to Arizona

Oh, Arizona, what a lifetime ago you seem to be. Is there a way to neatly encapsulate an experience so vast? How do I sum you up in a few tidy paragraphs?

If I’m being honest, I’ve been procrastinating this bit of writing for reasons unknowable to myself. The trip was cut short; the country shut down; nothing about this year has been anything that any of us could have anticipated. I suppose I’ve been waiting for clarity, to be ready for whatever it is I have to say. But one of the lessons I’ve learned this year (and learned it well) is that you can wait forever for a readiness that will never come of its own accord.

The west came after a heartbreak of sorts. I can’t lie and say that at least the first half of my time there wasn’t a surfeit of struggles, bits of darknesses and shadows that would rear up every hour or minute depending on the severity of the day. I’d wake up resentful and angry, pining for a home that I hadn’t appreciated when I was in it but seemed so dear to me now. And then, often reluctantly, I’d recalibrate.

The perfunctory bits became comforting; the importance of a routine was noted. Mere miles from the border to Mexico, I could go on hikes that allowed me to see into a whole other country. And at first I did do this - take off on an afternoon adventures where I hiked nearly all the local trails and got to know the nearby towns and was a little tempted to see if they’d allow me to sign up for a library card.

I woke early to tend to the animals – a llama, a sheep, two large dogs, a brood of hens, a pair of (super mean) roosters, a couple of peacocks, and seven alpacas (the headliners). The alpacas consisted of two adult males, an adolescent male, and four adult females (four expecting ladies, might I add).  

My days took on a comforting yet mundane routine. Feed the animals, weed the… weeds, tend to the plants, rake up alpaca poop to sell for fertilizer, turn the compost, collect eggs. I went with my hostess to book clubs, to farmers’ markets, to church, to interesting lectures at the community college on a variety of subjects (including, but not limited to, an overview of Arizona State parks and a crash course on mariachi music). I tried some local restaurants, and breweries. I went to the little co-op in Sierra Vista, giddy with a sense of belonging.

I had high hopes for my time in Arizona, as far as exploration goes. It’s a big state with a lot to see, surrounded by other big states with a lot to see. The plan was to visit all the national parks, to gallivant far and wide, to absorb the lovely arid healing air, to spread my wings and fly.

And then a pandemic struck. As cities and states and countries began their shutdowns, I was (sometimes literally) paralyzed by indecision whether to stay or to go. For the time being, my life as a vagabond was coming to a halt. I continued my routines with the animals, the plants, and the weeds, but the lectures at the community college, the book clubs, the restaurants, and even the trails… all that stopped.

Instead I watched the sun rise and set from my little porch. I sat in the field with the alpacas while they grazed and I read my books. I wrote and worked on art and got in shape and got a bit of a tan and trained my mind to be in a healthy place (which may have been the most difficult thing of all).

I’ve been a lifelong sufferer of wanderlust, to a degree where it could feel like a physical ache. It was a sort of sickness, that wanting. It was a false belief that I could go somewhere else far away – somewhere beautiful or exotic or just different, and that place would somehow make me beautiful or exotic or different. Somehow I would change just because my physical location has changed.

Haha, no. 

I was in a desert in Arizona, more metaphorically than literally. Physically, I was surrounded by red searing mountains and vast landscapes that left me breathless. But my insides were dried out and lacking. It didn’t matter that I was in a brand new beautiful place; I suffered until I learned how not to suffer.

Turns out, that’s my biggest takeaway from this time, that wherever you are – whether in a jungle or a desert or a mountain or a beach or a foreign land or your homeland – you are yourself, and there’s no escaping that, not in any real capacity. You take yourself with you wherever you go. So be who it is you want to be and like that person. You're the only you you'll ever have. 

Cheers. 

***

P.S. Another lesson learned (not just from the animals on this Arizona ranch, but from all the animals I tended to this year): the Number One Priority of animals is undoubtedly food. Seriously. Name an animal – pigs, horses, chickens, alpacas, dogs, cats – they are all about eating, in an unabashed way that made me feel not a small amount of admiration and solidarity.

on a hike (sowing the seeds)

Do you ever go on long lonely rambling walks in nature and realize that entire universes can fit between the start and the finish? I miss that sensation, that immersion into nature, occasionally getting to emerge from it a transformed person. 

I hiked a lot throughout my time in Arizona, until it seemed imprudent to go anywhere or see anyone or do anything at all. Instead, I’d walk down my host’s mile-long driveway at sunset, tracing my eyes along the outlines of the mountain peaks and watching the mountains fade from red to purple.

