Above Endless Badlands

...That’s my spirit. But my soul, now she’s a different story.

When I was younger, I was a green gal. Not in the sense of innocent. That was much longer ago. But in the sense of colors that spoke to me. Pennsylvania, England, Ireland—I spent time in places that spoke to me in cool, wet blades of grass and leaves. And in winter, in the pines. Eternally alive. Eternally the same.

But 20 years ago, I moved to Austin, and I’ve become a brown person. (My friend Anya and her parents are laughing in my head as I write this: “No, chica, you’re still a white person.”) But what I mean is this: that as I flew yesterday above the desert Southwest, a place my green self felt vaguely terrified of, I was drawn in by the different shades of earth. By the wrinkles in the land that mean mountains, the dark specks that are scrub, by winding dark trails too black to be water, too oddly desultory in their meanderings to be road. What were those? And the round basins I saw, the ones that circle down, down, down into the earth, the shades of brown going blonde and brick and back to sandy. What were those?

 That sense of mystery. That longing for something larger than me, for something to hold my fascination long enough to change me. That’s what I found there, at 33,000 feet, above endless badlands.

So I know this is where my soul is. Where the heat parches. Where walking without water is a risk. Where scorpions and rattlesnakes thrive. I am learning a kind of co-existence with all that scares my younger self. A kind of respect for places where there’s nowhere to hide. Where watching and waiting can bring the coyote and lizard and snake in me to life.