I haven’t wanted to return to the desert. It just took so much to finally leave, you know?
When I left Oregon last week in the early morning dark, I wondered how I’d feel when I caught a bird’s eye view of Phoenix again. What would happen in my body? What would swirl in my blood? What would go very very still?
I was reading Holly Ringland’s latest book, The House That Joy Built1 when the view from the small window caught the edges of the town that had forged me. Coincidentally I was reading the story of Holly fleeing her desert via plane just as I caught the first glimpse of returning to mine. Fitting, I thought. Perfectly timed.
And what I ended up feeling was… reverence. The familiarity was overwhelming, but not in a way that takes ownership. I had come back to a wild that knew my name. I had returned to a thin place that exists right on the edge of the world around me and the world within me. I am of the desert, she is of me. But I am also of something else.
I always have been. I just have room for it now.
I was only actually in Phoenix long enough to pile into Mel’s car with Sarah and Corinne. The drive was familiar and easy, with mesquite and creosote growing off the side of the highway and an endless blue sky stretching on and on and on. I know this world. I have it memorized. There’s always some comfort in that, isn’t there?
We spent days together at an Airbnb in Joshua Tree, just the four of us (who we affectionately refer to as The Berries). We were surrounded by deep desert in a Dark Sky part of the world. We ate and drank and wandered and shopped and climbed otherworldly rock formations and sat by bonfires and made each other coffee and swayed in hammocks and stumbled onto dragon spines and caught golden hour light and told tender truths and stayed up so so late and then woke up to untempered sunlight every single morning.
The experience was exactly what I’ve come to expect from the desert. Bone-deep sisterhood, ferociously safe vulnerability, and a reverberating whisper of, “go, go, go.” Go in the direction of you. Go in the direction of art. Go in the direction of reclamation. Go in the direction of transformation. Go in the direction of softness. Go in the direction of terraforming storytelling. Go in the direction of creativity. Go in the direction of collective liberation. Go in the direction of your largeness. Go in the direction of self-ownership. Go. Go. Go.
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