Photo, mine2007
Deserts have a way of sharpening you. They are direct and to the point. The way the cactus speaks. Yet they also soften you. And hollow you out. Time moves differently within them. You can watch the sage and brush and grasses moving in the wind across the distance, no tall trees in the horizon, and blue wide open sky for ever and ever and feel the way ocean once moved here before time was what we now know. It lands in you softly when you find shells in sand and experience the millions of years ago time in your hands.
But the stories move through you like fire breathing dragons. They breathe in and out as if the only way to get the job done is to make your ego hyperventilate with the enormity of space so vast and so vata, so wind driven and time bended. The light has a way of moving through you too, in that enchanted ethereal shadow swept way accompanied by shades of red and ochre, yellow and brown, sands and rock, stone and spire cathedral formation in a sacred attempt to ground the impossible and keep it from floating away.
The stories do not linger. They swell and surge and roar. They eat their own tail and skin their own teeth. They fan the flames of whatever needs to be annihilated. They are eerie and distorted and the flesh of these stories sometimes rots and hangs and dehydrates in air.  Bardo is a blend of story dust pulverized and tenderized, whitened and bleached like that bull skull with a broken horn you find somewhere off the trail, forgotten.
I now make stone circles in whatever place the story brings me to, after really understanding the medicine of ancestor work while living in London during my Saturn return , to say thank you to the ancestors who carried me that place, to thank the bone memory of stones and the spirit of the place and the spirit of remembering. In desert places, the circle stones of my ancestors were restless. The winds blew their forgotten not fully worked through stories through my bones and the echo of these stories rattled and shook. It makes the mind confused. Whose story is whose? The feelings they conjure are much larger than the tiny red ants, as mighty as they are in their large beneath the earth armies. And you just have to go with it. You have to let the wind carve you out, in its own strange timing, the way it carves arches in boulders. And you just have to surrender to the way it blows through your mind. You can get very vapid and untethered, a balloon aiming for the moon getting caught between here and where and there and beyond and then pop! a cactus surprises you and you find yourself right back where you started. Inside yourself in the labyrinth listening to the snoring Minotaur, hoping you can avoid it, yet tripping on its tail.
I did not know Steve the chicken farmer. My car died melodramatically, winter turning into spring 2006, leaving me stranded on the side of the road in northern Wisconsin, miles from home and all I knew was the story in the north was done dead and there was no more story to story there. There was no other way to remain unless I wanted the stories to start eating me alive, so boom. But I had fallen in love with Puck and the spirit of place. Puck was a real live human but he was also the Spirit of Place embodied and almost 10 years younger than me but he brought me Eagle feathers and the most otherworldly lake superior stones and agates and concretions and we foraged for ramps in spring and somehow, our friendship made the magic come alive in a place where long ago, the magic had been thrown out of the car like a bag of trash to rot on the side of the road, in an isolated rural snaggle of land in the middle of nowhere with primitive old growth forests growing in between. Having a psychopomp named Puck is very helpful for raising the dead within yourself and discovering that writing is its own rite of passage, and sometimes the things happening in the present bring to the surface the stories beneath the surface that have been stalking you in your sleep.
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