In the dark and miserable rain I saw none of the beauty he had described, and also I was riding the crest of a hormonal freak out, the last one of which happened roughly 28 days ago. All I felt was the weight of a past to which I did not belong, and cold and wet and generally unreasonable in every way, as can sometimes happen about once every month.
We checked into our hotel and I immediately fell asleep and stayed soundly so for nearly two hours. I woke up refreshed and slightly more reasonable and we walked the short mile to the local co-op for fresh vegetables and so that I could poke and sniff around the organic, vegan, wildcrafted, handmade-by-benevolent-witches health and beauty potions, many of which have magical healing properties, some of which I actually understand, like anything lavender-scented.
There is a local woman named Kate who crafts tiny bottles of anointing oils, or perfumes with intention. I happen to love both perfume and intention, and so I went to work appreciating hers. I was drawn to two of the eight or so flavors, "letting go" and "fearlessness and confidence," and only "letting go" smelled right to me with its rose and cedarwood base. I dipped generously into to the tester bottle and anointed the buhjeezus out my wrists like some furtive grocery store priestess.
We ate a simple dinner of miso soup loaded with baby bok choy, fresh shiitakes, garlic, ginger, and scallions and a second course of refried beans and corn and prickly pear cactus tortillas hand-made by Anita, another local woman who sells her goods to the co-op. Afterward, I pressed my wrists to my face and inhaled deeply and fell asleep again. That night I dreamed the most beautiful dreams of being utterly free in ways I have not been in perhaps ever.
Yesterday the sun had come out again and normal life for us resumed, which is to say the world was once again full of wonder. Ben indulged me in a trip to hoard more yarn (idle hands, etc.) and then took me west to the mountains to watch the sunset. It hadn't occurred to me that, since leaving the coast and driving east, we had not seen a single sunset.
We barely caught the last of the breathtaking light as the mountains turned to silhouettes and the city lights in the valley below became a twinkling sea. Scrambling up the dry, white, bone-like rocks of the trail made it real to me that we are, in fact, in the desert. We talked about the crawling pace of the desert and how time moves so slowly here as to seem to stand still. The rush of the coastal cities, the pounding of water and its constant change, doesn't exist in this place. Here it is so still and ancient that it appears dead to someone like me, someone unfamiliar, raised and living always near the sea.
Ben told me that we would come back in the daytime to listen and watch. He says that the boneyard surface of the desert belies the resilience of life here, that everything that lives here has adapted over countless lifetimes to survive, and we will see and hear it moving, hot and low to the ground. Everything here feels ancient. I feel ancient here. It is as though, like everything else that survived by adapting when the oceans abandoned this place an ice age ago or more, I will toughen and cure and learn to change colors and shed old skins and seek heat and carry only what I really need and let go of the rest.
