I just returned from five days in the desert, which was a confronting paradigm of Nature and City. Every year when I come out to Arizona to see my mother, huge swaths of desert are gone. Replaced by strip malls (because we absolutely need more of those!), and cookie-cutter houses that all look alike. All the pavement, all the noise I was as tight as a tick.

And then I found a patch of desert where I could walk every day and slip among the boulders and cacti, wander down the washes carved by years of ancient rains. Listen to the cactus wrens and the quail. Soften myself among the spines and thorns: the mirrors.

It was late in the afternoon, a desert wind blew cold, and I was down by one of the washes talking to a chaparral tree when I heard them...grunting sounds, and to my amazement I see a group of ten Havelinas with two babies moving down the wash. Havelinas are wild peccaries and I've only ever seen them from a far distance out in remote desert country in southern Arizona. Here they were moving towards me, rooting the desert floor for food. I sat very quietly, one took a curious notion to investigate me, and I sat there eye to eye with this amazing being, who had no fear. The wonder of the experience cloaked the message until days later when I was literally attacked by a cactus and as I pulled the sputnik-like clusters of spikes out of my jeans I realized the message of Havelina: move without fear.
May all of us move without fear into our darkness and into our light.

tigger