6/19 - road blog
Friday Newsletter: i wrote this while eating a loaded baked potato and watching the sunset
The last time I was here, I had to leave abruptly. My friend was giving birth.
“I’m in labor where are you?”
I was staring at red knuckles stretching into space folded over. Stuck between vortexes and “mine your own gems” gimmicks. In short: Sedona. I had time for chai and a million profuse apologies to my roadtrip buddy, Lyra, before she drove me to Phoenix to catch a red eye. I made it in time for the birth and held my friend’s hand during the c section. A trip cut short, but a legacy lasting. She named her daughter after me: Patience Devin.
“Patience Devin” could be my mantra for this trip.
“Patience, Devin,” as I drive through miles of sand, leafing through landscapes like pages in a book. The flora, Joshua trees, Yucca, tumbleweeds, and cacti, indicating new chapters.
Patience - as I wait for an epiphany. I often forget that I can’t conjure them on my own. I fall into this trap where I think if I spray the universe with buckshot prayers, openhanded with direction but obsessive in rumination, a miracle will appear. If I think hard enough about my fears, if I divine a 42 step plan of “if//thens,” a new belief system will emerge to save me from myself. I forget that I’m not god
or logic
or an amorphous shimmer that covers us all in love and grace despite the world being pretty hopeless.
Patience - as I climb the elevation, hand and foot, like a bear or some wild thing, until hills turn into mountains. I’m in awe of the light tipping the pine trees as the sun burns towards the horizon. They are just like the brownstones outside my window at dawn. It’s all the same. This world and that one. I forget, like an ant following the same path to path to path, that there’s a world above me as much as below.
Patience - as the mountains turn into canyons. I’m afraid I’ll swerve off the cliff trying to take it all in. It’s dangerous, all this beauty. It’ll kill you. Or at least parts of you.
The ant parts that dull your senses and make you forget stars exist beyond the office buildings and street lamps. When you can only see the moon and struggle to capture its essence, they’re still looking down, winking at you. (To be honest, the one’s being cheeky are most likely planets, and isn’t that even better? Sometimes I prefer to wish on Jupiter than Rigel A but that’s just me.)
Patience.
Erosion made the dunes, carved the valleys, exposed the mineral deposits, and etched the rivers into the plains.
Am I not the mountains?
Life is shaping and remaking the original design. I’m still standing, face soaking in the sun, experiencing the rock slides and wildfires. It all… is.
Not good or bad.
Patience may be a virtue but it’s neutral in its makeup. Time beats forward at the same monotonous pace and I can row with it or against it.
Last year, I was surrounded by water. Lorde’s album, Virgin, came out and I listened to it while I wrote the newsletter at an Airbnb on Fire Island.
“Pure heroine, mistaken for featherweight”
“I don’t belong to anyone”
She sang words before I could breathe them. Before I was ready to let them slip from my lips. Last summer, on the beach, surrounded by H2O Limos, dancing in a hollowed out club, was the most alive I’d felt in a long time. I didn’t know why I shed silent tears when I came home, when I woke up in his arms. I was paralyzed asking myself: did I arrest my becoming for the sake of equilibrium?
Now, I’m surrounded by desert. And the tears shed are not for loss or confusion. They are in awe of the life we are capable of grasping. A fire isn’t a scourge on the land, it’s a cleansing. What happens, happens. What falls away, falls away.
Patience - as there are new questions to ask:
“What do I want?”
“Where is the line between selfishness and self-discovery?”
“Am I ever going to love again?”
There are still answers I’ll never arrive at and the ones I do — those are miracles.
Dust devils, dancing on a mirage.
