Biology of Change or Desert Birth

I came here to deliver. Like the mammal is seeking a quiet place in the jungle to labor, I chose the desert to give birth to myself. Environments differ though: I'm operating in full light, plain hot sun, with very little shade to hide from myself. I'll go alone, naked, risking my freckled skin to photosynthesize against this giant reflector. I have decided to (over)expose my birthing to the arid nature of the Coachella Valley. Why?!

Because desert is sacred nature, in the greatest sense of the word. In Joshua Tree or Anza-Borrego deserts, hundred miles of horizons make everything visible to the human eye. There, I stop the car, watch the vastness and start to believe that this wide open space is only a trick of Gods to bear more secrets within. The Hanyashingyo Buddhist Wisdom and Heart Sutra said: "That which can be seen has no form, and that which cannot be seen has form."

Life seems to always hang onto the last drop of rare waters here, whereas the desert has a very vivacious nature. Moon and sun can meet everyday in those skies, stars are bountiful, running across the firmament, bathing in the milky way and dying as they wish. What looks like rocks, sands, bushes and cacti, are in fact the richest biodiversity of enriched minerals, plants and animals. Shamans, medicine people, witches, aliens and totemic animals all meet here, usually at full moon, dancing for the rain around a bonfire.

The same way the bare land doesn't leave any corner for a physical body to sneak to, soul and spiritual bodies have nowhere to walk in but into the light. "Ouch, it's hot!", sometimes uncomfortable, but the game is worth the candle: "Here I am, Desert, bare bones under your blazing sun, you can see me all now!". The land gives enough rays of light and silver mirages to reflect every aspect of the self. There's no way one won't see something about oneself, if one dares to look out, and in.

My internal water, my soup of life, needs to lay against the cracked alkaline soil to fully understand its aquosity. By contrast, like everything else. Ha, let's sit down and revise our old Tao for a sec. The underground world is a magnet to my core and tail: natural springs, aquifer, tunnels, secret passages to the center of the earth. "Why not, gulp it baby, it's pure energy of life!"

Pinkola Estes said: "Life in the desert is small but brilliant and most of what occurs goes underground. [...] A woman psyche may have founds its way to the desert out of resonance, or because past cruelties or because she was not allowed a larger life above ground."

Like the rattle snake is shedding skin under a rock, my old tail is ready to dry and detach. My new tail is the story of this rebirth, scales for words. If you can listen to it closely, you might hear the flapping of the flying fish across the sky and the galloping of the great white deer Pemtemweha on the shores of waters' underworld.