Half Measures Avail Us Nothing...Except When They Do

Desert Rats Writers Camp

In his 1929 book, Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud posits that an individual's instinctual desire for freedom is always at war with society's demand for conformity. Civilization is a tool we have created to protect our happiness, but bound to its rules, we are essentially unhappy and discontent.

It's a paradox for sure.

As an artist, it feels particularly sharp. I don't have some huge reserve of belief in my own creative prowess, but I don't think I'm delusional about my talent or desire. I was meant to be a writer. It's all I want to do. Observe, think, write, done. Simple. Yet, the plight of the creative is not that simple. Unless we are genius and recognized or well-funded or just plain balls-out crazy, we have to live with the paradox of discontent. We get to be free in as much as we must conform to survive in the society we want to reject.

Since I'm none of those wonderful things, I spend a great deal of time conforming and feeling a deep existential pain. Sometimes it burns, like a kind of spiritual bursitis. I can feel it in my joints and the pit of my stomach, the set of my jaw, or the way my feet hit the ground. The somatic response to conformity is stunning and painful and perplexing and flat out depressing.

Maybe Balls Out Crazy

There are days I think I would rather cut off my own fingers than use them to work for someone else. I'd rather poke my own eyeballs out than experience the particular shade of blue that defines the sea of cubicles inside the office I go to during the week. There are days when I feel like the clock in the break room is mocking me. Time cannot possibly move so slowly. Also, why do I want time to march forward so fast?

There are days when I wonder what is wrong with me? Shouldn't I be content? Not much is being asked of me. I'm not selling anything or being confronted with some great big moral dilemma  I'm great at what I do, so no one is breathing down my neck. Many of my coworkers seem content. They arrive on time. They work and mill about and share lunch and go home without spontaneously combusting. It is all so polite.

Every month my bills are just paid, there is a roof over my head and my cat is fed and at night I get to write but sometimes I'm too tired or out with a friend or gathering material to write about, so the story is there but always in the future, just ahead of me. I have this idea or that idea, and as I fall asleep or piece it out in the dark hours of insomnia, I feel that pain of discontent.

My belly is full. My head is swimming. My heart is wide open: I want to be free, but how can I be when I have to be at work in the morning?

Lately I have this fantasy, I'm going to buy a hippie bus and I'm going to load it up with some books and my poor cat (who really is chained to polite society) and I'm going to run away. I'm going to write all day and freelance when I have to and wash dishes at diners and bathe at TSAs. I called my best girl and told her about it. My best girl tells me the buses are made of tin, and not worth the money. She says I'm just going through the thing that ladies my age go through. She says to take a deep breath and to keep writing anyway.

From My High School English Class Journal

Okay.

I'll stay here with society for now, and I will work for who ever needs or wants me to, and I'll keep writing, not because I don't feel the urge to run or that it's small or easy to tramp down, but somewhere in that place is the reason to write. And also its material. Without the experience of conformity how would my writing change? It's this world I live in, the privations of society, of work, of modern life, of being a woman and an artist. I've heard a million times how you have to suffer for your art.  I guess I'm getting it right because I'm suffering. And it's just a little sweet.

Last week, I sent out the first short nonfiction from the Travels With Jonah Project. It's called Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. I think it's good. I hope it gets picked up. I sent out a short slice of life piece called Makeup to a few places. I'm working on a piece about how my parents met called Lake LeAnn and another piece about men and women and conquering the west. It's working title is Across the Great Divide.

I know who I am as a writer. I have my voice. I know I can do this, discontent or not.

Keep Walking - Bear Creek Trail - Briones Regional Park

Just me on Bear Creek Trail

This weekend I went for a long solitary hike on Bear Creek Trail in Briones Regional Park. I heard it was good place for spring wildflower viewing, and I had been longing for a break from the inside times, which so mark the end of the rainy season in the Bay Area.

Up late the night before, perhaps a little hungover, a little dreamy and thoughtful, I packed some food and water and headed out. It was misty; what I call "unicorn fog" clung to the hills and the trees on them, thick and eery like in a fairy tale. On the road out to the trailhead, a raptor of some kind came gliding down in front of the car, and I thought for an instant, before being taken over by a deep joy at "having just seen that" that I might hit it. I didn't.

There were only a few cars parked at the trail head, and there was no one around when I started down the path. I made sure to sign in at the registry and text a friend to let her know where I was, in case I disappeared or something. I was excited. I'd never been that park, and it was new, and it was all mine. So down the path I walked, taking in the views of the reservoir, moss covered trees, and carpets of teensy flowers.

