Good morning, y’all. This post is both tender and exhilarating. I hope you’re finding rest and ease where possible, that sweet things find you on your path in the week ahead (and always).
photos from many of the moments described in this post
Nothing for miles.
An empty expanse stretching beyond the furthest point on the horizon.
Then further.
Further still.
…well, of course, not nothing, not empty.
A million somethings all around. Snakes, spiders, beetles, saguaros, ocotillos, chollas, prickly pears, rabbits, lizards, sand, galaxies, ghosts... you get the idea.
But humans? Few. Maybe one or two every couple hours, usually speeding in the opposite direction. And this is exactly where I wanted to be. Far from humanity.
If you're unfamiliar and wondering if the Southwest can be so relentlessly untouched by human hand beyond the pavement you’re pushing 80 or 90 mph on, the answer is yes. There are days’ worth of drives that would make your teeth chatter if you weren't enchanted by the desert’s devilish intrigue, if you weren’t towing enough water, if the sparse gas stations were somehow shuttered. Of course you don’t have to take those routes, but I did.
I grew up in a place where directions to a high school party would go something like: “...drive past the cattle gate, turn right on the unmarked road, turn left at the big cactus. We'll be on the other side of the third sand dune on your right.” Those nights were so dark you could barely see past your own nose. You hoped you were following the tire tracks of friends here just 10 minutes ago, leading you in the right direction, not Border Patrol 10 hours ago, getting you nowhere fast. I still don’t know how to put that feeling into words, of: nothing… nothing… nothing… uh… maybe it was the other big cactus?… and then, suddenly a bonfire the size of a three-story building emerges from the void like a mirage, and all your friends are drinking Miller Lite and bad tequila around it. It’s unfathomably mystical. (And it’s nothing like Burning Man.)
All to say, pump five generations of Chihuahuan Desert into a blood stream, then mark childhood by the number of scorpion stings that strike your innocent little kid legs while you sleep, and you get yourself a desert critter, initiated by vastness and venom.
I set myself out on long, long stretches of open road through the American west because I was burnt out. These days everybody’s burnt out, but in 2014 the notion of “burn out” was almost sacrilegious. This was the time of hustling start up founders skipping rent by crashing on friends’ couches, waiting for an invite to an incubator. This was the time of pitch rounds, endless networking, and weekend coding bootcamps. This was the time when Google was the #1 best place to work in the world (!) and my golden ticket inside earned me a lot of “wow, what's it like??!”, especially from family and friends back home.
When I put in my notice, I was met with horror. Burnt out in your mid 20's? Leave *THIS* job, now?! Think of the stock options!! (The golden ticket became golden handcuffs fast.) To be burnt out in that climate was to spit in the face of everyone I knew fighting for their chance at a moonshot™ or a managerial position in the tech-empire.
“If you were my daughter I would never let you do something so reckless,” my old manager said. A “friend” told me if she were me, she'd end up on her couch eating bonbons all day, spiral into the worst depression of her life, and never leave her house. (What are bonbons? I wondered.)
I had tumbled into the trap of working for Google by falling in love with a quintessential tech bro-hero-genius who climbed the corporate ranks (level 5.. 6.. 7... aka Google's hierarchy) and spent his weekends working on lung cancer cures and served as a volunteer EMT. (???!) We met because he bought a ticket to a fundraising gala for the nonprofit I worked for at the time. He came on his own. A guy my age would do something like that? And he’s handsome? Of course I walked right up to him like a moth to a flame. I was mesmerized. He wooed me to join him at Google. He spoke of the scale of impact (!) I could make if I traded my no-pay struggle at the nonprofit for the tech giant’s infinite resources. I drank the kool-aid on tap during a campus tour when I learned about contact lenses that measured blood glucose levels for diabetics and hot air balloons that delivered WiFi to millions of digitally disconnected for cheap. (Those projects got scrapped while I was at Google, as did Google’s entire “social good” department in which I was hoping for a coveted role. What remained got shoved under “Google X”. Never heard from again. Guess it’s good I never got in. Also, that guy sent me a message a few years ago saying he left too.)
I was lulled into the feverdream. But then my colleagues started doing cocaine in the bathrooms to make it through the absurd intensity of our days, and righteously angry citizens of San Francisco started throwing glass bottles at our luxury charter buses, and the dystopia hiding beneath the glimmering, googley-eyed charade reinforced within me a deep sense of self-loathing stemming from a tremendous, gaping wound I didn’t quite understand. Who had I become? What devil snagged my soul? What am I doing with my life, “leveraging Google's power to make the world a better place”, co-signing a corporation whose tagline is “do no evil”??? At the time I internalized this as a personal failure. More evidence that I was never going to figure it out. My integrity was shattered in the swirl of a culture of recent college grads seduced by making money AND changing the world (read: Winners Take All one of my favorite books), numbing out catastrophic homelessness and inequality levels rising in parallel with our companies’ astronomic stock values.
