I grew up in mountains made of oil shell, thin hollow black rocks that are valuable to the oil companies, at least in the future where oil men are confident that they will be able to somehow milk the oil out of the stones. Halliburton has bought the mineral rights to literally mountains of shell. Yesterday I felt I had a pocket full of thin black rocks that sound hollow when I tap on them, but I can't remember what I saw in them that convinced me to pick them up. To somebody it's valuable, so I think it should be valuable to me as well, but...

Small two or three foot gray bushes cover this entire desert. This is the home of black lizards with yellow racing stripes, and long legged jack rabbits who run nightly from coyotes casually lopping by at twenty miles an hour. Everything here is fast, even the birds whistle complicated rhythms at a raver's beat.
I have been smelling my home every step I take. It's the sagebrush and the dry soil. The same kind of sagebrush covers my home at the foot of the Rockies, except there, cactus waits under every bush. There are other similarities as well: howls from coyotes we never see, tracks from wild horses who were just there the day before, and wispy clouds that pass before they have a chance to give shade.
Ant-hills are only outnumbered by the sagebrush but just only. Colonies live and die and expand and split and war year after year without a single worry for what's to become of them. I don't believe there is another species on the planet less concerned for humans and our pretend dominance than the North American red ant. They are so focused on what they're about that, as long as I didn't accidentally kick a hole in their home, I could sleep beside a dome and never be bothered. A practice I followed as their front porches tended to be the only patch of ground free of sage brush.

My companions are resentful. I am beginning to think that this is the primary emotion of teenagers, at least in relation to adults. It won't last though, soon we will be a small nomadic family fallowing the horizon, and they well be eager to join in on every conversation. Isolation is our deepest fear, even for the resentful.

I once watched a man through a pair of binoculars walk across my field of vision from one edge of the horizon to the next. We were in the desert and the sand was radiating heat, heat that you can see as a transparent wavy line snaking towards the sky. Marksmen call this wavy line the mirage and use it to gage the wind—if the line is bent then the wind is blowing in that direction. This man walked through a strait up and down mirage without stopping for two hours until finally he was beyond my vision. On a flat ocean beyond strait line vision is about 13 miles at witch point the earth's curve conceals a twelve-foot mast. This man did not travel thirteen miles away before he disappeared, but still he walked his way around the curve of the earth in a day. I am not the same man I was then despite my clear memory of being there and having seen what I saw. Having that memory is contributing to this moment and these words I'm writing, but my remembering is happening now, and these present thoughts about that memory are being built upon an insight I had this morning while I meditated, which was this: The perception that we ride around behind our eyes while life happens like a movie outside of us is an existential mistake of biblical proportions. This mistake is the catalyst for the experience of being cut off from the processes of life. It convinces us that we are permanent necessary selves witnessing life, in effect robbing us of the realization that we are the processes of life.