Rainy Reservoir

I wasn't completely present. I was thinking through all the things that were happening in my life, sometimes close to the trail, sometimes floating in that rich and creative imaginary brain space. So, it wasn't until I was pretty far along, that I actually realized I was alone.

I usually hike with a buddy. Who knows what can happen? A twisted ankle or a wrong turn, God forbid some creepy molestory-type like what happens in every Lifetime (television for women, of course) movie ever made? Look, I'm not dumb. I'm a lady. I'm pretty small. I do not have any secret super powers. I know I am liberated, but it doesn't make me free.

When I had this realization, I stopped. I felt my foot fall back. Then my foot advanced. I rocked in place for a moment. I felt, I guess, fear: the collective weight of all the possibilities, the bad ones. I felt the wind rise up, and I listened to it flow through the trees and the grasses, and I heard some birds out on the water.

I thought about all the times I wanted true solitude out in nature, and all the times I wanted to stand on my own without any other observers or conversations or interjections, where I could feel exactly and only what I was feeling. I thought about how long I had longed for that and how terrifying it really was, not just the "alone-ness" but also the "being-ness."

With no audience beside myself, was I as authentic, as deep? I was afraid of all of the real contingencies, and of the emotional ones, as well.

With only flowers to bear witness...

As I stood on the path halfway between coming and going, I reminded myself that the first part of courage is seeing fear clearly, recognizing how scared you are, and then going forward, whether it's heart first into the forest or heart first into your own heart.

In her book True Refuge, Tara Brach writes "Our undefended heart can fall in love with life over and over every day. We become children of wonder, grateful to be walking on earth, grateful to belong with each other and to all of creation. We find our true refuge in every moment, in every breath. We are happy for no reason."

In that moment, looking clearly at my own fear, I felt, also, the deepest, strongest sense of pure happiness: I was alone, in the woods, and it was all mine, and it was beautiful.

I kept walking.

2013: Your Weaknesses Are Your Strengths

Me, Red Rock Canyon State Park, 12-30-2012

True story: the other day I was driving my poor twelve year old car to the muffler shop when my brakes went out. The day before I had returned from a camping trip to Death Valley National Park. All that previous week, my buddies and I had been driving in that poor twelve year old car up and down around and through mountains and mountain foothills and hills and twisty roads and long stretches of uninhabitable, desolate desert where wrong turns and breakdowns can have serious consequences.

One of my biggest fears is losing control on a steep mountain pass. I have nightmares about it. Sometimes when I'm driving on a road with a grade or a sharp turn, I have a panic attack. Sometimes I have to close my eyes or cover my face when I'm riding through mountains as a passenger. Sometimes, I just start crying my eyes out because I am so scared.

Despite this crippling phobia, I love going places that happen to be in, on, around, and near mountains.

A few days before the trip to Death Valley, I took my car to the mechanic to check its brakes because I heard a little noise, and my big fear cropped right up. I wasn't sleeping, thinking about going through those mountains not having checked the brakes one last time. The brakes, my mechanic said, were just fine. So, my buddy and I packed up our camping gear, and we hit the road.

The brakes went out. But not on a mountain pass or in the desolate desert. They went out on a busy city street next to a service station and a bus stop, and everything was just fine.

Heading into Death Valley National Park

It was wonderful to see in the New Year in such a wild and beautiful place and in such good company. As my friend and I drove in on 190 E down through the mountain passes toward our destination at Furnace Creek, it wasn't fear I felt, but something without a precise name deep, deep, deep in every part of me. And I did cry, because it was overwhelming. It was something like amazement, something like drama.

Let me tell you: there is nothing like this place anywhere on earth and possibly not even in your imagination.

That first day was cold and windy, and it had rained and snowed. On the way into the park, we stop shortly at Father Crowley Point. The wind was so strong there. It played against the earth and its crevices like a giant recorder humming deep notes.

All through the trip, the wind howled. With almost nothing to howl through, it was often just up there in the air, moving. At night, in and out of sleep, I would hear it and think, what a comforting sound, though there was something preternatural in it. Maybe it was just that it was the only sound.

We spent a few days camping with friends who drove in from Arizona. No cell phones, no computers, no Facebook. After sunset, we sang songs around the campfire and stared at the stars, and made meals, and cursed the cold, and told jokes. By daylight, we explored.