Now, after the fact, one particular hike stands out to me – a seven-mile jaunt that took me to the top of Coronado Peak and back down the mountain again. There truly was a special sort of accomplishment that came from walking to the top of a mountain and then gazing into Mexico, a whole other country that I still had only visited for a trip to the dentist.

There was also a fragility that came with the risk of being blown off a cliff by a strong wind.

That wind in Arizona! “Is it always this windy here?” I asked my host.

“Just in the spring,” she replied, “and the fall, summer, and winter.”

How my emotions oscillated that day. There were true jubilant, the-hills-are-alive moments, followed by rippling discontent at the pains of the past mixed in with worries about an unknown future, a really rancid cocktail that I just didn’t want to swallow.

Sometimes hiking really feels like a self-confrontation, letting the monkey mind run wild and cacophonous until it is exhausted and finally – finally! – still.

After that hike – the ascent, the descent, the wobbling legs as I tucked myself back into my car feeling more like jelly than a solid mass, the scalding ravenous hunger – it would not have surprised me to learn that I’d spent an entire lifetime on that trail, that I’d actually reached the end of my life and was somehow having a trippy, non-linear look back over the life I’d lived along with all the other lives I didn’t.

I’d like to pinpoint this as the moment where I decided to change, where, in the movie of my life, I’d proclaim, “This is it!” I see now that things are much more gradual, and often there is no exact moment of transformation. You just wake up, you go on the hikes, you feel the feelings, and, somehow and at some point, you settle down into yourself.

You do the right things, even when those tasks feel perfunctory and meaningless. But, lucky for you, growth and progress are cumulative. You read about habituation and cognitive behavioral therapy and mindfulness. You see small muscles begin to show in your arms. Your hair grows. Don’t you see? Nothing is stagnant.

You read verses like “the best is yet to come,” and you shift your thinking. Because you can. You can shift your thinking. All of this takes place on the span of a hike. You forget; you relearn your lessons and re-experience epiphanies you never cease to find as earth-shattering. You go on another hike, and another. And another.

You live a thousand lives on them, these trails. You are everyone and no one and, somehow by the end, you are yourself again, more yourself than you’ve been before, and maybe not quite as yourself as you might be someday.

With the pandemic, state and national parks closing, and travel being somewhat unwise currently, I haven’t gotten to lose myself in a forest lately. Sometimes I think that all my work and all my progress is for nothing. My memories of the mountains and forests have to suffice for now.

My younger brother said yesterday, "Seeds are not reaped in the same season they are sown.”

Sow the good seeds, be the good soil.

all hopeful on you.

The current state of the world reminds me of a short story I’d write, or a very, very unedited first draft of a novel. So far, none of those dark writings has seen the light of day, and I can’t help but feel a twinge of remorse for them now, as if my little individual powers of manifestation could have set up such a colossal and devastating chain reaction.

Look at me, exaggerating my own importance in the grand scheme of things.

Last night I had a drink, took a walk, stumbled upon and startled a couple of javalinas, fell in love with the landscape of jagged Arizona mountains, listened to music that pumped me up so thoroughly that for a moment I truly believed I could fly and lifted my arms skyward for takeoff. (I don’t drink much; give me a break.)

But it was also like a dam broke in me, and all this bad stuff that I’d been clinging to (both with and without consent, for days or weeks or years or a lifetime) was swept away in the mightiness of that current. For the moment, I was weightless.

Why couldn’t I legit move here to rugged and wild southern Arizona where everything is so real all the damn time that it hurts until it doesn’t and then you’re so much stronger for it? Why couldn’t I get a job in a library and join a yoga studio or a book club or visit the Grand Canyon whenever I felt like it because I have a national park passport and I don’t have to pay an entrance fee? Why couldn’t I just settle down?

“Because my wanderlusting heart must wander!” my tipsy brain proclaimed.

“Because the world is shutting down and maybe you should just calm the f*** down and go home,” said the rational one.

Not that it’s surprising, but I’ve struggled with taking the pandemic personally. And then I remember the second agreement in The Four Agreements, which is Take Nothing Personally.

It seems I’m not alone in this. Er, well, I’m alone, but everyone else is alone too. Is there ever any real solidarity in loneliness?

