Without a compass, unmoored

In the liminal light of another day’s dawning I stumble on uneven pavements pursued by red eyed hellhounds (a curse upon the negligent owners of demonic dogs). The lights of a tiny desert coyote town provide no North Star, no navigation point today. The compass seems to be broken. I only have this moment, but the moment has already gone. All is squandered. The ancestors have cut the mooring ropes.

Heat, monsoon failure and my temporary geographic absence has brought the garden to its knees. Everything’s either dead or seriously distressed. Dis-eased. Paradise lost. Again.

Even the lemongrass has taken leave just when congested lungs really need it’s soothing, healing, refreshing tea. Do I have the strength to find my phoenix again?

Walking into another sunrise, I am in some other place, on the barely legible Old Salt Missions Trail, it’s seems. The ghost of a burro hovers in the sky. Calling me. Echos of Baghdad Cafe swirl. Dawn. My time of restoration.

Paddling, bone deep exhausted against the outgoing tide of my life, I set up my trade goods in heat already leaning into unbearable, greatful for trees at my back to provide some early morning shade and a cooling breeze. Practice gratitude the platitudinous say. Look for the helpers. Trees and wind: Thankyou for brief, temporary succor.

Yes the cloth and the colour did work its magic (Thankyou ancient process) but I wasn’t very good at keeping out of its way this time. I felt trapped in a furnace on baking tarmac with the shattered pieces of my compass grinding under marching boots of cruelty, prejudice and ignorance.

It was all good luck and no good management that I did not fall asleep on the two hour drive back home to the shala at the end of that very long days journey into night.

To sleep.

Perchance to dream.

As old Pop Schaffer did in 1923, when he built a hotel in a crossroads town on an old trade route.

Did he too make a devils bargain in order to arrange rocks into a fantasia of a fabulous fence?

What was his North Star?

How did he keep on keeping on?

Why did he keep on keeping on?

Does salvation lie in forging a new bestiary?

A language wholly new.

Idiosyncratic, yet leaning into mysterious meaning.

The Schaffer Hotel in Mountainair, New Mexico, is on the National Register of Historic Places. One can, I believe, find its records here https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=235543

These days the dining room with its magnificent ceiling is still functioning (but there’s nothing on the menu for vegetarians), the hotel part maybe not so much.

So that’s Sunflower Festival 2026 done.

I was not as well prepared or as robust as I would have liked to be. I came carrying stones in my bones.

The creative little town of Mountainair, the gateway to ancient cities deserves better than the broken stone heart I brought to it this week.

Will there be other moons when we break this one?

Will there be other lives when this one is all used up?

Today I have no answers, no compass and no ancestral voices.

Only radical discontinuity.

It’s time to shave the head, renounce it all, hitch a ride on a ghost donkey, start again.

Blank slate

A rabbit in the salt mine, for all its fear calling freezing ways, might just pull a grand mosaic from the prosaic top hat.

Recommended Reading

Notes on an Execution by Dania Kukafka, 2022. A novel of literary suspense, telling the complicated story of the life of a serial killer on death row, mostly through the eyes of a kaleidoscope of women whose lives have intersected with his. Not for the squeamish. Searing. Questioning. Brutal at times but also hugely empathetic. What does it mean to be human in our darkest moments?