Walk This Path With Me

It was the end of summer when we met. Right about the time the heat of the monsoon snaps and lets a taste of coolness in for a few hours in the early morning and you’re lucky enough to catch it and be reminded, oh yeah, that’s why I live in the desert. Because when it’s not like living in an oven, it’s perfect.

I’d been watching him online, the video introduction to his upcoming virtual art show being held by a local museum I’d recently joined, wanting to immerse myself in my creative community.

Something about his notebooks spoke to me. From the first moment he held them up for the camera to let us all see inside, I knew that’s where his heart lay.

Each one was so specific of what he put on the pages in between the plain brown covers. Sunrises or sunsets, mountains or valleys, rivers or lakes. The animals each held their own books too, everything he had witnessed over the course of his journey into his art.

I admired his passion, his focus and his diversity. One thing led to another, wire dreamcatchers became sculptures made from what’s left of a grand saguaro long past the time when it stood proudly in the harsh climate using what remains after the desert has consumed its flesh. Canvas became clothing. And in between the physical, he wrote poetry. Not the kind that needed a rhythmic prose. No, his words went deeper than the rules.

The notebooks are what led me to the trails he’d been on when he’d sketched the lines of these mountains onto the pages. I wanted to see what he might have seen and be drawn into the beauty so deeply, the only way I could express the experience would be to write. Or draw. A pencil and paper can be versatile that way. But could I learn to capture it in a way that makes my heart race, or pause?

It was on my fifth trip to that area of the valley when our paths crossed. Late September, like I said, just after the monsoon heat had flipped the switch to off and waved adios to the desert until next year. In a few weeks, we’d be in sweatshirts, our blood still too thin from the summer heat to insulate us from the ’70s of October.

He said I was in his spot. Those were his first words to me. I had not heard him approach too deep in thought as I studied the way light bounced off the jagged mountain in the distance, down into the canyon where, while the sun had not risen high enough to pierce its beams directly at me, the light was already bright enough to need sunglasses.

I turned to retrieve said sunglasses and there he was, not three feet from me, like a statue at first but then he smiled and said, “you’re in my seat.”

I recognized him as if he were an old friend. I smiled too and responded. “I hoped so.”

He was surprised, and, he confessed later, amused by my answer. “Really?” He raised his hand to shield his eyes and motioned towards the mountain. “What’s it saying to you today?”

And that was how we met. He took a seat on the rock too, he didn’t ask me to move from ‘his spot.’ He wasn’t too close, or so far that we couldn’t talk without being loud. Neither of us wanted to be loud.

I confessed to having seen his videos and his virtual showing at the gallery. I told him how I was impressed by his collection of notebooks and had been inspired to see this place with my own eyes after seeing it through his.

He liked this, “I believe it’s why we are artists. So we can share our experiences with those would can’t, or won’t or wouldn’t go the distance to see it with their own eyes. To feel,” he spread his long arms wide, he could almost touch me from where he sat, took a deep breath, and exhaled, ‘this.’

“This,” I agreed, “is something everyone needs.” 

We talked about the effects of nature on the human soul, the need to put our hands in the earth and be one with the energy surrounding us. If something was confusing at first, it became clear as we untangled the words together. 

Leaving the canyon he asked if I planned to return. I told him how my life was changing. I was going in a new direction and taking big steps to live the life I dreamed of. 

For a moment I expected him to laugh, or at least smirk at my bold statement. The few people I’d said such a thing to over the previous months of upheaval had not taken me seriously, instead wanting me to keep focused on the chaos happening around me, which is something I couldn’t do anymore. They had not been there for the years leading up to those months. They saw those months as the way my life was, is, and always would be. I saw them as closure to a life I no longer wanted to live. 

So when it ended, like everything does, I found myself exactly where I wanted to be because I stayed focused on what I wanted for myself, not what others thought I should want. I knew they had their best interests at heart, not mine. If I went and chased my crazy dreams, and succeeded, what would it say about them?

He didn't laugh. Actually, he didn’t react or respond at all. I thought maybe he hadn’t heard me, maybe he’d been lost in thought, maybe a lot of different things, all things I would know nothing of. 

He started nodding his head. “Yes,” he stroked his hair in a way I now know he does when he’s thinking things over. His fingers start at his temple. He might scratch his scalp a little right there before running his hand slowly over the top of his head, down the nape of his neck where he gathers his shoulder-length gray-streaked black hair into his hand to pull it away from his face.

“Hmmmmmm,” the vibration of his voice energized the air. I could feel the solitary note penetrate my skin and reach something inside me, like a calling of home. I got goosebumps.

We sat in silence until the voices of two women on their morning hike began to echo in the canyon. Their conversation had reached our ears, and something one said to the other, taken out of context, made us laugh, at exactly the same moment.

We walked out of the canyon together, talking as we went about art, nature, and all the other things people talk about when they’re getting to know one another. By the time we reached our cars, we’d made plans to hike other canyons together, places he wanted to show me, places I wanted to see. 

On our second hike, he gave me a fresh notebook, like the ones he uses. “For your journey,” he said when he handed it to me. There was even a fresh pencil tucked inside. 

There was always a place to pause, to rest, rehydrate and look, take in what surrounded us. We might stop for a moment or longer, the desert would dictate how far we went or how long we stayed. 

The first time we touched, a spark lit between us. It was night, we’d hiked to see a patch of La Reina de la Noche vines bloom in the glory of a full moon. He handed me a softer pencil so I could smudge the lines of the vines I was drawing in my notebook when our fingers touched and a flash of light burst between them. And it kind of hurt.

The shock left us silent until he said, “maybe we should light up the world?” And we laughed. It was funny, at first, until I moved closer to him and he reached for me. Then we stopped laughing. 

Feeling his lips on mine was the only thing I could focus on. His body against mine, our arms wrapped around each other, the closeness of it all would have been overwhelming. I could only think about the kiss. 

Our time melded into a being, this was us. The places we explored filled our souls with creative muses, the things we molded together opened new doors allowing us to grow in ways we may have never thought possible but dreamed of anyway. 

When he handed me the notebook tied with a deep blue ribbon, I knew what he was asking. With every page, I saw our time together had been documented in lines and colors, the ones we’d shared, what he saw when he was with me. There were my words too, the ones he remembered me saying when we were there. 

“To Live the Life I Dreamed Of,” he’d inked in a scrolled script under the drawing of the rock where we’d met on the first page. 

Seeing each scene, a place I’d been with him when he’d seen what he put onto the pages I was now viewing skipped the beats of my heart. The memories of those quiet moments shared with the man who allowed me to be me, and the me I wanted to be, made me cry.

He pulled me into his arms and caressed my hair softly. The feel of his chest against my cheek and the scent of his warm body is comforting. 

I get to the last page of the notebook where there is already a picture of this place, the two of us as we walk along the trail, hand in hand, and the words scrolled in the middle, 

Let’s walk the rest of this journey together.