Diary - Mile 180
Desert is a cozy place.
My favorite thing in the morning is to watch that tall cacti with yellow spikes shine in the morning sun. Rabbits run out of your path and watch you from a “safe” distance one step away. You have to avoid stepping on suicidal lizards running right across your path. The dry grass swaying in the faint breeze. And the myriad flowers in full bloom in this place that hasn’t seen water in months. And when i try to grow a succulent on my windowsil it dies…what a strange world.
They grow in such great arrangements that if you plucked a handful, you’d have a ready wedding bouquet.
Sandy hills are changed by green hunches, and those, by rocky peaks. Sometimes you enter a forest that smells of heat and pines. Sometimes walk along a ridge, among burnt down skeleton trees, that stand like windswept tombstones to what used to be life. And sometimes, there are no trees and no bushes and no shade, and you realise how great shade is.
And like that up and down, up and down on rocks and sand till it gets dark and I pitch my little shelter and attach prayer flags to it so they flap, just like they do on the biggest of peaks. I make myself dinner, drink tea, meditate, and roll myself into a quilt burrito just to wake up 6 hours later at 4am and hear the saddest sound in the universe, that of a deflating sleeping pad meanning it’s time to go. But its sad just for a moment, till I’m done packing, because going is actually the best part of it all.
