They stand like twisted contemporary dancers in the hot baked flat terrain. Dust rises and the fires look to find the fuel for burning. They burst into flames.
I drove past these trees along the highway towards the Mohave desert. This Feburary was the beginning of a strange shift in the world. There they were. The Joshua trees. Oddly shaped, Dr. Seuss looking, worshipping the sun and silent as myself and others whizzed by them back a forth along the road.
The first time I had ever heard of them was when the band U2 made there album and use the trees as a symbol for there their mysterious and musical expression. The trees seemed other worldly. It would be many years later that I would find myself among these strange trees. In awe and mystified by their presence. They added to the round boulders and other geographies of the California desert.
I was at the time looking for the mystery. Looking for the ecstatic experience and expression of the universe. I was on the road for work and to heal my emotional wounds. I wanted to find some justification for the pain in my heart. I wanted the beauty of this earth to somehow heal me. It did. In it’s own time….
This place of the Joshua trees touched me. The ecology of the land. It fueled all my curiosity. These trees were beautiful. A year later after my first visit, vandalism took some of the trees I passed back though to see them. I felt a connection to them.
Today these trees are burning as the wild fires in California rage. They are rare, fragile and symbiotic in an age that is fighting itself for deeper understanding and to get a footing in how to make a better world.
Shaman @ Large 