What to learn from an 11,000 year old Elder?

What to learn from an 11,000 year old Elder?

If you’ve been in the Mojave and Sonora deserts you know creosote bushes are ubiquitous. Creosote plays a pivotal role in the desert ecosystem as a keystone species. Creosote has earned the title of “nurse plant,” helping many young cacti and other plants to establish, as well as providing habitat to many critters burrowing underneath, from mice and lizards to rattlers.

Not as appreciated is the fact that we’re essentially looking at old growth forest, and in the case of King Clone, very, very old.

It was on my pilgrimage list this winter to meet King Clone, so on Saturday I spent some (deep) time with them. King Clone is a 11,700 year old creosote bush ring, one of the oldest known organisms. 

Think about it: this magnificent plant was just a wee lad here before modern nations, before the Roman Empire, before any empires. Before even settled human agriculture! 

Every section of this enormous plant community are genetically identical. The original central aboveground part of the plant died way long ago, but the plant continues to expand underground sending up new shrubs (clones) which now form a ring. It has continued to grow and expand since.

The ecological preserve site is largely unmarked, and a passerby would not notice anything out of the ordinary compared to the rest of the landscape.

I approached I would any sacred temple, with reverence — I was curious about a being that has seen the ebb and flow of the human drama over centuries, even millennia. 

They were nursing one of my favorite smelling plant friends, pink sand verbena. Laying in the middle of the circle, I tried to tune into deep time plant consciousness.

From the highway a few miles away I heard motorcycles and semi-trucks hauling all our precious plastic cargo to warehouse stores. I couldn’t help but be struck by the juxtaposition of the speed of modernity and the pace of this plant community. 

Whether it was me, or King Clone, I heard a language beyond words, leaving me with a sensation of a deep and slow patience.

As I said goodbye, deep time awareness met the ephemeral moment in the form of a rainbow.

Deep time is now.

Desert River Dispatch

A brief entree of Sun breaks through, inviting me to the bank for a dip. I recline on rocks reading the grammar of Water’s flow – they come in glyphs of slow swirls and quick sentences that are gone before I can read them. Some things are not meant to be frozen into prisons of meaning-making.

As is my habit, I put my palms on the surface, feeling the vitality of this mysterious being, blessing Water: “‘May you thrive and flow where you need to.”

This River in particular needs this, though perhaps it’s an invocation for all of us.

A different grammar above: two military jets blast over, their earth-rumbling, body-permeating roar persists long after they are visible. This is not uncommon in southern desert lands, as military bases & artillery ranges are scattered across hundreds of miles, stitched between “protected” lands.

I try to pretend it doesn’t bother me. I have a Buddha’s peace-of-mind, I tell myself. But it gets in.

Damn it, every time I hear a military jet now, I think of the ones over Gaza. And of the kites the kids who survive are flying. Spontaneously, I find myself uttering out loud to River, to Sky, to anyone who might listen, “How can we move beyond this wretched Empire?”

Immediately, I hear in return or from somewhere: “You must starve the beast. Feed beauty instead.”

Stop feeding the Beast. Fueling it. Investing in it. Economically, emotionally, spiritually. Divest In all ways.

It reminds me of Arundhati Roy saying, “Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.”

Coyotes yip-yaw Sun back behind a paragraph of clouds. A storm is brewing. Wind kicks up as Sky darkens. I race back to camp.

What much of SoCal has already been experiencing is finally arriving with a dust storm as preface. My chair and table flips over, dishes fly into the arrowweed brush.

I scramble to tie things down, &
cozy up in my van, which is shaking.

It’s a reminder: elemental forces can transform things quickly, a truth which actually fills me with some foundational comfort, a dark green trust.

It may have to wait til morning to retrieve what Wind shook loose. What River flowed. What nourishment that is usually given to the Beast was fed to Beauty.

And ain’t we continuously in the practice of retrieving what the Beast stole?

SONORA SOUNDSCAPE

As I bend down amidst creosote to inspect what I hoped were Sonoran pronghorn tracks, several war planes roar over through blue skies. Surreal. So low I feel the engines rumble through my tissues. What a contrast of opposites here: vast stretches of old growth desert, ancient saguaro forests, organ pipe cactus, shrike, and bighorn sheep on one hand, and border agents and all the shiny contraptions of modern U.S./Israeli Empire on the other. 

Military jets & Colibrí helicopters (military loves co-opting words from nature & Indigenous) roar, while Predator drones hover at 20,000 ft. with infrared cameras sensing body heat.

Inside the deafening boom, I think of the Oʼodham (desert people) who have been here for thousands of years, freely moving with sounds of cactus wren, elf owl, and songs of the land, must now endure this latest layer of colonial soundscape. I think of the people in Gaza inflicted with such sounds of war, multiplied a million times. Gaza kids are dying from cardiac arrest because of stress and lack of sleep due to constant bombardment and the roar of military machinery. 

Empire is killing our hearts.

This area (CBP’s AZ sector, with adjacent 2 million acre Air Force range) is the most surveilled in the nation: flybys, drones, flashing blue light beacons, hidden cameras, underground sensors, radar, surveillance trucks & towers with laser illuminators, intelligence hubs—all field tested first on Palestinian bodies by Israeli Elbit Systems, with whom CBP contracts. 

Elbit is Israel’s largest military company, and touts its products as “field-proven” on Palestinians, was contracted to build a high-tech surveillance system on Tohono O’odham land, and has already built 55 fixed towers in southern Arizona.

Then there’s the gigantic steel wall, an ecological and humanitarian catastrophe in-and-of-itself.

