stardust and fairy magic

With the cool Autumn air blowing down the mountain, and the hot desert sun beating on my back, I take a walk out into my favourite canyon. People often ask me why I like the desert so much. I have a friend from Costa Rica who was astounded when I said that it’s just so alive. To her, life is bright and colourful– the rainforest is alive, and vibrant. To her, the desert looks much more dead. Still beautiful, but dead. And I understand that because once upon a time, I too felt that way. But it’s what makes the desert appear dead to some that makes me love it so much: its subtlety.

I sneak past a couple of tourists (it’s easy to do with tourists– they walk so loud you could probably run behind them and they still wouldn’t hear it) and head up into the canyon. Little bird carcass on the right, and then further up, the remains of some sheep bones. Somebody has picked over them (as somebodies do) and so I bury the rest in case another somebody came along… I don’t know why exactly but I feel fiercly protective over this land– as if other people with their loud footsteps and loud voices and inability to listen are going to cause more harm than good in one of the few remaining spaces that is still sacred. And you can FEEL how sacred it is– when you half close your eyes all of the rocks wiggle and the plants have this potency that you just don’t see too much anymore. Seeing people trudging through there picking over bones and pulling branches off plants and leaving their trash makes me furious, and also ashamed– ashamed that I am a part of it too, ashamed that I don’t quite know how to communicate the importance of what it is that I don’t know how to say, and ashamed that I burn with rage instead of compassion.

So many people come through here and speak of its beauty as if its something that was put there just for them to experience– not like its a living breathing place that has existed for ages before they came and will still be standing long after they are gone. Not like its aware.
It IS aware. Not in the sense that you and I are, with our flitting emotions that cloud everything we do. But it’s an awareness, none the less, and an ancient one at that.
I think maybe sometimes if more people knew this then the planet wouldn’t be in the state that its in.

I climb up the dry waterfall– at the end of the summer in the desert, everything is parched. The air is so dry that it sucks the moisture out of your skin and your mouth, and yet, because it’s so cold, it feels refreshing. I keep walking. Past the caves on the right, through the dried out palm oasis that will be bright and muddy in a few months, up another dried out waterfall and into a little dried out lagoon. The sand is cool and silky; I lie down and close my eyes.

After a while of being surrounded by silence, your ears start to pick up little things. Much like after a while of being surrounded by the dead desert, you start to see little signs of life everywhere.
The beauty of the desert is in its subtlety.
Silence expands. The birds become louder. The dried out leaves rustle in the wind. Little stones trip down the cliff faces to land on the canyon floor. Little bugs run around on the ground and on the rocks. And then, underneath it all, there’s this humm. This canyon sings. It sings constantly, in the most beautiful clear tone that penetrates your cells and makes them sing back. It sings, and then sometimes the people who used to live here sing too, in response to the immense beauty that is in the small details, and if you listen hard enough you can hear their songs bouncing off the walls that are humming. Silence, sometimes, can be very very loud. I lie there, listening and feeling, for so long that I can’t tell where I end and where the canyon floor begins. For so long that I can feel the tourists walking back down the ridge up on top of the wall. For so long that the sun gets high and the air gets a bit warmer (which is a bit of a relief because my fingers were getting very cold). The tourists are gone, and I’m alone.

That’s one of the beauties of being out in nature. Being completely alone, and yet not alone at all. Being separate and yet completely connected to everything around me. These are the paradoxes that make up the entirety of life.

Alone but not.

Separate but not.

Changing but the same.

Like a river, like the wind.

LA smells incredible.

Woodsy, and rainy, and foggy and sea-y all rolled into one. It smells of fresh dirt and happy trees.

Maybe it’s because 2 days of torrential rain has washed away some of the dirt and smog so you can actually smell what’s underneath.

Maybe it washed away some of the attitude too.

I’ll find out today when I venture across town to get to qi gong class.

Of course my camera was inside, and I was transfixed outside, so I didn’t snap a picture of the prettiest sky I’ve ever seen in Los Angeles… but then my idea of a pretty sky and your idea of a pretty sky might be totally different, so maybe I just spared you a few scroll-down-seconds of boredom (this is what I am going to tell myself if you would please humour me).

