Desert Story I

I have every recording from my favorite singer/songwriter team. Vicariously, I have lived out Bernie Taupin's vision of the old west via his lyrics on the Elton John album Tumbleweed Connection. I was the highway man in "Ballad of a Well-Known Gun." I was the man, whose only chance of living was to "Burn Down the Mission." And I was the jilted lover in "Come Down In Time." It wasn't until the 1990's when I was in Albuquerque that I finally saw a tumbleweed. Until then I thought that tumbleweeds were a figment of Hollywood westerns and Bernie Taupin's imagination.

Fast forward to Fall 2013 at the Joshua Tree Saturday morning farmer's market. Having purchased my usual shopping list items of feta cheese and olives and then moving on to sample the Ethiopian roast of Joshua Tree coffee, I stopped by a massage booth. The booth proprietor told me a story of possible love. In the old days, people, both male and female, used to attach a marriage proposal to a tumbleweed. Whoever found it, if interested, would somehow find the originator and if there was mutual attraction, they would start a life together. Literally, being brought together by having their fate cast to the wind.

In April 2013, after having spent considerable time in Los Angeles doing work that I hated in order to somehow survive in order to do work that I loved, I called a friend and told her that I had had it. I wanted to see and experience the artistic and creative freedom that she had said was in the hi desert. Yes, I was skeptical, but i had also become complacent. I was now ready to give up my downtown LA loft for the unknown. My friend offered me her desert house for my trial run and I moved in mid-May.

It was so quiet. It was quiet during the day, during the evening and it was quiet at night. Twenty-four hours of quiet. The silence was maddening. Ok, there were coyotes and horses and bees and flies, but they only served to punctuate the silence.

And then there was the sky. The first time I looked up at the night sky, my vision was clouded by the tears welling up in my eyes from the beauty of seeing so many white lights on such a brilliant black backdrop. I could only ask myself and the universe one question: why had I not been here forever?

Or had I been? Was a piece of my soul, like a horcrux from Harry Potter, here in this desert? Had my soul attached a message to a tumbleweed in some other lifetime. In all of my travels, why was I just now getting around to saying yes to this proposal to live here?

I had often thought about living in Paris: to be an expatriate spending my days drinking cafe au lait, eating croissants and spending my evenings talking art and drinking French wine. But in today's global economy, I don't have to go to Paris to do any of that. I can even practice my French here in the desert as I keep running into expatriates from France at Pappy and Harriet's.

Years ago, I went to Israel and on one of my off the grid experiences, I ended up with a fellow traveler riding through the Sinai desert in the back of a pick up truck on the way to the mountain. That night sky was equally as magnificent as the night sky of the hi-desert. Israel is also a great place for ex patriate Americans. It was actually the first place in the world that I felt completely comfortable as a woman, alone, moving through my life with brown skin. It's not really what one thinks when one hears about the social, political, religious, not to mention racial unrest in Israel. but traveling often creates its own reality. Could I find my own reality, one that felt like home to me, in the hi desert?

Possibly, in the time that I have been here, I have managed to manifest a complete social, spiritual and artistic makeover. I am no longer doing something else in order to get to the life I want. I am living the life I wanted, wished for and desired. Do what you love and peace will follow and some change will make its way to you also.

I am using the concept of the tumbleweed to continue this phase of my life. It's been successful so far, why change? I am planning to locate a tumbleweed and attach a note to it. Now that I have found a lifestyle that supports my vision of myself as a writer, performer and scholar, I think it may be time to find my true love. The note attached to my tumbleweed will simply say, " having a wonderful time, sorry I took so long to get here........"