Truth be told, it’s hard not to feel fear, or hopelessness, or panic. I have had to distance myself not just from everyone physically, but virtually as well. I cannot carry the panic of the masses as well as my own private terror. I cannot feed or witness the hype or the frenzy. Perhaps it does nothing, but I hang out in fields with alpacas and shut my eyes and imagine myself as the little match that struck in a field and started the wildfire of hope spreading out across the world. I imagine this disaster being the ashes, and the world that follows it the phoenix that rises. I cling to faith and hope as if they are the water and I am the thirsty wanderer in the desert, and drink them down at every opportunity.

For the moment, I believe in my own soul as capable to bring about the change I wish to see in the world. Haven’t much smaller things changed my life? A book, a conversation, a song, a sunset, a smile from a stranger – all of these things and more have the power to tear a rift in the fabric of who you are and create something new.

Just be still, have a little hope, wait. This too shall pass.

***

"What could be heavier and more impenetrable than a rock, the densest of all forms? And yet some rocks undergo a change in their molecular structure, turn into crystals, and so become transparent to the light. Some carbons, under inconceivable heat and pressure, turn into diamonds, and some heavy minerals into other precious stones." 

to Louisiana ("finding" myself?)

It’s laughable to me just how out of order I’m writing about my travels, but then, that disarray might be more indicative of my life these last months than tidy chronological order would be.

It’s been several weeks since I was in Louisiana. I drove through the whole state of Texas in a day, lingered a few days in El Paso, spent another day in New Mexico, stayed these last weeks in southern Arizona, and went to Mexico for a teeth cleaning, which belongs to a future writing.

But, as the rain pours in Arizona today, my mind is on Louisiana – that cold, wet winter place where I got my heart broken and had plenty (I mean plenty) of time to ponder my identity and whether it would crumble or remain steadfast.

Evidently Louisiana winters are wet. Lesson one. So wet, in fact, that I had to call my wwoof host upon arrival to see if it was safe to venture down his driveway, because, like that episode of “The Office” where Michael and Dwight drive into a lake, that’s exactly where the GPS appeared to be taking me. At least, if nothing else, I had more sense than Michael and Dwight (although that isn’t saying much).

My time in Colliston, Louisiana was sort of living the high life, at least by wwoofer standards. Our host took us out to eat at a local Italian place, and at a highbrow taco joint. He took us to a screening of an independent film, all the way in the hip town of Shreveport. We wwoofers had a whole house to ourselves, with so much time to read or write or draw or piddle. There was a yoga room, and I was very thankful to incorporate such a regular yoga practice back into my days.

Other than keeping the very hungry horses fed, there weren’t as many farm chores as I’d grown accustomed to. Some days, he’d say, “It’s much too cold to be outside,” and that would be that. There was a great deal of weeding where I angry-pulled those suckers and took it very personally when one would refuse to be uprooted. “I may not have a man or any money when this is all over,” I thought to myself, “but I will have muscles and a tan, so.”

There was a large composting pile in which fresh onions were growing. “Life is tenacious,” my host said when I showed him. (By the way, I want to be this man when I grow up. He works internationally and was in between trips to Tanzania and Thailand during my stay. #goals, amirite?)

I was productive in a very personal way. I drew a whole lot. I exercised. I sat with my own mind and tried to rewire the whole dang thing. I thought about splitting up with people, regardless of the form the relationship took, and how I always had the tendency to divvy up interests afterwards, like physical possessions in the aftermath of a divorce. “Well, he liked that band; am I still allowed to like it?” “I wouldn’t have known about this famous funny mortician if it hadn’t been for ____. Am I still into her?” “Ugh, he’s an artist too? Well, screw my artistic dreams! The world’s not big enough for us both!”

This may come as a surprise to some of you (though probably fewer of you than I’d like to think) that I’m actually very dramatic.

This is not a blog about mental health, other than when it comes up in my own journey. I took a great interest in psychology a few years ago and attempted to delve in deep, only to find that, the more I discovered, the more shaky my foundations became. The more I knew the less I understood.

All that’s really relevant to this post is that I have a disorder with a very shaky sense of identity. I have a tendency to mirror whomever I’m spending time with, to trade out personalities fluidly like a chameleon changes colors (although this isn’t very fluid for me internally; it’s actually rather jagged and jarring, and leaves me with a great deal of whiplash).

Ergo, there were lots of thoughts about identity in this cold, wet Louisiana haven.

