Somewhere in the hoopla over this past week’s political assassination I let fly my 10,000th tweet without noticing. At the end of this month this site will have been in operation, under one name or another and with a few hiati, for eight years.
I don’t have much in the way of wisdom to offer about either one of those facts, except that boy, was my life different eight years ago. My life now is better in so many ways, aside from my having been, back then, sufficiently employed and abundantly endogged. I am happier nonetheless.
Not perfectly, of course. It’s been a tough couple weeks on a variety of fronts. I find myself turning into a complainy old man. Last weekend a guy pulled his van into the bank parking lot across the street and started power-washing the sidewalk. This would have been fine if it hadn’t been one in the morning. I fumed for half an hour, called the local cops’ non-emergency number, fumed for another half hour, and then put on shoes and went across the street to chew the guy out. Poor guy. I’ve been in his shoes, been the guy with the leafblower at 6:30 am in the parking lot. Somehow it’s always the guy who has no control over the time and place of the offending cleaning noise who bears the brunt of the public abuse. It didn’t make me any less mad, but at least I remembered not to make him the bad guy. I told him he had woken us, told him it was way too late, mentioned that I understood he had a job to do and it wasn’t personal, and he apologized (after a little defensiveness) and went away.
And then I laid awake for another two hours with the adrenaline.
I went over to the Coachella Valley Preserve last weekend and walked a little. There were Gambel’s quail all over the place, young jackrabbits undaunted by my presence, sparrows and swallows. After a mile of hiking I watched three ravens try to mob a kestrel. They lost. I think all five of us were a little surprised. In the dunes the honey mesquite were blooming, and for the first time — not sure why it never occurred to me to do this before — I stuck my face into the masses of dissected bloom, inhaled deeply. The tree is accurately named.
I’ve been afraid that the desert will stop being a source of solace to me. I’ve been afraid that the bitterness and rancor, the grief, the futility and fatalism will poison my heart. I still am afraid of that. But for a minute last weekend, as I took the honey scent of mesquite blossoms into me, the fear went mostly away.
1 comment on "Milestones"
Like you I’ve been around the block way more than a few times when it comes to defending our precious natural resources. Along the way I’ve watched nearly countless individuals fall to the wayside because they became burned out and/or to bitter to continue.
The loser was the planet. One less voice of sanity. One less soul to stand up for the right thing. One more person made ineffective by over exuberance.
You may see things differently than me. But I think you’ve seen the warning signs. That you can still smell the scent of mesquite blossoms is a good sign. But to stay in the game you have to spend more time appreciating the good things about the natural world than worrying about the bad things happening to it. That’s just the way it is.
It’s the same balance that always is part of nature.