I scream: Holy shit man get a grip! It’s so obnoxious I want to laugh at the absurdity of this multi-billion dollar fantasy. This laboratory for new systems of enforcement and control. Yet, I know who profits and l who loses. 

The jets are back. I want to throw stones. If I was Palestinian, I’d be dead. 

I just want to be with desert dark and Sonoran silence. 

I just want people and land to thrive. 

May these machines fall from the sky of our imagination.

May these barbed wires be buried in the soil of our soul.

May this Empire die. 

If Empire kills hearts, our hearts must be that which composts Empire.

Yes, I rage against this machine.

Yes, I love beyond this machine. 

SAGUARO PEOPLE

My instinct was to fall in worship of these beautiful beasts. I’d never met a creature like saguaro—awed by not only their size, which signaled a muscular presence, but by something more mysterious. Some invitation to slow down and listen?

Not all have the same reaction. In 1982, a man named David Grundman shot a giant saguaro with his sixteen-gauge shotgun. He got two blasts off before the cactus responded: a chunk of the column—1000s of pounds of cactus flesh—fell on him. He’d only gotten halfway through “timber!” before he died. 

For O’odham (Sand People)—who have been in relation with this land for eons—Saguaro (or Ha:sañ) are people. It’s an orientation to place that Tohono O’odham legislative council has officially enshrined. “Saguaro has always been a life-saving part of our culture,” says Lorraine Eiler, a Hia-Ced O’odham woman. The juicy red fruit in summer for jams and wine, ribs for tools & structures. 

Endemic to the Sonora desert, Saguaro can grow 60 ft tall, weigh two tons, & live for 150 years. True elders of this landscape, especially compared to modernity & its shenanigans. 

Theoretically, Saguaro in Arizona are protected. Of course, when it comes to imperatives of colonial infrastructure, all laws (let alone etiquette) take a back seat. With construction of Trump’s “Beautiful Wall”—a 30 ft monstrosity scarring the desert landscape—cutting through Organ Pipe National Monument & sacred Hia-Ced O’odham land, bulldozers did their thing.

Like other civilizational mega-projects I’ve visited—lithium mine at Thacker Pass, NV, tar sands Line 3 in MN, industrial scale solar in Mojave—it requires Ecocide. Dozens of environmental & indigenous laws waived or ignored. Obscene amounts of water gobbled up in an already dry land. Scraping the land clear of Life. Indigenous protectors arrested or shot.

And so the story of Empire goes.

A pre-requisite of ecocide is not being in relation with the land. In other words: the capacity to not see plants as kin, to not see people, only profit. To not see water as alive. To not see Life, only Progress. 

I’ve been sitting with Saguaro, sans shotgun, contemplating the role of us barbarian lovers in the imperial core, as jets roar over and walls get built. 

A patient peace arises, then a question as crooked and barbed and enormous as Saguaro: 

𝘋𝘰 𝘸𝘦 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘸𝘢𝘯𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘣𝘦 𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦?

I ATE THE HEART

It’s not something I planned. 

My heart both dropped and leapt when I saw something laying in the primitive desert dirt road. 

I stopped and backed up. 

Something compelled me to get out and be with this beautiful beast. 

A desert hare. 

The desert air and desert glare.

A desert dare. 

Sometimes you must follow that gravitational pull, beyond the mind, past old patterns.

It must have been hit a couple hours earlier. 

Warm to the touch, drying blood, forehead wound. Eyes open but void. An unnecessary violence. An unexpected peace. 

I felt the need to honor them. 

I wanted to be with the landscape.

I wanted to eat the desert.

I wanted to become intimate with its life-death cycles. 

This is quite the trajectory for me. Being vegetarian for two decades, vegan for many of those years, until I introduced eggs and cheese after an intense mountain trip, then fish and seafood starting a couple years ago, preferably if I can catch them myself. 

I’m someone who doesn’t even like hitting insects and butterflies on the windshield, and knows the massacre of countless animals that vehicles cause everyday. I hate that beautiful animal relatives die in that unsacred manner. 

So for whatever reasons, I was moved to be with this hare as their life force went back into the soil.

I found myself processing my first roadkill animal. Skinning my first animal. Eating desert jackrabbit with onions and a garden zucchini at sunset as a storm moved in, blowing out all the cobwebs of the heart.

Eating a heart.

Consuming their flesh. Absorbing some of their life force into my cells. 

These are things known since time immemorial, and yet I am one of the Forgetful Ones.

But trying to enter into the heart of things.

May it serve life and liberation. May it serve intimacy.

Thank you jackrabbit. Thank you desert. Thank you big sky that holds everything. Thank you ancestral people of this land (Paiute). Thank you sun that drives it all. Thank you Mystery.

SONG OF THE OLD SKULL

Doodlin’ again. Kinda lovin’ experimenting with drawing images evoked by a few lines of a poem.

_________________________________

They didn’t teach this in school—
that we all live inside

the song of the old skull
the one found in the desert wash

rippling across entire continents
of confusions and certainties

how every wind
touches every other wind

how it requires many seasons
to shape your true form

how even the teachers can’t teach—
you have to find out yourself

Part of an impossible curriculum
called ‘how to be here’

with lesson plans
on how to say goodbye

how the song sounds different
to different ears

a chant, an unintentional prayer
a grave drone, a shriek.

How if you pick up its melody
a string of fat notes can calm you

or send you evaporating
but it’s the same thing

how its chorus thrums salvation
grrrunka…grrrunka…grrrunka

however it’s heard
you’ll always be inside it

holding you like sky holds the moon
and the moon holds the brutal loving sun

who bakes the strange fangs
that pierce every thick moment