My buddies just chillin' on Mesquite Flat Dunes

I like camping. Most of the time is spent solving problems, simple problems of comfort. We have to figure out how best to cook a meal over a fire or how to get make coffee when the propane stove goes bust. We have to decide how to stay out of the smoke, how to stay warm, where to pee, if we're all getting enough water... The whole time we were out there, I didn't think once about my student loans or my job or the future. I didn't look at a clock. Time had a different quality.

Devil's Golf Course

I'm what you might call a naturally anxious person, and I've always seen this as a weakness. In the absence of big worries, there are always worries to fill the gap. What if a rattlesnake crawls into my sleeping bag? What if we run out of gas? What if we lose control and fly off the mountain? What if one of us breaks a bone at Devil's Golf Course? My anxiety is always with me.

On this trip, my friends and I played the "worst case scenario" game, in which I propose an activity, and they brainstorm the worst case scenarios until I'm giggling instead of fixating on what could go wrong.

Q: What could happen on Artist's Drive? 
A: We're all so overcome with beauty, we abandon the car to paint.

Bad Water

I'm not obtuse, I know my friends worry about my worry, then I worry about them worrying about my worry because that is what I do. It's a cycle, though not necessarily a vicious one. I was feeling a bit down about this anyway, worrying out loud if my worry was a total mellow harsher, when one of my friends started laughing.

She said that she was glad I was the person I was because I was always prepared. She knew, if we broke down, we would be fine, because I brought enough water for everyone, because we had food and shade and sunscreen. And, in real life, if there was an earthquake, she said, I'd be that person, the one with enough supplies to keep going. Everyone would want to be with me.

In all my years of worrying, I'd never thought about how it could be a strength. I only ever saw it as an obstacle that needed to be worked through or with or around, and in the space of a few sentences, my friend helped me to understand it could also be something really great about me too.

Natural Bridge Trail with Ing

Every year, I try to come up with a motto, instead of a set of resolutions. I think about this for a few months before and a few days into the New Year. There were a number of contenders, but 2013: Your Weaknesses Are Your Strengths is the winner.

This year, I plan to flip what I perceive as my personal weaknesses and obstacles right on their heads and look at them under a different lens instead of getting down about them.

Zabriskie Point at Sunset

True story: 2013 is going to be a great year!!!

Happy New Year!

Face What You Fear

Your humble narrator

Time travel is hard.

First of all: you're doing it your whole life. From the moment you're born you start journeying into the future, and it's not too long before you begin carving out a past to journey into as well.

I've mentioned before that Einstein quote about the stubbornness of time, the persistent illusion of past, present, and future. Probably what is, just is. I wonder, if I just came to terms with that truth, if there would be no time to travel through: just is?

Second of all: since we've all come to a tacit agreement that we are plodding through life in a linear way marked by beginnings and ends in spite of science, a person who clings too closely to the truthiness of the Einstein statement is going to probably end up getting looked at funny by her cohort and by others who are not her cohort.

Meh.

In linear time, it's been a while since I updated this blog. I left you all last at Black Diamond Mine. And what has happened since then? A contentious Presidential election, Thanksgiving, a horrifying school shooting, the Christmas cliff, the fiscal cliff. Tomorrow is the Winter Solstice and The Mayan Apocalypse.

And where have I been this whole time out in time? Well, I've been writing, an allotted one hour a day working on THE BOOK, and a variety of other projects. I'm convinced, if the world doesn't go cold still tomorrow, these projects will all be settled at once, and I'll have five books or so to offer. I've been a wage slave, commuting to work, working, commuting home, cooking passable meals with adequate amounts of nutrition, and carefully budgeting fun times.

The original title of this post was going to be "Not Everyone Wants to Live Like You," because out of all of the things that have happened in the last few months that have informed my view of American identity, it's that statement that has the most veracity. I wonder, could this blog be one line, that line? Why belabor the point?

Not everyone wants to live like you. That is not necessarily bad. It just means different people are in the world differently. It's simple, and easily forgotten.

I like my life. I like who I am and the way I live, but I don't expect everyone would want to live like I do. Ten years ago, I never would have imagined that I would be settled in Oakland in an apartment high on a hill overlooking a dense crop of tall buildings. I didn't think I'd be doing this on my own, catching commuter trains or buses or contending with rush hour traffic. Maybe some other women would think my life was a dream. Maybe some would think my life was a nightmare. I'm not gunning for the traditional heteronormative life with a husband and kids or a yard and trips to the mall or radio stations that play light rock and Kenny G. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just not what I want.

Okay, who would not want to wake up and see this every day?

