It feels good to be home, albeit a little panicky with the living that has to be done between now and April. Lots of scheduled things, lots of meetings and elections and negotiations. Once I’m right back in it I’ll be fine, but here on the precipice of plunging back in, the pool appears bottomless. Procrastinating by upgrade only did me some good and now I am back to staring at the to do list and fretting.
Although I took many photos on my trip, I did absolutely no writing at all – finding myself continually in the company of others. This is not conducive to the process for me, and at the same time I found it a convenient excuse. When I was finally alone at LAX on the way home, I discovered myself afraid to put pen to paper because it seemed like too much of a commitment to document everything right then. Go figure – I’m suddenly afraid I can’t do a camping trip justice.
Really, I think it’s the fact that this was so much of an inner trip in ways I feel incapable of explaining and so to write anything seems false. Simply I would say that this is a landscape that prises one open in peculiar ways – a feature that has me in no rush to go back despite the beauty of the place.
Or perhaps it wasn’t the desert at all but going back to the US with all my missing dreams and friends about me – the ghosts who await on the long stretches of highway, at the junctions between one moment and the next. I am torn between wanting to visit the friends I do have left down there, and wanting to stay clear away for fear of having the missing ones at my side.
Time, yes. Time will finish this line of thought off. But in the meantime there is a busy life here that will absorb me once again as I sort my calendar and shake the dust from my shoulders.
