The Desert is Full

the desert feeds you, if you listen

Oh hello there. Where have I been? I’ve been pretty full.

Almost a year ago I went to an artists’ salon and met a desert character that can only be described as an oracle. She told me two things:

First, “there’s something different about the hunger you feel in the desert,” she said. At the time, I believed her. You can imagine it - the dry, cold winters and the harsh wind, the animals grazing all day and never satiated. But looking back, I think the feeling I understood and related to at that time was residual hunger and yearning from years and years prior to landing here. The desert, I’ve found, can feed you. If you listen.

But the second thing she said after, I agreed with and still do: “Be gentle with yourself; move slowly like sweet, fragrant honey.” And that, a year later, I find myself doing more and more.

A lot can change in a year out here. It feels like it moves slow, like sweet fragrant honey, until it doesn’t. It can take a year for your hair and skin to get used to the hard water (still working on that). It took a year to find my current yoga community, where I’m meeting even more new people who feed themselves in the practice. It took a year to memorize the face of the coyote that lived on our street, only to find her dead, hit by a car, off the main road last week. I had resented her for killing Olive’s puppies back in the spring. But after seeing her lifeless, I came home and cried. I have a pit in my stomach that hasn’t left yet. I know her spirit is still out there. I feel it when we ride down the road. I will never get used to things dying out here all of the time.

In my newsletter from our anniversary I wrote about connection as my priority. Summer was ending, a new moon was in the sky, and I remembered why we came here in the first place - connection, with myself, with nature, with those around me. The desert is full in the fall, having imbibed in the sun for those long hot months. Your body forgets what it feels like to be chilled to the bone. But then you remember, and hope the memories of summer can keep you warm. Sometimes that connection includes the death.

After drafting this newsletter, I read it back and noticed the nuance of “we” that I mention throughout the rest of it. “We” are not only me and Matt - “we” are a whole desert presence and community. My strong feminine bonds, our found family, the creatures and the sky and the art. We are everywhere.

From the new moon night

So we tried to take it slow. But at the same time, we filled ourselves with everything our beautiful little town had going on for October.

The month consisted of the Highway 62 art tours, Rachel’s opening in LA, The Dandy Warhols and the Black Angels at Pappy and Harriett’s. Zia from the Dandies made me want to play the tambourine. They are a band I never thought I’d get to see in person after buying one of their albums back in fifth grade but everything about them fit in so perfectly with the experimental art that blossoms out here.

Desert family (where's Matt??) including the garden parrots

We listened to Alex read at the Red Light Lit showcase in Joshua Tree and found the only grass in the hi desert. We played volleyball with the group that plays here weekly - I hadn’t played in ~15 years.

I’ve started my course for hand-poke tattooing at Love Always and have been finding so much solace and wonder in drawing again. Granted these designs are way too complex 1) for hand-poking and 2) as a starting point for me, so I’ll likely be going with baltic pagan symbolism in the meantime (throwback to my first ever tattoo).

We had countless evenings of dinners with friends and nights at the Tiny Pony. Last weekend, we lounged in the cool air, but warm sun, discussing our bodies and stories of our births. For Samhain, we gathered the coven at Nuria’s, celebrating each other and our ancestors, ending the night with a howl at the moon.

For the coven celebration, I procured some realistic bird wings. I wanted to evoke the dark goddess Lilith. I walked around our backyard in them. Something about wearing those wings, and us women standing in our circle and asking for safety and peace for everyone right now, I was taken back to a poem I hadn’t read in years.

It’s the last sentence. In my gut.

The Winged Energy of Delight - Rainer Maria Rilke
(I like the Robert Bly translation the best)

Just as the winged energy of delight
carried you over childhood’s dark chasms early on,
now raises the daringly imagined arch
holding up the astounding bridges.

Miracle doesn’t lie only in the amazing
living-through and defeat of danger;
miracles become miracles in clear
achievement that is earned.

To work with things is not hubris
when building the association beyond words;
denser and denser the pattern becomes -
being carried along is not enough.

Take your practiced powers and stretch them
between two opposing poles.
Because inside human beings
is where God lives.

Love,
Lily