welcome home

just got back from a short trip to the desert. instead of spending a week there as i have in years past this year i could only fit in a long weekend. it was really good to take a break from my daily routine and also to take a break from any large projects or serious intentions for my few days there. the last few years included a project, adding something to the moroccan tent that i setup there or contributing to another art project. this year i did nothing of the sort. it took only two hours to setup camp, and less time to put it all away and head home. that was a terrific lesson by itself.

the one thing i noticed this year was the number of people telling me ‘welcome home’ when i arrived in the desert. this meme really took root this year. it made me think about how much i and other desert campers have come to identify with this yearly pilgrimage. there was a sweet quality to the announcement, a definite welcoming, but adding ‘home’ on the end turned that sense of community into more of an “us versus them” identity for me. i wasn’t being welcomed because i was another human being, but simply because i was ‘one of us’. i was one of the in-crowd, one of the people who have the gaul to brave the harshness and intensity each year.

i guess with any activity the natural tendency is to solidify an in-crowd and the rest of the world. but it did strike me as going counter to the gestalt of the desert - which seems limitless in its expanse and completely open and accepting of anyone. the sky is so wide there it captures your mind and one tends to stare out toward distant clouds or mountains. there is no real in and out in the desert, no real sense of place even or location. it’s easier there to see perhaps how our sense of in and out, member and non-member, is so artificial.

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