Bring the Lonely Heat Home

For two weeks at the end of February into March, I had the profound privilege to participate in a desert quest program with Animas Valley in Anza-Borrego State Park. Late morning this past Monday, I rev my Subaru up and out of the desert basin, homeward bound, and join what I imagine to be the legions of people who, following an ecstatic experience of truth and aliveness in communion with the natural world, have blasted the Tea for the Tillerman album in entirety twice over, sun-baked arm hanging out the window, hair dancing in the wind. I am slowly integrating the many lessons of this powerful experience, and no doubt will for months and years ahead. To quote my guide within the first minute of meeting her as she references protecting against cuts from the cactus spikes, “Birth, sex, and death, baby.” Life hungering to spread out, and surrendering when it is time to go.

The night prior to departure, I tend a small and humble fire with two friends who also stay behind for an extra night after the quest’s formal end. Beneath the Big Dipper on the rise and rotation around Polaris, surrounded by familiar ocotillos on the edge of bloom and the latticed husks of chollas that have given up the ghost, my friend instructs in how to be in dialogue with the fire, how to track mindfully and with care. “See this,” he says, motioning gently to a small flicker at the end of a stick splayed away from where the rest of the wood is fast growing flame, “Bring the lonely heat home.”

Really, is there much else to say? Is there not, implicit in this, the seed of an answer to all great questions? It is teaching and prayer about how we might yet learn to care for each other well. We breathe with the silence as the fire gathers heat, digesting the fire’s teachings from our centers closer to the ground than our heads.

Driving along the one-lane backroads that eventually feed into I-15, and then my personal least favorite stretch of scarring in America, I-5, I see a man on the side of the road gathering trash. I think of that old teaching story, shared in a variety of iterations, in which some version of a young boy/girl/elder person wanders on a beach full of drying-out starfish that have been pushed up by the tide overnight. One by one, this venerable character gathers the starfish and returns them to their ocean home. Another person comes upon this starfish/ocean unification and scoffs, “There are so many starfish here, you can’t possibly return them all to the water, what you’re doing doesn’t matter.” The starfish tender throws another starfish into the water, noting “it matters to this one.” Artfully to the point from Harry Belafonte: "Each and every one of you has the power, the will and the capacity to make a difference in the world in which you live in."

This morning, I wake up with the phrase, “The world has flowers enough for her funeral” reverberating in my head. I don’t know if this phrasing emerged from my own unconscious, or is the echo of something else I’ve heard; regardless, it’s a facet of the Universal Mind that is constantly expanding in its knowing of itself, and its possibility. Flowers. How lucky we are, to have such beauty and fragrance and surprise accompanying us on our processional. How short sighted we are to tear up and bomb the blooms. Another phrase at my mind’s foreground recently: “You never see a U-Haul behind a hearse” (unclear who said this originally - seemingly a syncretism of Maya Angelou and televangelists?). From my esteemed Annie Dillard: “I think that the dying pray at the last not "please," but "thank you," as a guest thanks his host at the door.

I’ve had the great privilege to move among masses of bodies in the street in New Orleans, watching men dressed snazzy-as-hell, dripping sweat, pumping the coffin of a departed beloved high in the sky and down the streets in the tradition of the Jazz Funeral. I’ve watched a ram’s blood run fast and hot down a once-white throat in response to a knife prayerfully brought to end a life and, depending on the lens you look through, free a spirit. I’ve sat with very old women in hospice, heads just a few thin hairs away from bald, arms revealing the structure of skeleton, faces luminous in the light of whatever shines on the other side of the veil. In the undoing is a becoming, and vice versa. I’ve been thinking of vultures, who soar and scan higher than any other bird, and who descend dutifully to place their feet and face squarely in the carrion.

Two weeks in a desert does something to the subtlety sensors of a person (this person, at least). All around, life blooms from what to a novice perception seems an impossibility, and into an inevitability. Such abundance of arrival and departure all at once. Truly, there is no shortage of seeing where coming and going are two bird wings that both steady and give flight to the vision. The process of recognizing the possibility of home seems tied to recognizing patterns of the design that, if not entirely immutable, are intrinsic and wildly creative at each juncture.

Emerging from the wild, I enter a gas station, I look at the news and the magazine covers, I see the waves of insanity and insipidity barrage us all in the face, as if tests against our ability/commitment to apprehend beauty, even in the “least likely” of places, of forms. Bring the lonely heat home. This phrase, to me, is in one way a vibrant calling into the center, an invitation into the installment at the heart of life and participation where the fire burns, holy. Pick up the can, return the starfish, call the senator, have the conversation, move the dial. And, it is the song from the great beyond, in which the life-blood that warms our forms seeps back to nourish a home, a happening, that we ventured from in growing in our mothers’ womb, and to which we blessedly return.

The desert teaches to not be in a rush, but to not forget the there there. Every moment, a birthing of what, in our own death, we will leave to those who walk bravely on. Make me a mass of hot lava, glowing at the core. Empty me back, into white. We have our whole lives to live into our dying, which is just another way of saying to die into our living, to walk each step in acknowledgement of the possibility for truth, to feed to the fire the weights that hinder us on our quest home.