This is a strange plane, with rust red rock towers that teeter over the earth, some menacing, some so holy the desert air seems to pick up your breath and steal it. Until you are one with this strange plane, the desert that was once underwater. The crimson rock seductively twisting around scattered trees and cacti, howling an echo of the harsh wind. I found a coyote femur as soon as I got here, the trickster spirit, decaying in a casket of red rock.
I’ve seen twelve deer this week. They are elusive, poised, quick- the Celtics called them fairy cattle, and said that they could be milked by strange and otherworldly women. You go to these new places, and this whole thing is a hologram, so they aren’t really places, just new neural pathways, weaving out and calibrating in front of you faster than you can blink. And the animals are symbols, and so are you. The shaman told me, when you go to the mountain, you are accessing the higher realm. The mountain winks and grins back at you. When you dip down on the trail, and enter a low place, a cave or a river, you are in the subconscious. And it's all you. All of it is you. So listen.
I can fan myself out and make myself bigger, amplify the light quotient and capture the sun. I dialogue with my oversoul.
She says,
Be brave, resist, don’t burn yourself at the stake, swear off the small minded and close hearted people. Abandon your propensity to apologize for occupying space, for being loud and red and wild like the Scottish moors you were woven from. You were sewn like a quilt into that land. Don’t apologize. Set superficiality on fire, abandon shame and guilt, roar and climb and learn to fall in love again and again. To feel pain is sometimes the way into the heart. The keyhole into the next plane. There will be others.
The vortexes here amplify everything, the good and bad, and I oscillate between insane sensitivity and impish reactivity. I want to live days like this for eternity, where I can lead with childlike curiosity, explore and walk and climb, look for faces in rocks and lend shade from strange desert trees.
I found a coyote bone, and I will bury it. In a low space. By the winking of the water. I will use it to commemorate being the fifteen year old pin up girl of inconsolable rage, fury, and unfair projection. Bury my rage with Los Angeles. The never ending psychic attack. Cheers to being unmanageable, to being paradoxical, to being tricky.
I want to learn how to love what I see, how to not judge what I see. Learn grapple with the illusions and the smoke shows, the never ending chase for the invisible dragon, fragile and reckless. The trail of coyote boys.
I return to Los Angeles, and try to find peace in the alienation. After all, there's night jasmine blooming in beachwood.