, on Western towns and earth disappearing
before our eyes, eaten by insatiable hungers as
thoroughly as bone by cancer.
Under that light, in pure gratitude, I offer story
and the possibility of connection, delicate and
essential as Desert Big Horn bones in an un-named
Mojave wash---or any first meeting."
Over the last four years, the double light of story
and connection began to fade from my life. In the
last year I came to doubt that it would do anything
but disappear. A few friends; the Sacred Mountains; a
cluster of seven Ponderosa, one of them reduced to a
stump by the busy work of the forest service; the
double-trunked pine behind my cabin---women and men,
stone and trees have been my illumination, my medicine
and fragile tether.
Two months ago I learned that the Hassyampa Insitute
for Creative Writing summer writing conference had
been killed. For ten years or more, writers and
teachers have gathered in Prescott, Arizona for a week
of work and beauty. A month ago, a gifted editor and
even more gifted friend told me that it had become
impossible to publish the books she loved; and then
another equally fine editor and friend said identical
words.
I told myself that as long as my hand moved a pen
over paper; as long as my fingers moved words out
through computer keys, I was where I needed to be. I
walked with friends, sat with the trees. The darkness
grew.
And then, I drove to Twentynine Palms, California to
read and teach writing for the Mojave Desert Land
Trust. I took the I-40 Mountain Springs exit to Amboy
Road. I drove west between blue-black mountains. I
was alone on the little two-lane till a beat-up
Eighties Ford truck appeared on the western horizon.
As the driver passed me, he slowed, grinned and raised
his hand.
I waved back and pulled off onto mosaic hardpan;
climbed out and leaned against the car. The mountains
to the south had begun to catch pink-gold light. It
seemed vital to know their names. There is always a
road atlas on the passenger seat. I opened it and
studied the Eastern Mojave.
Old Woman Mountains.
I smiled as I had not for much too long. Easily,
deeply. I knew the barn was nearly burnt. I knew
that somewhere down a dirt road there was an un-named
Mojave wash, and moon-white bones and an old woman
finding them. I knew it was time to leave what had
once been my home.
It was time to hunt the moon.