stuff.
Always with the creative titles.
Right. So in keeping with my recent trent of overly sentimental and reflective posts, here's something that I wrote last year. I know that the desert comes up pretty frequently on this journal, but it really is very important to me. I've been thinking about defining moments recently, as a result of some conversations I had last week, and this moment I'm writing about really is one. It has really shaped a large part of who I am, and it's something that I can always go back to. In one of Barbara Kingsolver's essays she wrote about a place in her head that she likes to go, memories of the woods of kentucky, and this really is that in some ways. Okey. enough prefacing. Onwards!
I remember hiking in the Sonoran Desert when I was younger. As my friend and I pitched the tent, the sun began to set, silhouetting the giant saguaros and immense, stark rock formations. The shadows from the cacti stretched to infinity as the last of the sun’s rim disappeared beneath the horizon, and the mountains faded into the night, leaving only a hint of their existence caught in my memory.
That night I saw for the first time the vast desert sky in all of its radiance. These stars were not the ones I watched from cornfields back home; no quality could change as much as the brilliance of these stars. Emblazoned across the sky in their fiery glory, the stars could not possibly be the dull, sometimes glinting ones from home. Here, the Milky Way was no faint dusting, no wisp of a cloud across the sky seen from the country away from the city lights. Here, the the Milky Way was, truly, a way--a blinding, shimmering, glowing road across the sky, illumining the way for all to see.
I lay there, captivated by stars and sky, and the desert wind blew across my face. That unique, dry, warm wind that somehow whips across the ground without chilling or biting, the wind that wraps around you and threatens to carry you away in your sleeping bag. I held the desert pavement, the dry, powdery dirt and pebbles that protect the delicate soil of the desert, and let it run between my fingers, feeling the different textures against my skin--smooth, then rough, then soft, then rough again. Small desert animals scrabbled around at the edge of my hearing, looking for food and shelter.
I awoke that morning to a desert in full, jubilant bloom. Deserts were lifeless, barren places, I had been told. Why, then, could I see the flowers of cacti spreading over the hills, blanketing everything with a spectrum of hues that seemed to bright for the soft greens and browns of nature to which I was accustomed. The pure white Saguaro flowers, the purple Barrel Cacti, the brilliant red blooms of the Ocotillo, all gave me proof that the desert was anything but lifeless. This was the biggest bloom in the Sonoran Desert in 40 years, I learned later, and it was indeed an event worthy of such rarity.
The rest of the trip was also memorable: finding flint arrows in the ground; climbing a small peak and seeing the eternity of the desert; seeking shade during the blistering heat of midday in a wash under a cluster of paloverde trees. Nothing else on the trip, though, changed me quite as much as that first night. None of my memories, nothing else in my life, is quite as vivid as that night setting up the tent. It is the one memory which stimulates all of my sense. I can smell the desert air, I can hear the sound of the wind and feel it against my face, I can see with a clarity that sometimes surpasses my normal vision the silhouettes against the setting sun, and I can taste, yes, taste the desert on my tongue, biding its time until I return to where I belong and am again flooded by sensations and beauty too great to conceive.
Right. So in keeping with my recent trent of overly sentimental and reflective posts, here's something that I wrote last year. I know that the desert comes up pretty frequently on this journal, but it really is very important to me. I've been thinking about defining moments recently, as a result of some conversations I had last week, and this moment I'm writing about really is one. It has really shaped a large part of who I am, and it's something that I can always go back to. In one of Barbara Kingsolver's essays she wrote about a place in her head that she likes to go, memories of the woods of kentucky, and this really is that in some ways. Okey. enough prefacing. Onwards!
I remember hiking in the Sonoran Desert when I was younger. As my friend and I pitched the tent, the sun began to set, silhouetting the giant saguaros and immense, stark rock formations. The shadows from the cacti stretched to infinity as the last of the sun’s rim disappeared beneath the horizon, and the mountains faded into the night, leaving only a hint of their existence caught in my memory.
That night I saw for the first time the vast desert sky in all of its radiance. These stars were not the ones I watched from cornfields back home; no quality could change as much as the brilliance of these stars. Emblazoned across the sky in their fiery glory, the stars could not possibly be the dull, sometimes glinting ones from home. Here, the Milky Way was no faint dusting, no wisp of a cloud across the sky seen from the country away from the city lights. Here, the the Milky Way was, truly, a way--a blinding, shimmering, glowing road across the sky, illumining the way for all to see.
I lay there, captivated by stars and sky, and the desert wind blew across my face. That unique, dry, warm wind that somehow whips across the ground without chilling or biting, the wind that wraps around you and threatens to carry you away in your sleeping bag. I held the desert pavement, the dry, powdery dirt and pebbles that protect the delicate soil of the desert, and let it run between my fingers, feeling the different textures against my skin--smooth, then rough, then soft, then rough again. Small desert animals scrabbled around at the edge of my hearing, looking for food and shelter.
I awoke that morning to a desert in full, jubilant bloom. Deserts were lifeless, barren places, I had been told. Why, then, could I see the flowers of cacti spreading over the hills, blanketing everything with a spectrum of hues that seemed to bright for the soft greens and browns of nature to which I was accustomed. The pure white Saguaro flowers, the purple Barrel Cacti, the brilliant red blooms of the Ocotillo, all gave me proof that the desert was anything but lifeless. This was the biggest bloom in the Sonoran Desert in 40 years, I learned later, and it was indeed an event worthy of such rarity.
The rest of the trip was also memorable: finding flint arrows in the ground; climbing a small peak and seeing the eternity of the desert; seeking shade during the blistering heat of midday in a wash under a cluster of paloverde trees. Nothing else on the trip, though, changed me quite as much as that first night. None of my memories, nothing else in my life, is quite as vivid as that night setting up the tent. It is the one memory which stimulates all of my sense. I can smell the desert air, I can hear the sound of the wind and feel it against my face, I can see with a clarity that sometimes surpasses my normal vision the silhouettes against the setting sun, and I can taste, yes, taste the desert on my tongue, biding its time until I return to where I belong and am again flooded by sensations and beauty too great to conceive.