Desert Jewels

I stood and looked to the east and took that picture as the sun rose on Sunday morning near the Salton Sea. I shouted hallelujah in my mind and looked to the west where the moon was going down.

The birds were truly like a chorus, and I whispered hallelujah in my mind. My troubled mind so heavy along with my heart over Sophie's struggles. The photographer of birds who holds my heavy heart with such light hands.

Day after day I think of you as soon as I wake up. Someone has put cries of birds on the air like jewels.

Ann Carson, from Short Talks

I hope you can play that video because it's sublime. I also posted it on Instagram where you can find me at elizabettaa.

I went with C to see the desert bloom, supposedly over-the-top-once-in-a-decade because of the unusual amount of rain we had this winter. The desert didn't disappoint, even though about a million people were doing the same thing. The ground was covered in a carpet of yellows and purples and whites. I took pictures with the fancy lens, but I haven't uploaded them, yet, so here are some from my iPhone.

We met dear Yolie and Tearful in the desert where they're living the boondocking life. It's like a dream both to meet them and see what they're doing. They are a couple with whom I connected many many years ago on the world wide webs. Now we've met in person, and it was an intense collision. We already knew one another. I held onto both of them for a good long time, absorbed their goodness and strength.

These internet friendships are the real thing, people.




This morning I read about the trauma that Syrian children have suffered, have absorbed, will suffer. I read about the people of the Sudan, of Yemen and other countries -- the starving bloated face of a child, the warning that displacement, famine, warfare will bring on the greatest humanitarian crisis since 1945. I looked at the smug faces and read the words of those who rule the plutocracy that is the Disunited States of Amerikkkaa. I felt the dread of what is to come even as I heard my own daughter's sigh into seizure over the baby monitor. I rushed into her again and again and again and all the years of agains. Suffering. The world is so vast, the suffering so enormous, I texted a friend, our efforts to stem it so paltry. If I am charged to care for Sophie and suffer in doing it, I will try to do it with strength and love.

I repeated that over and over and over today.

Perspective as Higher Power, my friend Chris said. Yes. The ongoingness of it all.

Alison Piepmeier, A Meteor

Night Sky, Perseid Meteor Showers
Joshua Tree, California
photographer: Carl Jackson

When I drove out to the desert on Thursday with a friend to watch the Perseid meteor showers, I knew that my friend Alison Piepmeier was dying. Alison was a beautiful woman whom I met online many years ago and with whom I spoke several times over the years on the telephone. She was a badass and a kickass professor of women's and gender studies at the College of Charleston. Her delightful blog Every Little Thing chronicled her life as an academic, a lover of Star Wars, a mother to her darling daughter Maybelle and, of late, her struggles with cancer treatment and death and dying. She had an infectious smile. She was working on a book about the high incidence of abortion of fetuses with Down Syndrome and worked passionately to "change the game."  Her daughter Maybelle was the delight of her life, and I think that child will be held with love in the minds and hearts of tens of thousands of people who were fortunate to know her a bit through her mother's writing. Alison appeared in the Extreme Parenting Video Project that I made years ago, her smile brilliant and her hair thick and curly. She was a dogged and passionate advocate for the disadvantaged and the disabled. She wrote a brilliant and moving essay in the final weeks of her life that will tell you everything about what kind of soul she possessed.

She died of a brain tumor in the early hours of Friday morning, surrounded by her husband and family and friends. She was 43 years old.

I saw many meteors on Thursday night and into Friday morning, light shooting across the sky, one after the other, the desert still and vast, implacable. I thought of Alison and her passage from this world to the next, how grateful we were to have her here and how much we will miss her.

Listen to and read these:

Down Syndrome and Equality

Thank You For My Beautiful Life

It's hot

When you're squinting even in sunglasses and the temperature's in the triple digits, when the wind is blowing hot and dry and you're feeling angry for no reason, it's time for something to happen. In the south you'd lie down someplace cool or in the shade, sweat beading on your neck. Languor. Out here, in the desert, you bare your skin and feel flayed. You want to make trouble, kick up some dust, strip the steam out of steamy, expose yourself. Even the crows are silent, leaving you to murder.