I am still myself, I thought, despite everything I am still her. I worked damn hard to find her. And then I scoffed at that, at that word. “Find,” as if it’s something that I just stumbled upon while out on a lackadaisical stroll, “find” as if I chanced upon it in a thrift shop, “find” as if it was something I lost and rediscovered only through serendipity. Ha. Oh, no.

There were blood and sweat and tears as I carved into myself like a sculptor slices into wood or stone to find whatever it is that slab is supposed to be. It's not a discovery; it's a decision. Let’s be intentional about who we are, shall we?

I became; and I am becoming.

on a rant. (We're all someone's crazy ex.)

The night I met my most recent ex-boyfriend I said some atrocious things, like where I did and did not shave, that I did not adhere to misogynist cultural norms, and how I wouldn’t mind having a sugar daddy if I didn’t have to perform sexual favors for him.

(What can I say, he must have found me at least a little charming. And, in my defense, I was out with a lady friend - a date on which he was the third wheel, not me.)

But I have had a realization in hindsight, as so many realizations are only realized after the fact (which is to say, too late to matter), that I was on a the high end of an overcorrection, a phase where I took nothing slightly resembling BS from anyone, that I was deep into an I’m-a-strong-independent-woman-and-don’t-need-no-man period, and now I wish I’d dialed it back just a little bit so I could look back and think to myself, “Ah, I was the least bit rational; I’m so proud.”

Alas, no, rationality is not something I can reminisce about or claim I ever possessed.

This, this overcorrection, is the reason I went from taking so much wishy-washy will-he-won’t-he-come-back and pining for poor treatment and half-love to running away, sometimes literally, from nice guys who just wanted to take me out for coffee or dinner or for a walk or something. If only there had been reason, or at least a little balance, perhaps things in my most recent romantic endeavors would have turned out differently, or at least amicably.

Perhaps I could have said, “yes, I’ll have a drink with you and we can have a conversation; I might say something weird, but oh well!” I could have said, “sure, I like coffee, wanna buy me one.” Instead it was like, “no, you have a penis, stay the hell away from me, you’re just like all the rest of the other sordid lowlifes and I want nothing to do with you forever and ever.”

I could have been like, “yes, we kissed, but let’s not overthink it,” instead of putting my phone on airplane mode for an entire day and wandering aimlessly around a park lamenting, “woe is me, what have I DONE?” I could have said, “hey, we’ve seen each other four days in a row, and maybe I need some space now,” instead of having a full-blown crying meltdown and not speaking to him for three days.

Cleary I had and have some things to work through.

And that was just the very beginning of that story that now appears to be over. I see now over the weeks and months the vast number of things I could have done differently. But the pendulum swings, and, up till now, I’ve found myself just along for the ride.

Now… now I’d say it’s high time I just took a step off the ride and watched it swing for someone else for a little bit. Until I figure out if this thing has an on/off switch or speedometer or something.

When you’re traveling solo across the country and staying on farms with really just animals for company, your mind has a tendency to rebel against itself (or at least mine does). You want to doll yourself up and go out and be all, “I’m still clever and okay-looking even though I’ve been dumped, right? You, random man, validate me.”

You want a massage, a bath, a pedicure, a haircut. You want a pint – nay, a tub! – of ice cream. You want a whole stuffed-crust pizza to yourself. You want an endless supply of rom-coms that will restore the faith in your delusional little girl mind that meet-cutes exist IRL and you will someday very soon find yours.

Did you ever hear about that experiment with the kids and the marshmallows? The kids that were willing to wait to devour their treats got a second marshmallow in addition to the first one. Evidently this patience and willingness to wait for good things was very indicative of later-life success. I see now that I’ve always been among the group of kids who eats the marshmallow as soon as it is within reach (even though I don’t even eat marshmallows at all now, because, you know, gelatin).

All this massive rambling is to say, maybe it’s a beautiful thing to think that we can grow and change and become more than whoever it was we were born as. And now is as good an opportunity as any to take the time to realize that maybe it’s better to wait for the best, for the bigger reward, instead of settling for whatever just comes along.

... to Alabama (a sanctuary of sorts)

In my journal, I wrote, "Time passes slowly here," but now, in retrospect, I'm wondering if I didn't abandon the concept of time altogether for the week and some change I spent on a farm in southern Alabama.

Highly organized and community-driven, there was always much to do. Weeding, transplanting crops, digging holes, raising fences, herding chickens, watering the greenhouse, tending to the animals (seventy chickens, two piglets, three dogs, and a cat), preparing food, cleaning up after meals, etc.

