everything is changing, everything has changed

two weeks in the desert, year of the snake, making roots in the stone

I am sitting inside of the second bus, the bus that first felt bare but now it feels luxurious because you can close the door at night and because there’s no tarantulas or dogs howling and it’s only for us / there’s a light breeze through the windows, it’s actually winter here, even through the sweat and the red on my cheeks // it’s winter which means the snakes are hibernating and the ground is drier than it will be in march and it’s not as hot as it could be / perfect weather for hikes /////

it is the year of the snake and I have never given much thought to the zodiac until now // it all lines up, that’s what it has been // shedding shedding shedding / preparing for the running of the horse / born in that sign and coming out of the things I have held since then / three months ago I was in Berlin and everything was okay but I wanted everything to be different / and now it is /

I’ve been learning from the desert / the desert isn’t lush and it isn’t green and it doesn’t make your primal heart say thank god we have water and food all around us / the joy is in the process of things / the walk between the basement and the fridge, the search for a lighter for the stove, the picking of dry leaves off the branches for the compost toilet later / the sunrise waking us and the sunset putting us to bed /

and we can learn a lot from the cactus / Like how they can make roots from stone / like how their long fingers reach up like hands that could hold you / I have learnt that weeding in the desert is tough because everything is out to get you / and the people of the desert seem to mirror those tall green creatures / we are all products of our environment, i think if I lived here for that long my green walls would solidify and my spikes would grow / piercing the soft hands of travellers who are weeding ///

this desert is just like a forest but of cactuses / it doesn’t look like a forest because where we’re from the forest looks different / but I think all of the cactuses must speak to each other somehow, through the black beetles that crawl between them or the sigh of the crickets or the hum of the big black birds above them /

we have befriended a retired US soldier who despite saying he left and he knows why its bad he has told us so many times that he was in the military that it has become the defining fact about him // we go on long walks and listen to him talk about himself for hours and hours / he’s insufferable but he’s our only driver in the desert and his dogs are lovely, he’s been travelling with them in his car for years and he has driven down the whole coast from alaska to get here // there’s a pointer named leo and a dalmatian named India which makes me think of that place and that love //

it has not always been easy but we are moving deeper and deeper, closer and closer / if you want to get past the big wave you need to go through it / we cant get past what we don’t look in the eye / it’s not about compromise it’s about understanding / what we are grateful for, what we want to remember / we don’t know where we are going but we are on our way ///////