For a while, the road was the only place I understood, and the only place I felt understood me. I would craft complex journeys through enormous deserts and float disassociatively through their otherworldly enormity. I deluded myself with the romance novel I wrote in my head: “I just love being alone in the middle of absolutely nowhere. It suits me and my fierce independence.” I didn’t realize then that I was scared of myself and using that fear to scare myself even more. That I was looking for intensity because that’s what felt familiar my whole life. I pushed myself to the edges of my own instability, searching for a break, a tear in the seams. I wanted to rip through the timespace continuum of my own mind. I was tired of how it felt to be me, in a world that seemed like it would never wake up.
I took the story of myself from childhood that I was alien to this Earth, placeless, homeless in my own skin, and I banged it out against the pavement for miles, and said “see? Alone alone alone.” I didn’t realize how much I carried that feeling with me everywhere. I remember the flight to study abroad in Argentina in 2010, shortly after the traumatic brain injury that nearly cost me my life. I hovered in mid-air somewhere over South America, feeling so insignificant, so fragmented, so separate from everything. “See? Alone.” I was also so numb, and also somehow spinning another romantic story in my mind that I could handle it, I needed no one and nothing, despite the fact that I had just barely re-learned how to drive, read a map, follow a recipe, balance on one foot…. My brain was still broken in some ways, my heart was broken in nearly every way, but I couldn’t see it. I just thought this was me. Haunted and hungry. It wouldn’t be til around 2018 that something finally snapped.
I wish I could say I used that time to get lost. The problem is, I wasn’t there to begin with. Sure, someone was driving the car, someone was staring wistfully into the clouds from the window seat. But I wasn’t really there. I was severed from myself, showing up in moments, doing enough to play all the games and the roles, but most of me was stored away in a thousand places within myself, locked up along a trail of trauma I didn’t have the tools to trace back and retrieve. I was profoundly disembodied and disconnected, severed from source, reeling from abandonment wounds not only familial, but from Earth herself/themselves.
Abandonment is a wound from which few of us are spared. From parental absence or abuse to abhorrent negligence infusing our governments locally and globally, many of us not only feel left behind, we are. Ignored, gaslit, traumatized from care deprivation. Abandonment wounds made me terribly lonely, separate from all, cut off, and dangerously vulnerable to cheap, toxic substitutes for what I really needed: authentic connection, love, affection, belonging. Cultural conditioning made me turn all of that against myself, made me feel irredeemably “bad” and “wrong”, the one that couldn’t just get along and get what’s mine and keep on keepin’ on. I couldn’t see through the layers of what was mine and what was my family’s and what was society’s. Ultimately, I became deeply, profoundly lost.
There is a difference between being lost and wanting to get lost. The former is how I lived a majority of my life. The latter is where I live now.
I intentionally yearn to get more and more lost.
What I mean is a lostness that is an essential part of meeting this moment, this pivot point in the human story, with integrity, spoken about so beautifully by Bayo Akomolafe, the inimitable teacher to whom I am indebted for so much soul expansion. In this interview, Bayo speaks of these times, these pandemic times, these climate crisis times, these racist, late-stage capitalist times, when things have fallen apart and the task is to break out of the “colonial forms that white modernity has fixed us into” in part by “making sanctuary with the more-than-human world”.
Tami Simon asks Bayo what he would say to those who are uncomfortable right now, he says:
“We have thrived in the myth that we should be comfortable... The very first gift of the more-than-human world is to make us uncomfortable. If people find that they're politically homeless, if people find that they have more questions than answers, if people find that they have more concerns than convictions at this moment in time, then I would say the work has begun.... and then maybe the next step is to ordain that recognition, to find the other, to learn how to listen. ...I feel the edge work of our time is not to gain a sense of justice, not to arrive at a utopian universe, those are all fantasies of modern minds. It’s to lose our way. My elders would say, ‘if you want to find your way you must become lost.’ To lose our sense of placement. That’s where the work begins, only then will we learn how to become wiser beings, wiser creatures, only in building wilder coalitions with the more than human around us.”
Tami probes further (understandably! he takes us to the edge!) and says: “Yes! I want to land, I want to feel connected to my body and the Earth, I want that sanctuary... and yet I have to be lost to get there?” He responds:
“...Being in that place of lostness. It may sound very dangerous. …But it actually is the lostness of a seed buried in the ground. It doesn’t lose anything, it actually gains the forest. It is the lostness of a child in a womb. It doesn’t lose light, it becomes a human being. This is a place of growth. This is a place of becoming wilder. We have become so incarcerated, so stuck in familiar patterns of doing things, of engaging, that we need a break. ...We need to stop walking so fast. We need a break in business as usual.”
