• AT HAND: Deuce Lee, Eric
• LOCATION: Joshua Tree NP, CA
• DATES: February 12-14, 2016
• STATS: 3 days/2 nights, 39 miles – 933 feet EG

The desert is(n’t) for everyone. There is immeasurable beauty to be seen but you have to adjust your vision (and your expectations). Most of what you tell yourself that you want to look at isn’t actually worth wasting your gaze on. If you open your eyes wiiiiiide and take in everything all at once you get a clear sense of the beauty of physically uninhabited space, an eventual understanding that not every space should be filled, and the realization that emptiness is necessary for the appreciation of presence and omnipresence alike. With your peepers gaping long enough, you become aware of the darkness between the fireflies, and realize that you’ve allowed the buzzing, frenetic lights to distract you from that black nothingness that you so desperately need.

If you squint your eyes and allow your perspective to blur, letting shapes and definitions intermingle, then the dependent, immutable interconnection with everything else that we so fervently attempt to refute and deny magically comes into stark, naked relief.

At night, laying on your back, looking up at the sky you can see stars too numerous to count. If you close your eyes tightly then relax but keep your lids sealed, those same celestial objects sparkle and shoot across your inner carthal region, exploding, dying and reforming around your retina like a quantum sun conducting a sub atomic orchestra. The desert is(n’t) for everyone.

Of consequence: JTree forest soul foraging; sandy washes to walk uphill in; absolute silence and isolation; unclad horizon spotting on rocky outcroppings; yucca yucca; water cache money.