It would be great if everyone got that, but it's not always the case. Some people believe everyone wants to live like they do. It's easy to believe this way:  Everyone should naturally want this life, my life, a life of traditional American values. We hear that often, don't we, a call for a return to the imagined America of yesteryear? And on the far end of the spectrum, there is a kind of smug, libertine self-righteousness. Any person who is a moral or religious or fiscal conservative is a terrible, greedy, close-minded sociopath poised to squash or fun and freedom at all costs. Everyone is right, of course. Everyone's personal lifestyle is the most relevant. Oh, Everyone, what to do with you and your assumptions about reality?

Speaking of that subject, I know my feet aren't planted firmly in reality. I get it. Sometimes I feel like one of those Thanksgiving parade balloons on a windy day. It takes a whole lot of strength to hold me down and keep me close to the tacit agreement of "reality" we seem to have. This causes me so much grief. Like, seriously, man, why does a person need to sit at a desk all day poking shit around on a computer until she is blind or broken when there is a whole great wide big world out there? It's so myopic. And why am I participating in this silliness? Why are any of us?

This past weekend, after the horrific, devastating  inexplicable, and downright stupid school shooting in Newton, I went to church at Glide Memorial in San Francisco. I don't identify as a Christian, but I really, really love that place. During his sermon, the preacher urged us to quit looking at God when things like this happen and to start looking at each other.

My head is always in the clouds, and my brain is always saying: this is not real. This is bullshit. The thought that we are here on Earth, for a reason, for each other, it's not new and it's new. The preacher, urged us to stand in another person's shoes, gain another perspective, look from another place. Think, really think, about how things are different for every person.

All week I've been trying (and failing), and thinking. I've been thinking about this blog, our country, my work. Why did I call this "Face what you fear?" Well, because: it is frightening to examine the difference, to stand in different shoes or think how (really) some other person's experience is (really) as relevant as my own.

Give it up!

Black Diamond Mines

Mount Diablo Coal Field Marker

On a hot September day at Black Diamond Mines, a regional park located in California's East Bay, a couple of friends and I walked together up the dusty road to Rose Hill Cemetery, a small, abused plot of land on an eroding hillside and the only remnant of the the mining town that was once settled around it.

Entrance to the Hazel-Atlas Mine

We'd just come from the cool, cathedral like silica mines, and the earth and heat we surfaced to felt unreal in what it was and what was beneath it. Who could ever know such a place existed, tucked into the California landscape: vaulted subterranean rooms held up by massive pillars, down, down, down, seven levels, and beneath, and parallel, even older: coal shafts where children as young as seven donned soft hats, clutched miner's candles and rooted through the earth like grown men?

Graffiti Carved into the Sandstone 

The short film we watched at the Visitor's center, located just inside the entrance to one of the silica mines, made life in the coal boom town of the mid-19th century sound  idyllic. Miners, it said, liked to be beneath the earth. Sometimes they worked seven days a week for months without the sun, living, breathing, eating in darkness, a darkness that fed their families and the ever hungry and growing city of San Francisco across the bay. They had a schoolhouse, a choir, even a baseball club. They were mostly Welsh Protestants, some Catholics. The latter were denied burial in the town cemetery.

A View from Chaperel Trail

When we climbed the rocky trails above the center, the early Autumn sun was burning, the sky clear, the path steep and smooth. At the crest and out in the distance, we could see the city of Antioch, the bay, and a huge energy farm, its propellers spinning hypnotically before us. There was something ineffable about the land, the way the hills rose up like the muscular back of a lion sleeping in the heat, the blue sky pressed against its yellow fur. Lower down, Manzaneta trees grew in dense thickets, their bark alternately smooth and red and rough and gray, was striking up close; far away the colors blended to a heathery purple.

Manzaneta, the park ranger told us at the Visitor's Center is great for poison oak. The berries are tasty. Foxes and other small animals love to eat them.

Manzaneta Tree?

I've been trying lately to learn about the flora, fauna, geology, and geography of the state I've come to make my home. Back in Michigan, I could probably narrate a nature walk from memory. In California, I don't know anything. As we hiked the steep trails of the old coal field, I couldn't identify the Manzaneta's even though they are a common plant, and I'd brought a field guide complete with glossy pictures to help me find my way. Compared to Michigan, everything in California looks like it was culled from the pages of a fairy story. I wonder: did those old-timey miners who lived there far from their native Wales feel as disconnected and dumb as I do sometimes?

