Sitting by Water at Oasis+ Susan Lang + Horsethief Creek

This past Wednesday, finally feeling well, I took a private, short walk in the Coachella Valley Preserve and found a safe little place at the bottom of a short cliff to nestle in next to a trickle of water. As always, the flow, sound, rhtyhm and healing pulse of water in the middle of a desert oasis, shaded by fan palms and thick water grasses, was a miracle - as was and is the healing smooth of flowing water. Sitting in damp soil, legs crossed, meditating on water, and drawing small pictures in the sand, with pieces of stone and sticks, humming to myself. A good hour or more. So much transformation for which I was, and am, grateful. A fifteen minute drive and five minute walk from my house, which is situated in the middle of the desert on a former range of ancient sand dunes, now known as the Palm Desert Country Club.

Last Saturday afternoon, I went, perhaps a bit unwisely - I'd had a wisdom tooth pulled just 24 hours earlier - to to the area known as Pioneertown, north of and higher elevation than the town of Yucca Valley, in the high desert, about an hour's drive from my house. Destination: a beautiful private home nestled at 4,500 feet in the maw of a range of rocky ridges known as the Sawtooth Mountains for a literary event and reading by the wonderful desert writer Susan Lang. Susan grew up in Pipes Canyon on her mother's homestead, and has written a trilogy of books on her mother's life there - the most recent one, "Moon Lily," is recently published.

I have devoured all three, including the earlier books, "Juniper Blue" and "Small Rocks Rising." Although I had a crushing headache by the time I arrived - 5,000 foot elevation gain with a massive late-late-winter storm barreling in, compounded by my very recent and fairly traumatic oral surgery - I managed to connect instantly with Susan herself. We talked about desert writing, growing up in the remote high Mojave desert - as I did - and being community college English professors - she is at Yavapai College in Prescott, AZ, where she also founded and ran the Hassayampa Writers workshop for 10 years. Susan was and is an amazing, charismatic person and I feel so grateful to have met her and talked for those 15-20 minutes, through my wisdom tooth headache, about writing, teaching, and.....the power of the desert and the role it's played in our lives and in our writing.

Before dinner even got started, I left the party, and my friend Caryn (who I'd picked up at the Canyon Coffee Shop in Yucca Valley en route) there, stumbled home with headache-galore, but with a new book in hand, which I consumed the next day while keeping company with one of the very intense windstorms we sometimes get here in the lower desert at this time of year, all palm fronds flying about, sand and dust blowing, and the howling contrast against the usual calm we experience most of the time.

And today, a perfect spring day, the pleasure of hiking to Horsethief Creek, in a canyon tucked into a fold of the Santa Rosa Mountains - part of the newly-designated Santa Rosa- San Jacinto Mountains National Monument. I haven't hiked there since last year at this time. In the ten years I've lived in Palm Desert, it's been a favorite - I've been there may ten times: with Tarah; with my parents; with my friend Kurt and the College of the Desert ecology club; with my friend Darlene; with a few other friends; and several times on solo excursions. This was the hike I had a real emergency on, four years ago, when I did the hike alone on too hot of a day, too fast on the way out, in May, and got heat exhaustion on the way out - and ended up going to the hospital for dehydration treatment. None of that today - blissful temps and a cool breeze, time spent sitting on a giant boulder mid-stream, time to go inward, rinse my Hindu prayer beads in the snowmelt water, and gather huge, open-handed expanses of sweet mountain sage.

The trail from the area known as Pinyon, situated about 1/3 of the way from Palm Desert and the mountain town of Idyllwild, to the creek itself, is a 2.5 mile up and down, 5 miles roundrip altogether, with more uphill on the way out - and it traverses amazing chapparal country at the 4,000-5,000 foot level - a mix of desert cacti, particularly beavertail cactus, agave, and arid, low mountain trees, particulary pinyon, and in the folds of several draws, and of course along Horsethief Creek, cottonwood, which today, were in early spring hallucinogenic green mode.

I went today on a whim. It must be spring cleaning of sorts. I have been through such intensity in the past six months of event and emotion and upheaval and change that I have developed a newfound compassion for myself, for others, and am supremely grateful for the beauties of spring. After weeks of exhaustion, sickness, malaise and the recent upper left wisdom tooth pull I've endured, this was a very welcome excursion. I paced myself, rested at the creek, and meditated as I walked.

The low desert has about maxed out on flowers. Our wildflower season begins as early as late January/early February and often is over by early or mid-March, depending on when we get our first cluster of 90 degree days. We've had a few warm ones this month, so the flowers are exiting already. However, we are so fortunate to have frequent and common elevation and climate change at our fingertips in this part of the world. The adjacent higher elevations are just now springing into full bounty. The drive up Highway 74 was magnificent, a quick rush through 7-level Hill and it's hairclip turns, from sea level to 4,000 feet in about 15 minutes - hillsides flush with yellow flowers, bright pink cactus blossoms, red ocotillo and Indian Paintbrush, purple lupine.

Sitting and relaxing on huge boulders on the creek was relaxng and rejuventating. In one place, I lay back and watched a light-shimmer that seemed almost like smoke emanate from a rock wall that rose hundreds of feet above the creek - and I could see many tough cactus plants growing sideways straight out of rock! There were mini waterfalls and beautiful water slides, and I ran my hands on smooth rock across the face of one such pale-pink-and-red rock fantasy, water rushing down its wide surface in a shallow skim. I also soaked my feet in a pool, and carefully and respectfully gathered sage - my usual place to do so - in fact, some of the big clusters I collected are now scenting my entire house - I've laid them out to dry on the kitchen counter. I only select sage in years of water abundance, and this year the usual plants I visit seemed to be doing well.

I was concerned, however, that with the recently published map of the monument, the area has shown drastic increase of usage even since last year. Today, a weekday, I counted 23 other hikers, one in a group of 16 - I've never seen more than 4 or 5 other people on that hike, ever. And, the area heading upstream from the creek crossing actually has a fairly worn footpath now, something I never saw before. The blessing/bane mix of a new national monument - more protection = more people and, so often, a great, little known place being loved to death. This had been, heretofore, strictly a "locals" place, and now, it's obvious it's getting quite well known to others.

Thank you, Mother Earth, for this healing landscape and geography, for the people in my life - with all of the ups and downs that many of them bring to me as I grow in awareness and continue to emerge from my longtime "privacy" shell, a longtime defense mechanism, and reach out more and more to people in my actions, in my phone calls and emails, in my shared hikes, and in my growing sense of compassion - as never before, I take the risk to build new friendships in ways that are more meaningful to me than the ways I used to take people much more for granted; I reconstruct old friendships and find ways to heal and soothe pains and sorrows I've experienced with people I love, working on transformations and new levels of "being," and more than ever now, I give thanks for each and every person who graces my life.

I'm also so happy I was able today to get out there and do a good hike - taking my time; after all, it's been only a week since I had oral surgery, and I must admit I have a fragment of that last-weekend headache visiting me again - for renewing me and for the many blessings of the day. Deep appreciation, and a growing awareness of what it really means "to walk in beauty," glistens in my little home tonight, the way the thin sliver of very new moon limned the bottom aspect of the just-audible moon, not far above the monlith of the San Jacinto Mountains to the west, in a navy blue sky, nearly all the way to complete darkness, but not quite - the evening star, alongside.