Yesterday, in Hagen Canyon Wash.
I feel these last weeks as though a few layers of gauze have lifted from my face. There is less weight on me. I doubt myself less. I look back less to the life I once had, and spend more of myself anticipating the one I’m building. I have met new people who have become important to me. I am starting piece by piece to tackle old demons.
It’s an odd feeling. I think I may be becoming happy.
A few nights ago I stood outside in the driveway looking south and upward. Orion and Canis were out for their nightly walk. I remembered all the times I’d run at night up north and hate the half-mile back along the levee, because Orion and Canis would be there brilliant and I’d have to see them as I ran, and it was no fair that Orion had had his dog with him for tens of millennia and I couldn’t have mine anymore. The other night I probed vaguely at that old pain, like a tongue poking around where a toothache once had been: I remembered the pain but didn’t quite feel it anymore. I wondered for a moment if I had actually lost my mind for much of 2007. And then I dropped my gaze back to earth to go inside, and saw three people across the street staring at me rather frankly, clearly confused at what I was seeing up there in the sky.
So was I, for that matter.
The Raven and I walked in the desert yesterday for a time. Goldfields bloomed bright yellow in small and isolated patches, like pools of sun on the desert soil. A handful of Joshua trees bore thick panicles of flowers still shut tight against the air. We walked up a dry wash that was not really all that dry, rushes still green in drifts among the sand, here and there sand so wet that it gave an inch or two beneath our feet. The whine of mosquitoes a drone beneath the gargling calls of ravens, we looked up at an almost-dry fall perhaps eighty feet high. Six years ago Matthew and I sat up there at the brink, watching one slow teardrop after another spill over the edge, and I wondered what it would be like to lose my grip on the world, find myself suddenly heading downward.
Yesterday I finally reached the bottom. It was lovely aside from the mosquitoes.
You are lovely. Keep going. I want to see more of you. Speak and i will listen.
I am trying to pursue more creative writing (for work and pleasure) and you are my teacher.
I’m not a professional psychologist, but I’ve read your blog over probably the last five years and I’m glad your depression is lifting. Hope it stays away.
We missed you by 2 days; we left saturday morning. Hagen canyon is breathtaking.
I’m glad I’m not the only one out in the desert exorcising demons. Thank you for your love of the desert, and for your honesty.