After hiking a short loop of trail through the park, my friends and I ate lunch in the shade of some tall pines at a picnic table in view of Rose Hill Cemetery and the golden hills above it. I thought the Italian Cyprus trees, so alien on the land, looked as if they were pointing a pathway to heaven. We learned later, in the mines, that this was the reason they were planted there, so souls could find their way to God.

A Distant View of Rose Hill Cemetery

In the silica mine, we watched a slideshow about the park and the eras that came before it. We donned hard hats and jackets, grabbed flashlights and followed the old tracks of the mining carts down into the earth. The docent told us stories about mining life and technicalities. As we passed through, we learned that the ceiling was the floor of the ancient ocean that California rose out of millions of years ago. Above our heads, prehistoric waves and sea life, time past but present, hung preserved in the sandstone ceiling.

How could such a place not be full of ghosts? When I asked the docent, he said the only known "ghost" was actually a lady who cooked meth in a squatter's trailer on the land in the 1980's. This meant as we walked to the cemetery together, we had nothing spooky to speculate on but the real nature of humanity, of life and of death. I suppose that is spooky enough.

The trail up, a dusty twisting road cut through the yellow hills, did something to quiet us anyway. The wind picked up, and the light at the end of day, when everything feels suspended, began to spread over the hills and valleys.

An Up Close View of Rose Hill Cemetery

Ahead of us, a lone woman walked in Nike running shoes. She wore a t-shirt with the Pittsburgh Pirates logo. She carried a plastic wrapped package of cookies and a dented water bottle. At the top, she sat beneath the swaying peppercorn tree that marked the entrance to the cemetery. She took a few raspy breaths before moving on. It was quite a climb up, and there was something strange and sad about her and in the way her body heaved with exertion. There was something mournful in the way she looked out across the land.

I wondered, for a moment, if she was a ghost -- then, if I was a ghost -- then, if my friends who bowed their heads dutifully to read the information placard at the gate were ghosts. I felt a chill, even in the heat. There was nothing left but the dead. When the coal shafts were exhausted, the miners and their families packed up the town that fed the lonely cemetery. Board-by-board, nail-by-nail, down came the houses, the schools, the church, the saloon. Everything went; nothing remained except remains, and even those had been defiled.

As dusk came on, the wind picked up and with it, the dust around the graves. We wandered through what was left of the headstones in silence. When a gust of wind stole my friend's sunhat, she chased it through the cemetery, and I chased after her, laughing.

A Made Bed

Ooh, la, la

When I was a little girl my dad used to entertain and terrify us with stories of military life. Everything about the army seemed exotic and extreme. When I was eight, I thought of my pops as some kind of hippie Chuck Norris. He ate grape nuts, walked everywhere, and took care of poor people, but I knew he could live in the backwoods for a week with just a rotisserie chicken and a knife, he probably could kill a man with a straw, and he definitely knew how to make a bed.

During his training at Fort Benning, my dad learned, he claimed, to make a bed so well that a drill sergeant could bounce a nickel off the sheets. I believed him, and I used to try with the sheer determination of an anxious eight-year-old to do the same. When I realized this was impossible, I decided to leave my bed unmade as an act of rebellion against order, against my dad, and against the army that made him who he was.

When I got older, my maternal grandmother, appalled at my nesting habits, took me aside one day and taught me how to make a bed. We did it together, flying and flattening the sheets, tucking the corners snug. There was no way we were bouncing a nickel off of it when we were done, and it didn't matter. A made bed, she said, could be an island in a sea of chaos, something to look to when everything else is a mess.

This stuck with me.

Before I leave my house in the morning, I like to make my bed. Sometimes, I'm slow and deliberate. I meditate on it and think all mindfully and whatnot about what the day will bring. Some mornings I'm in such a hurry that I just spread the duvet out over whatever lies beneath. Those days, I can feel the mess in me, the mess beneath. Today is one of those days. In fact, I didn't even bother to make my bed at all.

Why mention this on my travel blog? Well, because before I go any place for any length, I make my bed up with fresh linens, as pretty as you please, and I think about it when I'm away, how restful and peaceful a place it can be.

Life, no matter how mundane or day-to-day, no matter how exciting or disappointing, is a metaphorical journey. Even if when I'm not traveling through physical space, I'm traveling through heart space and soul space, and I have to pay heed to what happens on those primitive interior and spirtual roadways. It's good to have a safe and quiet place to return to.

Today was a rough day for this traveler, but it's okay. Tomorrow when I wake up, I'm going to make my bed all nice like before I get started on the journey again.