The clouds had been rolling in for a few days and were getting darker and deeper. By yesterday afternoon you could feel the rain about to happen. This, in Southern California, is a magical event. It happens so rarely, and when it does, so powerfully, that even though I swore that I hated rain, I can’t help but love it here.

I woke up this morning, and went downstairs, made my tea and opened my front door, and the entire morning was purple. This purple that I’ve never seen before (now I wish I’d taken a picture), and the wind was the wind that I’ve felt on the west coast of Scotland (imagine my surprise at finding it here), carrying the sea-air and the seagulls in, swishing through the trees, scattering leaves and sounds alike, and chilling me to the bone.

I don’t know what happened to the rain. The clouds are dissipating and the mountains are still thirsty.

Maybe it’s going to the desert, which, (since I’m going every week, I know this) needs the rain even more than out here.

I feel like I’ve been going a little crazy lately.
Though I know that I have this thread of rationality running through these emotional outbursts, even if I can’t restrain myself from crying for no reason (wtf!) I still have this girl in the back of my mind rolling her eyes at my hysteria.

When I was up in my tree crying the other day (as one does) I had an imaginary conversation with a few of my teachers, who appeared beside me trying to pull me out of my self-obsession.

Them: well they didn’t actually say anything, they just stood there floating up next to the tree but not really on the branch because there’s not much room.

Me” “Look, just leave me alone. I know that I’m being a brat… I just want to cry for a bit”

Them: well once again they didn’t really say anything but they looked at me and THOUGHT “what intended result will come from your acting like this?”

Me: “Well I’ll get the attention, love and care that I want and feel like I’m not getting”… “oh”… “crap”…

silence

Me: “It’s never going to come from anybody else, is it?”

Them: smile… shake heads.

Me: cries a bit more hysterically now

I remember being quite young– 7 maybe– and dealing with the stress of school was just not fun for me, between trying to please the teachers, trying to navigate the delicate politics of making and keeping friends, and trying to take care of my mum and make sure she stayed safe even when I wasn’t with her (ah the responsibilities that kids take on), it was constant stress. I used to sit and imagine that life as a small child, pre-school days, was much easier, much less responsible, much less scary and traumatic. But then pre-school, I remembered, was when my mum and dad would fight constantly. This was still stressful. No, I thought, the ideal state to be in is that of a baby– you have all your needs provided for you, you don’t have to deal with people, don’t have to worry about your mum being safe, and don’t have to do homework or please your teachers. In fact you don’t even have to WALK yourself– you get carried or pushed around.

I used to gaze and babies in prams longingly. Not because I liked babies (I hated and envied them) but because I wanted to be pushed around in a pram. And to be held, and loved and not surrounded by a mountain of expectations and things to do and weights to bear.

Responsibility. For how long have I been running from it?
And how fast is it catching up?

No wonder I can’t stop crying .

O, why this restlessness?

Even when I’m moving? Even when I’m happy?

It’s like some sick joke that the Greek gods would play on a mortal just to have a reason to eat popcorn and giggle.

There’s a cute little old lady who lives a few houses down from me. Cute, that is, until you try to pick a lemon from one of the enormous lemon trees in her front yard. And then all of a sudden she’s barking at you in a thick German accent and, well, I have [affectionately] called her the Lemon Nazi… This was before I found out that she was actually a holocaust survivor and is absolutely terrified of dogs, which can’t be good in this neighbourhood because everybody has a dog (which must suck in this neighbourhood because everybody has a dog), and then I felt like a royal asshole but the name had already stuck.

But still, she barks at people who even look at her lemons. I know this because I looked at them once.

I like to sit on my front step early in the morning, to watch the sun come up and listen to the closest thing I’ll get to silence in Los Angeles. After a while I noticed that every morning, the same few people walk past my house in the direction of L.N.’s house with empty plastic bags in their hands. And then a few minutes later they come speed-walking back in the other direction with full bags.

I think this is quite funny.

I forgot to tell you that this rock didn’t like Kelly.

Grouchy old rock

She was getting so angry– it was slippery and craggy and for some reason kept trying to knock her over (really. I was right there and it was easy for me, but she kept feeling like it was pushing her). She got so mad that she kicked it and started cursing at it.

I shit you not, the rock started spitting pieces of stone at her.

I was less than a foot behind her and I didn’t get hit, nor did I get scared that I would be.

It was kinda funny.