wildflowers in a time of rage. episode one. water spells

This spring I spent a lot of time alone in the desert, basking in the beauty of a season blessed with flowers, and I thought about grief and rage. How they are interconnected, hand in hand, with joy. All emotions really are part of one continuum, a feeling within the chest, spreading out through the arms and to the hands like light, or pain. The emotions get stuck within and the energy has a hard time moving. In this world, it seems easier not to feel at all. Safer to remain within, rigid and cold. But then there is rage- it comes to say hello, it takes you by the hand, it lights the match when you cannot. If you think you can make it  feeling nothing, rage will take you by surprise. The fight response. All that emotion can’t be held within. To touch the earth, to listen to the wind, to know what is happening. To wake up every day and go to work, pay the bills and tend to the calderon of life. 

Three years into a neverending pandemic, I hope we’ve all gotten the chance to stop and observe how these years have changed us. Our ideals, our values, and how we put them into action. How we get up each day and find a way to cultivate hope. Hope feels different now, something you need to dig through the wrecked pieces to find. And if grief is not truly felt, if it is not honored, it hardens within the body. It turns to rage. 

 I had the vision for this podcast at the beginning of spring- the last days of March. Frustrated and destabilized from the constant worry of making it as a small business owner in late capitalism, just a few months into my two year lease on Milk Thistle, an apothecary and gallery I had opened to spearhead meaning and connection in my rural Mojave desert town. The constant stress was causing constant autoimmune flare ups, fatigue, and sleep disturbance. I looked out the window of the shop one day, the blue desert sky was spotted with perfect, tiny clouds. I needed to be outside and not attached to the dollars I was hoping would come in, so I hopped in my van and headed down highway 62- past the Yucca Valley big box strip malls that had become my home, past Joshua Tree village, past my former home of Twentynine Palms where the day was starting to warm up, towards the desert wilderness. I drove until I got to the flowers- the first of the season. It was warm there, and having been enough monsoons that winter, the whole desert was dotted with dune primrose, gently swaying in the breeze, looking like tissue paper covering the sandy floor. Miles in the distance, jagged mountains pierced the sky. 

When you are in the desert, and can see miles in every direction, there is nothing to hide anymore. You can let your jagged parts fall away. There is nothing to hold back. Our planet is burning, a pandemic of toxins and plastic and chemical warfare, the corporate elite and state sanctioned violence narrowing in around us, and yet here the flowers continue to bloom, the clouds paint the sky, the sun still sets. When all you can hear is the breeze, the swish of an occasional passerby car, you can remember what you are still holding on to inside. The hard, jagged parts. Let yourself feel that calcified grief- for it needs to be expressed as rage. It’s only through the anger, the heartbreak, the fierce disappointment and betrayal from a system that was built only to harm and control, that these tiny particles can start to dissolve. The chipping away at rocks within. 

The atmospheric river across California last year resulted in enough rains to temporarily get us out of drought- and what that meant was a superbloom unlike we had seen in years. Desert Lilies bloomed abundantly for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic. Desert Dandelion and cactus flowers made desert landscapes look electric. Joshua Trees flowered their cream colored blooms. The hills in Desert Hot Springs, just south of the the little San Bernadino mountains where Joshua Tree Park sits, were dotted yellow with abundant blooming brittlebush. 

Like a call from past ancestors, the whispers we were conditioned not to hear, the flowers told a story of resilience and survival. Although I have learned to not too quickly jump to the word “resilience” when it is not to describe anything that isn’t near death, or exploited to the point of extinction. The devastation that many have lived through, the ancestors’ journeys of both perpetuating and escaping colonialism, surviving war and famine, unimaginable hardship. They live in the flowers, in the mountains, in the clouds. Look down at your phone too often, and you might miss them. 

So what happens when you acknowledge the rage. What happens when the rage misses you, you sail past it, towards something else. What is there? Rage is an energy, for destruction or for growth, to challenge us to keep going when keeping going feels impossible. It was only through flowers that I learned about rage. And it was through flowers that I learned about grief. Rage as a fierce protector, against threats real or imagined. Rage as a boundary. Rage as a shield to feeling deep and intense emotional pain. Rage as a destroyer of vulnerability and intimacy, or when evolved, rage as a tool for accountability and deep change. 

So I look to the flowers for the lessons, for the study, for the ritual of it all, the church in my heart. And maybe if we do enough water spells, we’ll see a superbloom again next year. 

Water Spells

It has been said that earth, a seven billion year old planet, has been dramatically and irreversibly altered and destroyed in the 400 years since the colonization of turtle island. That in the timeline of all things, this is such a miniscule amount of time for humans to do so much damage. And yet, perhaps we are giving humans too much credit- while oceans are boiling & rising, fires are raging, tens of thousands of species are threatened with extinction- the earth has seen changes far greater than anything we have. But to think of the devastation of human existence and all it has had apon the lands- with only 25% of our original wild forests left remaining, and by the end of the century, said to be gone. 

As a child I dreamt of what was then called global warming- a world where the smoke was so thick no one could breath, landscapes arid and dry where forests used to be. They said in 30 years, the wars would be over water and not oil. Imagine knowing that, and not taking immediate action. But who am I to talk. 

“Will it be the fire or will it be the flood?” one of my tarot students said once, when we spoke about the knight of wands and the knight of cups. What brash energy, so quick to move- but the knights don’t exist just as humans but as extreme weather forces. Here in the mojave desert, the ironic and majestic joshua trees are among those expected to go extinct before the end of the century. In the years since the pandemic, two fires raged through the planet’s largest joshua tree forest in the Mojave Preserve. And now, at the time of writing this, we brace ourselves for Hurricane Hilary, downgraded to a tropical storm landing in the California deserts. 

Rage is a mechanism of grief. A fierce protector of deep grief or trauma. A hotness in the heart, moving out towards the arms, and up through the cervical spine. Anger held here, in the body, in the long term contributes to chronic stress, tendons like hard tree branches, pain points in soft tissue, irregular heartbeats, cortisol spikes dysregulating blood sugar. A dysregulated nervous system in the end, can destroy our connections to one another, and disconnection is the primary source of depression, addiction, and despair. 

But when I look up at the Joshua Trees, at the woodpeckers and quails and hawks that frequent them, I know that the rage is collective. Many times the Joshua Trees have spoken through gusts of wind, shared their anger. That so many travel to photograph them, paint them, glamourize them, yet will not do the work to protect and preserve them. Rage is the fight response for traumatized people, and under the constructs of late capitalism, generations of unchecked and undealt with violence from systems of power over, have left many of us with that trauma, held tight within the body. 

But the anecdote to rage is grief. To unveil it slowly, to gently uncoil the flames and find what’s beneath. A heart broken, but still beating. A child with big dreams unfulfilled. A long road, winding across hills, into the distance. As a young person I saw a glimpse of this future in the most vivid of dreams- a city burning as we watched, all masked up and dressed in black, from hilltops nearby forest. From the city a roaring elephant emerged and danced towards us, but our reaction was to run in fear. There is something about liberation that is terrifying, but the boxes we have been placed in are subject to the same flames. 

So I cope with flowers, and water spells. Making essences to cope with the pain and the anger. I collect rain whenever possible and sprinkle the droplets on myself and others in drier days. Praying to ancestors to end the drought, bring rains so heavy that the flowers live on. Perhaps we won’t survive, perhaps the fight is futile, but in the words of Sara Connor, No Fate But What We Make.