The HU Sound

Montezuma's Foot Bath

I'm hunkered down with three other writers in a cabin in Camp Verde, AZ, working on the manuscript for the book that the Travels With Jonah Project inspired. I'm even more impressed this year by the talent of my fellow Desert Rats, and I'm feeling pretty humbled, too. That's good.

The story I set out to work on is maybe not the one I had originally planned, and that's okay, because it has to be. I think this one will be better, though it may take longer.

Thank you all for your  support and patience as I work my way through it.

Yesterday, we took a side trip to Montezuma's Well, a site just up the road from our cabin. A round lake formed from an underground water source when the ceiling of limestone cavern above it dissolved. Around its rim, cliff dwellings over 800 years old are carved into the rock.

Montezuma's Well

I think this place is magical. At the risk of sounding like one A-Class hippie, I dreamed about this place a long time ago, so you can imagine how surprised when I first crested the hill that hides this oasis from the high desert. It's like this place is hard wired into my brain.

Oh, yeah, I am an A-Class hippie. Here I am hugging a giant Arizona sycamore tree.

To be honest, I've been feeling a bit down these days, fighting off a depression of the generic but powerful and exhausting existential, "what does it all mean?" variety, peppered with a nice dose of antsiness that makes it hard for me to sit still too long. Maybe this is just called "being a writer." 

Meh. Whatever it is: it is what it is.

So, today, I convinced a couple of my fellow writers to go out to Boynton Canyon in Sedona. I wanted to get a hike in and just zone out and try to think myself into a better mental space. 

But, when we arrived at the trail head, we ran into a slight hitch:

Great. Bears.

This probably would not be a problem, but I just watched Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man about a month ago, which was followed up by an OCD level marathon viewing session of Animal Planet's Fatal Attraction. I pretty much immediately had bloody visions of Timothy Treadwell flash through my head and tickle my extreme and irrational anxiety gland. I stomped off in the direction of another trail not blocked by bear warnings, while my fellow writing hikers followed after me complaining about my decision to suddenly abandon the Boynton Trail for one called Dead Man's Pass. 

"Fine!" I shouted at them after two-minutes of unbearable whinging. "I'll go down your dumb bear infested trail." I made some further childish protests about no one paying attention to my needs. Then I turned on my heel and passively/aggressively stomped back to the bear trail with visions of park rangers poking at my eviscerated entrails and shaking their heads while mumbling, "Damn hippies," under their breath.

Anyway, at the trail head, we ran into some other hikers, who were actually damn hippies. A sun baked, white haired dude with a small day pack and a fixed beatific grin stopped on the trail as we passed and handed each of us a heart shaped rock, which he told us was a gift from Mother Earth. I asked him if he had seen any bears, and he said they were really far off  in the wilderness and that I should just concentrate on love overcoming hate. He lectured us for a few moments on the power of love before moving on down the trail. 

I was still grumpy, but, I resolved to try despite myself and a few false starts.

Me at the secret entrance to the Secret Mountain. If you look closely, you'll see the outline of the heart stone in my pocket.

We spent the hike literally looking for love. Fellow travelers had hidden the heart shaped rocks the earth produced prolifically amid the branches of the junipers and clefts of cacti along the route. We had great fun pointing out the ones we found, and it was easy, too. There was so much love; it was ubiquitous. I tried to  foster a positive attitude in my mind as we climbed up the red rock face to a scenic outlook.

Boynton Canyon Trails are filled with heart shaped rocks  lovingly placed  in the trees by fellow hikers.

When we  reached the top of the rock, I have to admit, despite our encounter with the spirit man and Mother Earth's love, I was still feeling pretty pissy. One of my companions reminded me that we were at an energy vortex, which was easily identified by the presence of many twistier than average of juniper trunks, rock cairns built by other visitors and some hot lady doing yoga by herself way up on a rock a few hundred yards away.

I sat down with my back against a tree and proceeded to eat some almonds and the apple I brought with me, when I burst into tears. I stared out over the red rocks, and I told my buddy that I figured I'd get it right at some point. We had a really deep conversation, the details of which I will spare you from. I snuggled into the crook of the tree and just zoned out, like I wanted to all along.

A view from up there.

When we decided to come down off the vista, I felt a lot calmer. As we walked down the trail, I heard a buzz, quick and deep, like a hum under my feet. I stopped and asked the people with me if they heard it too. They hadn't. We started walking again, then just as suddenly I heard it again; maybe "felt" is a better word, a low, warm rumbling buzz, for the second time. It was strange and strangely comforting. I don't know what it was, so I've decided to just call it the HU sound, which is both appropriately hippie enough and most probably true.