Success with my Joshua Tree Imprimature poem....and the film collaboration with CA Museum of Photography. Success with Phantom Seed, Issue #2 amazing readings and events. Beyond what I could've imagined. Success with desert conservation groups, presenting as a guest speaker at the Desert Protective Council annual meeting last month. Success with the desert anthology for Heyday, still ironing out some tough spots but the intent is out there, most of the hard work has been done and more hard work is being done. Success with College of the Desert Solstice. Success with Trapdoor Poetry Series in Palm Springs, welcoming the wonderful poet and friend, Ching-In Chen last night. Success in teaching a California Desert Indian class for Desert Institute a few weekend ago. Success in professional networking and community building - the community thing is by far the most important thing. I'm finding my literary niche - the desert. I'm building on that, in every way shape and form.
I let the pool pump motor linger another few weeks at a shop in Riverside so I can fund another run of 100 Phantom Seed #2 books. The response, love, community circling and avid interest in the desert has bowled me over. Two events, one at Riverside Library October 4, another at Palm Springs Library Oct 27, were tremendous successes, not only with high attendance but a beautiful and heart-rending turnout of contributors-readers!!! I skip grading another stack of student essays so I can go to Trap Door Poetry - was out of town for three weekends in a row recently: Oct 17-19 at Desert Studies Center; Oct 25-26 in Joshua Tree; Nov 1-2 again in Joshua Tree to teach a class for Desert Institute. I regretfully had to bow out on two recent East Mojave gatherings, due to work I needed to get done for the desert anthology, and more recently, for essential rest at home. All these great things I want to bandwagon onto! And I am, as much as I can! I got really spoiled having two sabbaticals in a row for the past two autumn seasons.
Although I feel I'm living in a ghost home now, my spirit only halfway here if that, halfway at College of the Desert, my literary underpinnings shoring me up but feeling fairly weakened by strong undercurrents of professional obligations and a strange bottom sinking of dead anchor weight, too. A very weird mix. I resent my past, the past that's piled up on me here - although it was "the thing" for so long, my 10 year tenure here in the brute desert has really come to an end and now it's a matter of me tying up loose ends and shape shifting, now, it feels, to the wind. Tarah, too, aching to move to Berkeley, she's 20 and I know I sure didn't want to be hanging around with my parents at that age - she has a dedicated boyfriend and I think she's ready to take on the steps of that new maturity - a move to a new town. She is bright and strong and together.
Challenges and struggles to shed old skin. Yesterday I cleaned up my garden area, the lovely bricked patio with surrounding soil I have planted, let lie fallow, and re-planted again this past spring. It was lush and green in early summer - boiling over with marigolds, peppers, squash, poppies, baby lettuce, and various stripes of mint - lovely scents. It died off during the summer, at my behest; too much water. And so, into autumn, and I just cleared it out yesterday - grabbing the big pruners for the volunteer junior sized palo verde tree - still sharp! - and hauling the long branches for storage into the backyard (a few droppings landing in the pool, whoops) - clipping the overgrown, also volunteer, lantana bush, with its pretty and psychedelic flowers that resonate with my good friend Swami Ramanda's joyous stories of his time in India with his great guru, Anandamayi Ma.
I was in bed last night, post poetry reading, and feeling the sensation of ripping old roots out of my heart - pulling that sucker wide open to the wind, the whiles of the world, to everything dark and secret, and saying, look, soil - it's time for change! It's time for oxygenation and fresh air and a time for the earth to lay quietly for this brief desert "winter" (if you can call it that, 90 degrees yesterday) but the shortening days are testimony to my inner truth - and at least we're not burning up out here like they are in O.C. and L.A. but the energy, that tinder-crisp feeling of irritation and incindiary sensations, upon me. Dig up what's been buried under and left to stagnate under the soil - bring it to light - terrify the open heart - let the wind blow through - let the flowers of laughing, bliss-saturated gurus enter me from every angle - when I can surrender my worries and sorrows, my obsessions over lost love - not be attached to what came to seem so essential - be grateful for love when it has showered me this past two years, in whatever imperfect forms -
There were moments of perfect love, there were moments of perfect love, and like the desert on a flowery spring April morning, the contrast to heat-warped insane white lightning July afternoons, I hold the feelings of success and achievement side by side with the brute force of the desert at its most punishing and worst, and keep in mind that I can see and feel all of the seasons at once, and that what feels now like an endurance test of marching across a dry lakebed, only imagining the luxury of water, only imagining the safety of shade, and bracing myself for the possiblity of skeletons of those who didn't make it, and for the cock-tease of that ever-mirage, tapping me on the shoulder with shimmering visions of hugs and love and easy money and easy men, well - I place myself on the old Mojave Road, and I am a pioneer in life and love, and understand that for me, it's a lonely sojourn, and that I will savor people, community, the shelter and warmth of their hearts, even whilst many of them will help themselves to what is in my generous pockets - it's all one. The moments of grief, the moments of perfect love.
The desert never disappoints. In its emptiness, we find a gift of something pure. And in a rush of wind, it vanishes again, but we know it was there. We know it was there. And that has to be enough. I've planted the garden, and I've pulled its dead roots out. The soil is cool and damped, and Shasta the dog clawed a little bit of it up, and I apparently slept through an earthquake in the early hours of morn, and I'm meeting my homie for dinner in Redlands tonight, and we will not talk about love, and I'm believing in my visions, apparation birds, and they seem to be vultures but then again, maybe sweet little cactus wrens, and maybe I'm the loose mountain lion now on the prowl, a little deranged, a little suckered by young love, and a little saddened by the sweet taste on my tongue that turned to agave cactus heart - uncooked - and just knowing the old Indian trail that crosses the huge California desert, my literal and literary journey and landscape, makes me feel better - walking the road with others who've criss-crossed this expanse - and bringing it all together, building a campfire for everybody, bringing it all back home.
Which in itself is success. The dot to dot connect. A night of stars, which seem to offer permanence to us even while they burn out in front of our eyes. The beauty, cannot be denied. Compassion and success, sadness and disbelief - this ancient lake network is so wide.
c. 2008 Ruth Nolan
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