Something Cool, Perhaps

Good Morning -

It's hot. It's very hot. I went outside yesterday around 10 a.m. to mail a card and was appalled at how hot it was. Everything you touch, everything you see is bursting with heat - just this side of exploding into brittle cinders. I told my partner as we rode home yesterday that it was so hot, all I wanted to do was drink water and cry.

This is what the desert does in June - it gets hot. I know it's what is supposed to happen and yet, each year that it happens, I still think, "Oh, my God. What is this? This can't be natural. No living creature can be expected to exist in this." Lots do, but most are able to burrow under the rocky soil and sand to a cooler layer and wait it out. If I could, I might.

Kind of like how people stranded somewhere keep their motivation up by talking with each other about their favorite foods or movies or people or whatever else they don't have access to while being stranded wherever they are stranded, people here keep their motivation up during the hot-hot by talking about all the delicious things that keep one cool (raspados, frozen margaritas, giant blocks of ice big enough to stretch out on), all the cooler places they've visited (Colorado, Maine, outer Mongolia), and all their stay-cool strategies (drink lots of water, cover exposed skin, go to San Diego for a month).

It was out of such a motivation-making strategy that our Virgen was born. My partner suggested I honor Phyllis and Del on the Virgen with some sort of marriage imagery but it's too hot for hot issues and I wouldn't want to subject these lovely ladies (even in effigy) to Tucson right now via the Virgen (San Fran is much lovelier this time of year. Almost anywhere is much lovelier this time of year.)

No - I needed to imagine someplace not here for the Virgen. I collect various travel brochures and booklets from different locales - always ready for the next trip, next adventure - and knew that the one from Oregon would not disappoint. Indeed, the cover was this lovely image of a mountain lake at sunset - snow capping the peaks and purple and pink soaking the sky and saturating the lake. The butterflies are from some fantastic beads my partner brought me back from her trip to Flag and the silver ribbon is the last of the hotel bag ribbon.

Nothing hot about this Virgen. It's all cool and transformative (butterflies). I was complaining about the desert recently to one of my sisters and she reminded me that there's a sacred bareness to this place, which is why stories often have leaders spending a nice biblical amount of time in the desert when they need to clean off and regroup. It's true and it's important.

Just as I imagine the caterpillar might have that moment just before it emerges of, "Christ, already. Come on. Let's wrap this up. I'm ready for the next phase" (Okay. So perhaps caterpillars are much more zen than that. The above dialogue represents what I might say as a caterpillar, which is probably why I'm a human.), I'm in that phase of the heat and the desert and the hot and the dry. I'm ready for the next phase. I'm clean. I'm regrouped. Now, get me out of this heat. Bring on the rains.

And yet, I can be as ready as I want and the rains will come when the rains will come. So it is.