Thirty-Five Days in California

I am settling down and digging my heels in, as if touching the sand has triggered an unknown reflex: I no longer wish to be moved. I’ve stopped wearing a watch that counts my steps and measures my heartbeat. Something else is keeping time here, the sun perhaps, or sentences from 1952 that read, “It was a time when the past had lost its sweetness and its sap.” I’ve lost my appetite for the artificial.

If you were to read my ingredients, what would it say I’m made of? How exactly have I been made? I can hear, now that I have my ear to the earth, the hellish doubts that have been following me – the siren songs, both intimate and at scale, that have lured me into perpetual healing and away from actively creating. These voices are the synthetic additives that have made my mouth salty.

California has given me a grave understanding of what it’s like to have your natural resources exploited. There is an innate intelligence here that knows its life-giving beauty need not be touched to be experienced, and yet everyone wants access to her water and minerals. When I speak now, I hear a voice that has screamed from the mountains of my emotional landscape. Loud and clear, it echoes; even the silence.