My friend looks over at me. We're driving through gray light and mist to the eastern desert. "So what is your practice?" he says. I laugh. "Practices," I say. "One is the morning meditation; another is eating almost a whole bag of potato chips; another is Not Doing; another is driving with a friend out into the eastern desert. None of them are rules from a teacher or spiritual way. All of them have arrived in my life and refuse to leave."
"It's good that the last one won't leave," he says. "I like to ask my friends that question because I don't seem to have found my practice."
"Bulls--t, " I say. The road drops out of the junipers. We are in a huge world of silver sky and dark sage. "Wrong," I say. "You are a father. You do that work with constant attention and respect. You walk this country the same way."
He is quiet. I turn onto the road that goes south to China Hat and Fort Rock. "I can't believe I get to be here," he says and gestures toward the mist and low mountains. There are layers upon layers of vapor, colors for which I cannot find words. I think of how the wet gray back in town suffocates me and how not being able to walk without watching every step for hidden ice makes me furious. Here I can breathe. Here I know that obstacles in the path are gifts.
I park. We get out and begin walking across piebald snow and sand. There is a basalt ridge gleaming black. There is bitterbrush, mahogany red, and gray-green sage. I pinch off a few leaves and crush them under my nose. I smell the scent of my Arizona homeland. My friend tells me the human names for this Oregon sage: bud sage, Big Sagebrush.. I tell him that Black Sage grows in the high Southwestern desert where the humans have disturbed the soil. "Not here," he says, "coyotes and badgers are the culprits."
We walk for a while in silence. He and I have taken to driving out to this basin-range a few times a week. I come out alone more often. No visit has ever been the same as another. There is nothing charming out here, no cute or tasteful "viewpoints" signs. There are cow pies, rusted barbed wire and Off HIghway Vehicle trails snaking up into the basalt. When I am here, something always surprises me. It has been years since a human was anything but predictable. Including me.
My companion surprises me. "I know another way I practice," he says. "I pay attention and I get angry. Sometimes I think I want to change that - get all mellow, see the goodness in everything - but here, where there is only is in everything, I want to stay as I am right now."
"That's an old Havasupai prayer," I say. "Let me remain as I am now."
We walk a little longer, then drive further south. The road curves up out of the sage into stands of Ponderosa and Juniper. We stop again and walk across the snow toward an old time-blasted juniper. Lush clumps of lichen glow yellow-green on the bark. My friend teaches me about lichen, about its bi-polar nature: fungus and photosynthetic partner; and the bi-gender aspect of the juniper on which the lichen lives: male and female depending on the requirements of survival. I walk further up the faint trail in the snow. When I look back, he is taking a picture.
We are on our way home in comfortable silence when he laughs. "I keep thinking about having a practice," he says. "Keep thinking I should make a vow of some kind. Then I realized that we've walked in this desert a dozen times in the last month. We never agreed to do that. We didn't promise anything - not to the desert or to ourselves."
"I know myself," I say. " I've broken almost every vow I ever made. That's what humans do. Besides, curiosity keeps me alive. Once I throw up walls, I close myself away from what might be fascinating."
That night, I email my friend a quote I found in the Portland paper. An artist spoke the words, but I believe the joke into which I want to be stretches ahead in the year to come, across the Desert of Surprises, out to horizons whose colors I cannot name.
You do as much research as you possibly can. You look at every show. You have to know everything that is going on. You have to be in on the joke, whether there is a joke or not. ---Noah Davis, Seattle artist, 2010.
photo of a living Old One by my friend
