Where My Bones Were Made

Good Morning -

Ah, yes - more mountains. Did you think yesterday's blog was a flight of fancy? Did you think I would wax poetically about the mountains one day and then, like a 13-yr old girl wide open to the world and its possibilities, be off on some new interest and love the next day? Did you doubt my conviction? My supply of mountain imagery?

Hardly.

Those who know me know that my love of mountains runs deep and to the bone. There are other landscapes I enjoy - a good, moody, overcast beach, gently rolling hills full of deciduous trees, fields of fire-orange prairie grasses blowing in unison in a sunset breeze - but they are to visit, not to live.

For me, my bones were set in mountains. The clay with which I was made was scooped out from the bottom of a mountain creek bed, rinsed in ice-cold run-off water, molded in the trunk of a tall pine, and set out to dry on a large granite boulder. My flesh is of the aspens - flexible, strong, communal - my skin a collection of columbine petals - my hair the wild tangle of berry bushes the grow at the edge of mountain streams.

When I'm away for a long time, I get used to the click-click-click sound of my gears that don't quite catch. I tune it out, pretend I can't hear it, until I am back in my mountains and I suddenly hear the silence, the absence of resistance, the smoothness, the purr of gears that are locked in place, home. Then I remember how my bones were made. Then I remember where I work best.

Ah, no. There is no talk of deserts here. No mention of tall saguaros, squat mesquite trees, white-hot sun, and thin, pale soil.

I have come to believe that there is a reason that, in most stories, the protagonist goes to the desert to get stripped, to think, and then to return home. She doesn't stay in the desert. Often it's solitary, but maybe she meets people of the desert who do live there. They are a particular breed, they are of the sand, and sun and prickle needle. Usually the number of time spent there is biblical - 40 days, 40 nights, 7 years, etc.

I have also come to believe that it doesn't matter what works for those who disagree, what matters is what works for me. When I talk of my doneness with the desert and am countered with shock and stories of wretched eastern winters or the bliss of shorts in December or the interesting prickle plants, I think, "Sounds like you're exactly where you need to be. That's great. I'm not."

There was a time - earlier - when I didn't have this peace - a time when I fought with the desert for being hot, for being dry, for being prickly. I wanted it to be different. I wanted it to change to be what I liked, what I needed. If the desert was my lesbian lover, we would have been in couples counseling.

We would have worked on negotiations around how hot she is, how dry, the inconvenience of her wet, humid explosions in the middle of the summer. We would have done a retreat, perhaps, where we tried to improve our communication with each other, all the while working from the agenda that if she, the desert, would just stop being so hot, stop being so dry, stop having all her moisture come in one bug-filled month, grow plants that didn't have prickles, then we wouldn't fight as much, then we would feel love again.

This system doesn't work in relationships with lovers, and it didn't work in my relationship with the desert. Like the peace just preceding the long break-up, I've come to accept the desert in all her hot, prickly dryness, and she, perhaps, has come to accept my need for pines and water and moderate climes. We've both accepted that neither can change, nor should she, and to love is to set free.

Here's to that. Here's to love, here's to freedom, here's to home.