Strawberry Moon in the Sagebrush
It has been some time since I wrote in this space, wrote from my person and from my heart. So why not on this Sagittarius Strawberry Rose full moon? When the sun opposes the moon, it can be a good time to reveal and to allow that light to work into dark and unkempt places.
Working for Social Media, takes away a lot. The allure can be captivating: to build a space, to share an aesthetic and can indeed be helpful and connective in some ways. But it is not real life, but distorted fraction of it. A constant need to prove you’re Doing the Thing, Being Good. Signaling my virtues from places of insecurity to people I have never met, yet, find myself caring what they think of me. Social Media saps, it steals and monetizes and manipulates. Writing here is an exercise, it’s taking something back and remembering parts of myself. But I am not here to write about that…
I am in a different land now, than I was a year and a half ago.
For 11 years I knew moss, dangling lichens and forest so dense with green life that it overwhelmed me at times with pleasure and joy and otherness. There was fog, mist, rain that would last a month or more. There was frog song so dense it would lure you into the underworld. There I had people, community and chosen family. So-called western Oregon grew me up, held me and taught me so much. I loved it, but I longed to run away from it — I knew that something extreme needed to happen.
Now, I am in the high deserts east of the Cascade mountains. I came here like the cottonwood fluff that swirls around my house and street. I drifted on a wind and landed and, I think: am taking root. It is still unclear to me, but I pray daily about this.
I came out here because of love but soon discovered that as quickly as it formed, it fell apart. I found myself interestingly outcast and ostracized in the fallout of that relationship — and while there was sadness and pain there, I leaned into it. I was disinterested in feeling a victim. I never chastized myself for the seeming failure of that relationship, I did, to my truest Aries heart come here with pure and loving intentions.
Love you have and love lost is always a catalyst.
I knew that leaving the Willamette valley was going to happen for me and I knew that the other side of leaving was going to look like the desert.
Here I am.
I spent three years living in rural settings, far from traffic or the sound of neighbors laughing and having a Memorial Day barbecue. Now, I am in a small town rural town ruled by a ranching economy. As I type I hear the incessant buzz of electricity from the substation across the street. Deer and quail live there, coyotes trot down orange lit back streets and up into the hills that are named after them, magpies squwak from powerlines over the hills. I hear cows calling out on the hills they are not native to. Somewhere, reaching a little further east, near the canyons named for Hell are the shunned wolf people. Dodging bullets, picking off calves. The sun, who nears their apex reaches over the hill east facing and pours light and warmth into my face as I write.
I spend a lot of time walking in aromatic sagebrush, asking questions, asking questions and crying. Asking for acceptance and belonging. Asking where I fit in here. While I do this, I walk old wagon ruts created by pioneers, white settlers looking for new lands. It feels ironic, it feels uncomfortable that my own footsteps trace their wheel tracks so worn in, they still exist. It is from this place I often call to the land to lead me in ancestral reperation, strangely. I feel the tension and anxiety of my presence here, in my body and in the land, in this socio-polictical climate I am am keenly aware I do not belong, but I need belonging — I need to be present and dig here.
I look to Lilitu in her outcast wandering of the desert, to give birth to demons. To give birth and scream.
Lilitus swirl here in the sagebrush I feel. Devils of the wind who collect dust make spirals in the sky over an earth who has been cut open and forced to be a way. Beaten into submission and drugged. The wind gather the restlessness of the earth and put them into movement — and I should say, these wind devils are always red…
Sometimes you’ll be walking and hear her coming in the dead silence held by silver sagebrush. It starts at a rocky hill point and whip-rips their way down slope, invisible, visible wind — and this makes a shocking sound. One I cannot describe here. You must be in witness.
I have been on this land and in this area for a year now: in deep observation, reverence, awe and adoration to a degree that make me weep. What I know now, is that I did indeed come here for love. I came here, to hear myself again and collect lost parts, to court the land, to listen, to learn slowness and shed skin. To understand the innerworkings of establishing relations and connections to more than human-kin. Land and place is my lover. They are changable, angry, loving and so giving. Always I am asking, how to be in this. To see and hear where they want me.
There is no foot path I can see in sagebrush.
There is no path.
So I surrender to this realization.
I laugh and I scream into it, like Lilitu.