There was time for adventure, too - there was a wonderful meditation center, an expedition to Mississippi for the De Soto National Forest, a trip on kayaks down a cold and crowded stream, a jaunt to Mobile for a Mardi Gras parade (where I had a thorough but quiet environmental panic attack). There was a lake behind the house - with two kayaks and a canoe. There were hammocks and campfires.

There was space for the stillness; there were these perfect days where I could tilt my face forward to the sun and bask, moments I'd chuckle to think I was doing better things for my tan in Alabama than I ever did in Florida (though I was, in fact, diligent about sunscreen). When you are in the dirt, surrounded by plants and animals and QUIET, the monkey in the mind is still present, but it sitting still, for once. There was space for that quiet, for the expanse.

And the community, the closeness shared by my host family and those surrounding them... Perhaps my lifelong isolation has been self-imposed, but my lone wolf status felt shaken, as I was welcomed into a community overflowing in goodness. If I must be like a sponge and absorb the energy of those nearby, it would be wise to henceforth surround myself by this quality of people.

I watched my muscles grow. I felt my mind become dearer to me. I ate onions directly from the ground and got dirtier than I’ve ever been in my life. I collected chicken eggs and made exceptions for my vegan-like sensibilities to allow me to eat eggs I'd gathered myself.

ABUNDANCE, that was my mantra: shed the rubbish, so you will have room for so. much. more. Since my time in Alabama, I've been clinging to things that no longer serve me, and I could really take a bit of my own advice. I could certainly use another dose of that farm's medicine. But I cherish that time and that place, for what it was then and for what it stands for now.

... to Texas and New Mexico (God is in the sand)

I drove through the entire state of Texas in one day, a fourteen-hour day of driving, which is a new record for me in my solo travels. Fourteen hours alone in a car certainly yields a lot time for a lot of things – music, podcasts, thoughts that range from silly to serious to severe, and then back again.

To my cousin in El Paso, I professed myself to be a “yes” woman, someone who says yes to anything (yes, like the Jim Carrey movie) unless there’s an actual valid reason not to. We didn’t do anything crazy. Mostly I said yes to different types of food. I said yes to going across the Mexico border, until a massive traffic jam thwarted us. But when you have suffered from antisocial tendencies in the past, saying yes to small things isn’t such a small thing after all.

Post heartbreak in Louisiana, I began to have a difficult time with more creative endeavors, like writing and drawing. Though I usually try to push through, though I have done my best to make those things habitual tasks that I JUST DO regardless of feelings, they fell by the wayside. I journeyed into the rugged wilderness instead, as if I could push myself hard enough physically then the brokenness of my insides would catch up to the muscular and hardened muscles on my outside.

Day one, I went to Franklin Mountains State Park, where I hiked up a mountain, saw some caves, climbed higher than I should have, and scrambled my way back down with a sort of graceful gracelessness. Contending with the altitude was the biggest obstacle. I was breathing with audible gasps that embarrassed me when passing other hikers (who were also struggling and likely took no notice of me).

I stayed in the park until sunset, just cherishing my time outdoors. The aloneness was comforting then, as it is sometimes, until it isn’t.

Day two, I drove up to White Sands, New Mexico, where I decided to embark upon the five-mile hike through the dunes. I spoke aloud myself only to ask "why am I doing this" as I struggled up sand dunes and the sand burned my legs and face, and my throat dried out and lips cracked and nose ran. "You'll be damn proud of yourself when you're done," I said aloud, in response to my query moments earlier.

Some stretches of markers were highly visible; you could see the path laid out before you. Others became visible only upon reaching the previous marker. A lot like life. And, when I'm in the desert, apparently all my thoughts are merely metaphors. Or is it I turn real life into the metaphor?

I sat on a dune with my running nose and burning skin and the freezing that came from the burning. I talked to God and felt Him listen. I asked Him questions and thought maybe I should try listening instead of running my mouth. I stopped talking and continued to feel that presence, but there was only companionable silence, no words of wisdom or life paths laid out before me.

Sand dumped from my shoes, sand filled my car, sand everywhere. Invasive species, sand is. I feel God more at the ocean too; perhaps sand is what makes a space holy; perhaps God is in the sand.

I realize now God owed me nothing; the bargaining I made was entirely with myself. But I did endure; I am growing a sort of tenacity that I hope will one day yield something more than a checked off completed trail. I can still only see the next marker, and barely. The sand rises around it in small storms.