In seeking lostness within these immense, capacity-exceeding times, I'm brought back to the “obliterated place”, a notion from one of my favorite writers Cheryl Strayed. She wrote advice columns for years before she got famous. I read every one. I’ll never forget the father who lost his son too young, and in the agony of unbelievable grief, asks Cheryl “how do I go on?”. She wrote: (get the tissues ready if you’re gonna click that link)
“The obliterated place is equal parts destruction and creation. The obliterated place is pitch black and bright light. It is water and parched earth. It is mud and manna. Your life is the one you must make in the obliterated place that’s now your world, where everything you used to be is simultaneously erased and omnipresent.”
The rest of the response is absolutely stunning. It moves me to tears no matter how many times I read it.
As I was weaving this post over the last few days, I searched in my Evernote knowing I’d saved her quote, but I surprised myself to find the caption of a post I’d shared on Instagram in 2017. I wrote:
“... The obliterated place. The ache. We are so quick to rush toward the light. To resist pain. To push away discomfort. We are seeing that on a national scale right now. So many of us need to slow down and learn from our shadows, to get clear on our issues, to breathe through our pain, lest we project it on to others, lest we fear and hate others because we struggle to love the complex parts of ourselves, the ones we’d rather hide from. Like grief, the only way out is through. What could we learn from this darkness we find ourselves in? How can we confront our own inner demons with courage, seeing how this turmoil is, in so many ways, unhealed trauma of a nation that’s been able to stuff that shadow so deep there’s simply no more room. What are you triggered by? What is uncomfortable? Don’t turn away from it. This discomfort can feel lonely but the truth is, we are all here together.”
It’s a little embarrassing to share this here because my imploring tone has softened so much since then, but it was the heartmind of 5 years ago, another world, another life. Pre-pandemic and mid-Trump! I share it because I didn’t even realize it was a collective slow down I’d been seeking for so long. The break from business as usual. And then I find Bayo whispering in my ear in 2020: “the times are urgent, let us slow down” like a prayer.
I knew the lonely road wanted to speak to y’all today. It has carried so many of us fugitive, weary travelers. Then Bayo and Cheryl came along and said that road is full of lost, obliterated hearts, aching from abandonment wounds, looking for each other out there.
I do wish someone could have told me back then: “you’re not wrong, what you’re feeling isn’t wrong. What you lived through was wrong, this toxic world order is wrong, but you are not wrong for seeing and feeling and surviving the wrongness as best you could.” In this obliterated place we’re in now, we are not wrong. And we can turn the prism in our minds and see the obliterated place we’re in now isn’t wrong. It is a profound, humbling teacher. And as Bayo says, it’s time to listen.
I may be intentionally lost from what society wants from us, from the perfect, pretty, polished version of me that was hiding my inherent human mess so powerfully from everyone, but I don’t feel so alien these days. Or maybe… I'm embracing my alien-self, my more-than-human self, more than ever. And as I do, I find you flamboyant, excessive, capacity-exceeding, magical, misfit weirdos who just want to be human and more-than-human, too. Obliterated, lost, making sanctuary. And maybe you don’t quite feel that way. That’s ok too.
I love y'all. Thank you for meeting me here.
I would love to hear your heart(s) in the comments if you’re moved.
Til next time,
Rach
Dear reader, if you value what you find here and would like to support my work, consider leaving a heart/comment on this post below or sharing this with a loved one. If you’re not a subscriber yet, join us! And if you feel spacious, please consider contributing for a monthly or annual membership if you haven’t already. 10% of all contributions go to Sogorea Te’ Land Trust - an Indigenous women-led organization that facilitates the return of Indigenous land to Indigenous people. I’ll share the total donation amount for each year on the Solstice. THANK YOU AND LOVE YOU!
“There is a difference between being lost and wanting to get lost. The former is how I lived a majority of my life. The latter is where I live now.” Oof, I love this juxtaposition and nuanced distinction and know the intentionality in which you’re living into this now.
I am so grateful you have introduced me to Bayo. His quote and your expansion upon it brought comfort and hope to my heart-weary soul. Every second of this was thought-provoking and I’ll say the intro gave me Didion vibes. Much love RSS!!
“It doesn’t lose anything, it actually gains the forest.”
Whoah 😍 I love this. Reminds me of Maria Zambrano’s “clearings in the forest” philosophy...the idea that you cannot go looking for a new understanding, it must be received as an unexpected gift. (Recently learned about this from a Foresta Collective session!)