Ocotillo rising into the air, waxy creosote bushes, brown fields of massive chollas with pale-yellow, puffy spikes, and, of course, Joshua trees, all dotting the land and multi-layered, carved mountains of Joshua Tree National Park.
The desert is expansive. It expands you. It’s as if your soul has more space to fill … and so fills it—widening, stretching, spreading itself open.
I can’t imagine that anyone could drive through a place as wide and vast as the Mojave Desert and not feel a shift in consciousness. What a gift.
The rain smells different. The creosote.
The wind sounds different, like it’s swirling around high up in the sky somewhere, higher than the birds.
Even music sounds different in the desert. Take Flume’s “Wall Fuck,” for instance. In the past, I’d thought that the electronic instrumental represented frustration, being up against a wall with no way out. When I hear it out West, it sounds hot—a body pressed against someone, up against a wall, fucking.
This shift in perspective reminded me of one of my favorite Kerouac quotes: “It’s me that’s changed and done all this and come and gone and complained and hurt and joyed and yelled, not the Void.”
I feel like something shifts on a cellular level when I get out West, like my DNA is restructuring itself into a different version of Lauren LaRocca, opening up channels hitherto untapped. It all left me wondering who I’ll be if I ever return to the East Coast. Will “Wall Fuck” once again represent me banging my head against the proverbial cubicle? Or will I take these shifts in awareness with me?