Desert Serpents & Character Defects...

We drove to Anza Borrego yesterday.  I had never been before.  It was hot, dusty and beautiful.  I love the desert.  I am not sure I would want to live here full time, but there is something about my soul that needs to be here a couple times a year.  I just need everything to be removed so it seems so that I can remember to go deeper, look harder, notice the little things.

The desert is a place where beauty abounds but you also have to look for it.  I find sublimity in the absence of all the stuff.  I like the vastness of it.  I appreciate the muted tones and colors while every once in awhile being absolutely gobsmacked by the brilliance of a sunrise or sunset that just stuns you with the brightness of color and hue. And don't even get me started on the way the light and shadow plays with you out here.

As I have found in my life, so many of my lessons come from me removing things instead of adding.  I need to see less in order to see more.  And the desert is a wonderful place to renew this lesson.

We went to Galleta Meadows where some guy had the forethought to buy a whole bunch of land and then install these giant metal sculptures all over the place.  There are 130 of them, wildly scattered about.  Bugs, desert creatures, mythical beasts and even a few dinosaurs...it was quite stunning.  And my favorite part?  There was no one there! It was just us, the sand and the creatures.  I love the absence of people most of all!  (I know, not my best quality but the older I get, the less tolerance I have for the masses and the more my nervous system avoids crowded venues).

It took us some time to find the place...I mean once you know where they are, they are fairly easy to spot.  But it took us a good 30 minutes to figure out exactly where they were.  While we didn’t see all of them, we did see quite a few.  And my favorite was the Sea Dragon.  It is massive and just very fucking cool.  But it also kind of reminded me of my character defects.  They appear to have a serpent like quality, running underground for awhile and then bursting out of me with a spectacular and beastly vengeance.

As I stood there looking at the creature this is what I thought about...how much my character defects are like this desert serpent.  Big, unwieldy and fiery, burrowing beneath my surface only to erupt into my life when I seem to least expect it.  And also, that while they do represent the harder, less worked upon parts of me, they are still pretty amazing in their nature.

I live in metaphors a great deal of the time.  Spending a great deal of time thinking that this thing over here is pretty representative about this other thing over here...and my character defects, just like my assets, are a huge part of who I am.  And kind of like that desert serpent, they run underground until they don’t and then until I am willing to stop engaging with them and reinforcing them.

I liked the idea that my pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, lust, and gluttony now have an avatar.  It is this desert serpent.  They spring forth out of the depths of my being, creating terrific fanfare and quite a spectacle.  But then they settle down and go about their usual business of being off radar and content to dwell in the depths of me.  And much like if there were a real desert serpent in front of me, I have to deal with it, I cannot postpone or evade it.  Lest that would be my downfall back into the perils of addiction.

Best thing I know to do with serpent like character defects is photograph them and celebrate their arrival as a harbinger of renewed growth and change...and yesterday was a very good day for that indeed.

Again, still...