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Author’s note: I spent 4th of July 2023 in the desert, and around 2 am on 6 July, I wrote this reflection. Sharing it with you today, because as long as there’s poetry we endure.—hsc
Wash Our Spirits Clean
Starry starry night
The desert sky is pink and subtle, muted like a faded postcard. I miss the astrophysicist, who used to tell me things about scattered light and black holes, gravitational waves and string theory. I understood little but loved the magic — a universe filled with wonder and beauty, particles colliding.
As the pink sky becomes blue black, manmade fireworks conclude for another year, and the real fireworks reveal themselves — first a scattering of stars — blink — then more — blink blink — then millions, sky sparklers, shooting through the night, an infinite tiara crowning the cosmos.
The buttery moon is big and its face bemused. I stare at it as if to never forget what it looks like in this moment. I am asked if I have a vision of heaven. I respond, “Yes… it’s this moment.”
I see heaven in moments such as these, and I don’t want to miss a single second of the wonder and beauty.
“We come and go, but the land is always here.”—Willa Cather
I come to the desert to wash my spirit clean, as John Muir wrote of our national parks.
I trade fireworks in Palm Springs, for the stillness of Joshua Tree.
In this stillness, in this moment, I feel clean.
I have learned to be very still in the desert — it’s this stillness that allows me to see its true and subtle magnificence. It is inhabited by things that endure. From the cacti that store water to survive the dry periods, to the coyotes — opportunists who adapt.
It’s 2:22 a.m., and I am blanketed by stars in Joshua Tree — I don’t want to sleep because the moon, and the stars, and all the night creatures. I am of the desert. I think of Tucson, where I fell in love with the Saguaro and javelinas. I think of Monument Valley, where the coral winds whipped nature’s flute music throughout Navajoland. I think of Silver City, New Mexico, and the infinite lessons of the Gila Cliff Dwellings. I think of the Grand Canyon, and how when I left — a fear-loop played in my head of a Big Wind carrying me over the edge. So I had the astrophysicist take me back to the same spot days later, and I stood firmly at the edge. I was not going anywhere.
I felt the wind protect me, blowing me gently away from the precipice, away from the abyss. I was never unsafe. But I just had to know it.
I can’t step away from the moon tonight. It’s just too beautiful.
The desert is perfectly still in this moment. The desert endures.
The silhouettes of Joshua Trees — exalting up to the sky — the moon, a klieg light for these spiky celebrities. The tree, which is not a tree at all but an exquisite yucca, is endangered. Which means the Scott’s orioles that nest in them and the yucca moth that relies on them — and in return pollinates them — are in trouble, too.
So I see heaven in this moment, and I wash my spirit clean.
I have been on the frontline of an invisible war for seven years and have learned to step away to refresh my soul — the war is still there when I return, and I endure like a Saguaro — spiky but with reserves.
In the desert, I am reminded that we are small and the universe is vast.
I wish for a day in the future when I can look back and realize a turning point, when the global community came together to be better stewards of the land. That day will not come unless we defeat the fascist creep.
Do it for the stars and the coyotes, the Saguaros and the orioles.
War is hell for the birds.
In the desert oasis where I am staying, there is a book of Pablo Neruda poems — ‘Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair’. I flip to a random page and read the poem ‘Juegas todo los días’, which translates to ‘Every Day You Play’…
Here is an English translation excerpt:
Every day you play with the light of the universe.
Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water,
You are more than this white head that I hold tightly
as a bunch of flowers, every day, between my hands.
You are like nobody since I love you.
Let me spread you out among yellow garlands.
Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south?
Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.
Suddenly the wind howls and bangs at my shut window.
The sky is a net crammed with shadowy fish.
Here all the winds let go sooner or later, all of them.
The rain takes off her clothes.
The birds go by, fleeing.
The wind. The wind.
I alone can contend against the power of men.
The storm whirls dark leaves
and turns loose all the boats that were moored last night to the sky…
As long as there is poetry, we endure.
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Coda: The above is part of my Desert Series. I often went to Joshua Tree to wash my spirit clean. The trauma of this decade is real. As David Pepper taught us long ago, we celebrate the wins, and the next day, we get back to work.
I am uneasy, because I do not believe a transnational criminal mob suddenly stands down. I believe they create chaos and strategize how to manipulate outcomes. I am worried they will drop the bursting of the AI bomb all over the Democratic Party, and blame mass unemployment on them to move people to the right. I am worried they will create another staged horror event and blame Fake Antifa. As I type this RTE Studios in Dublin is being evacuated due to bomb threats. Bomb threats are a cheap and easy way to creat chaos, and we know Russia uses such threats as part of their warfare-chaos kit.
I don’t not underestimate the evil of the criminals I have been documenting since 2016.
I do not like how Democrats are already eating their own, pushing its leaders out, although I do understand why. As Polish-American foreign policy analyst Philip Bednarcyk told me, he thinks the shellacking of the GOP will dampen right-wing fervor in Poland, but not in France and Germany, where it may shape it or improve it. More on that soon.
But for today, join me in washing your spirit clean. The Joshua Trees need you. A Dublin DJ set the words of this post to music. You can hear it below.
The fight continues.—hsc
Wash Our Spirits Clean by DJ Oisin Lunny
DJ Oisin Lunny, from Geek Pie Radio 16th September 2023 mixed my “Wash Our Spirits Clean” post with Starseeds “Elsewhere”, taken from their seminal lost album of groovy electronica “Parallel Lives. The poetry starts a few minutes in.
“For this relief, much thanks.”—William Shakespeare, Hamlet
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