I’ve bid my darling friends farewell and camped in Joshua Tree National Park and avoided all information about the Oscars until the flood of text messages that came in today when I came back out of the park.
Some highlights and thoughts from the past two days.
The ability to camp in the park and spend so much time in a place with zero mobile phone service/wifi was really nice. For as much as I do appreciate the ability to be connected digitally, it was a nice “hard line” between bidding my friends goodbye and getting back into the solo traveler zone.
I popped into the Palm Springs Art Museum after dropping friends off at the airport yesterday, and found this most excellent example of art twinning I think I’ve ever seen. The couple in the foreground is alive. The couple in the background is a Duane Hanson sculpture
I’ve missed my writing updates, and I’m glad to get back to them. You know I love an adventure, so the ADVENTURE UNDERWAY keychain I found in Joshua Tree had to come along with me. To that end…
I’ve decided to carry on my trip throughout the next month. I’ve got a project planned in Denver at the end of April, and I’m going to keep on traveling around this side of the country until then. It’s a real test of my tolerance for nomadic life. I don’t have plans beyond a few more days in the desert and then about a week in LA (where I’ve never really spent much time). That still gives me about 3 weeks to play with before Denver. And I really do feel fine about not knowing where I’ll be in those weeks.
I’m looking forward to doing some active planning and plotting about coming work projects. While I do keep falling into my accustomed mental pattern of waiting for a bolt of inspiration to hit me, I’m also able to recognize the false simplicity of that. Yes, I’m figuring out how to work as I move forward. That is happening bit by bit as I go, not in one all-at-once light bulb switching on. Reminder to self that I should keep on listening to this tortoise road sign.
There are a lot of great plants in Joshua Tree National Park, but the one I got the most obsessed with was the ocotillo (previously only known to me as a word that I repeatedly miss in the NYTimes Spelling Bee game). Here, have some pics I took of this gorgeous specimen (and the cactus wren that hung out in its branches for a while).
Clouds of the days: yesterday it was the peachy-rose-violet daub over the campsite at sunset. Today… honestly, today was a day full of great clouds (it rained in the middle of the day out of a lowering gray behemoth of a cloud, and cloud shadows across the park were truly excellent), but I’m going for this abstracted view of the window of my tent as the sun came out this morning.
