Hello and thanks for reading Life is Strange! My trip has now come to a close, but I’ve got a few more stories in store for you.
Be sure to share and subscribe to keep up with the rest of this trip and with my future travels.
After leaving Area 51, I headed to Las Vegas for the night. I have to say, Las Vegas was not my favorite stop on this trip. (Admittedly I don’t think Las Vegas is right for an antisocial young solo female traveler so that definitely colored my experience, and I hope to return under different circumstances in the future).
I spent most of the night driving around the city, listening to Heaven or Las Vegas, of course, and then to the soundtrack of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The first motel I tried to book was in a sketchy part of town and no one was there at the reception desk so I ended up going to a Motel 6 for the night. At some point along the way I downed a tragically sweet vanilla milkshake and felt quite sick after, but I suppose you have got to do something regrettable on a Saturday night in Vegas.
The next morning I did some souvenir shopping and got the hell out of there. On the way out I stopped at the nearest Starbucks, which happened to be in a casino. I almost made it out of there unscathed but then I saw a game (are they called games?) with a howling wolf on it, and you know how I feel about wolves, so I tried to figure out how to use it but abandoned it when I couldn’t, figuring that gambling just wasn’t for me this time around.
Then I set off for Joshua Tree.
Deep in the Desert
The drive through the Mojave Desert was far longer than I thought it would be, and at one point temperatures climbed up to 110 degrees Fahrenheit. The scorching sun was oppressive even with my AC blasting.
Along the way, I listened to a podcast about being a lost 20-somethin, and how important it is to have these lost, free years in which to find ourselves, which made me feel seen. I think this road trip has actually given me some ideas about a few new specific directions I’d like to explore, though (hallelujah), so we’ll see how that goes.
I arrived in Joshua Tree National Park around 5PM, and it was so hot that even the water fountains were spewing hot water. After a journey down Twentynine Palms Highway, past a million discarded trucks and ruined shacks and gas stations and quirky artists’ homes with gleaming stucco roofs and yards full of trash and treasure, I made my way into the park, and spent a while driving among the Joshua Trees.
Joshua Trees are quite strange, and you can see why early Mormon settlers associated them with Joshua, brandishing wide-open arms and welcoming them to the desert. They seem frozen in time, as if the moment you look away they’re going to resume some robotic, frenzied dance.
After meandering for a time, I spent a while wandering around a collection of gigantic, surrealistic boulders called the Hall of Horrors. Even though the sun was setting, it was so hot I think I got dehydrated right then and there.
I have to say, Joshua Tree has a heaviness to it, a specific energy that I haven’t felt anywhere else. Judging by what I’ve heard about this place, I was expecting it to be very spiritual — which it is, but in a different way than I was expecting. Being in this park made me feel close to the ground, in my feelings, raw and almost cut open.
As the sun was setting I started another hike along a boulder-ridden path, scrambling over sand and by huge cacti and juniper trees. Soon it grew so dark I had to turn back, and after a little poetry writing and a little stargazing from the side of the road, I headed home.
I had booked my only Airbnb of the trip for Joshua Tree, and the house was a wonderful relief. It was a sweet little casita located in the back of a home in Yucca Valley, and what I wouldn’t give to live there! (Well, I wouldn’t give the $4000/month it would cost, but still)… Exquisitely clean, decorated with bohemian-themed desert decor, it was heavenly.
The only issue was that it was burning hot inside when I arrived, though, and the AC took quite a while to get going, and by that time I had a raging headache.
That night I had a peculiar dream. I dreamed that it was my birthday and I was hanging with a group of friends, who included some old high school acquaintances as well as Kanye West and Neil Patrick Harris, for some reason. We had all hung out in the afternoon, and I wanted to keep the party going, but Neil Patrick Harris was too busy and no one else wanted to celebrate with me that night, so I was abandoned on my birthday. I woke up feeling very sad. I guess something about the desert heat brought those old fears and social anxieties up and out from underground.
I suppose the desert gives you what you need, not what you want, and often the best way out really is right through.
Sound Healing in the Sun
The next morning, I did some work in my gorgeous little casita, and then went to attend a meditation and sound bath in the desert. The event took place outside in the desert heat (though not the sun, fortunately).
First, our guide led us in some breathwork exercises, which left me feeling, well, breathless. But it was grounding, and gasping for air at the end of long periods of emptiness definitely brought me into the present.
Then she led us through a meditation, first inviting us to open a portal to the spirit world by inviting in our own personal spirits and guides. I thought of the old wizard and his bird companion who sometimes show up in my visualizations, and called in Lilith and Gaia and the angels and all my other guides, and invited new ones to make themselves known, too.
Then she invited us to engage with our gratitude. The level of gratitude I have is supermassive and so that was easy to summon. I am so deeply grateful to have been able to do this trip, and I am acutely aware of how fortunate and unbelievably privileged I am to be able to do all of this. I am grateful for the car I was able to drive across the country for free (for someone who’s moving to California), and I am grateful for this time, and my health (a bad knee and stomach issues or infinite other problems could’ve easily crushed this trip), and my family’s support, and so much else. I’m grateful for this land, this wilderness, all the music, all the sights, all the spirits that have guided me on this trip, that carried me across this land, and that brought me home safe.
Then our facilitator asked us to summon up some love. I realized that in truth, the love in my heart felt very small and constrained. After some events that happened this summer, I’ve needed to close down my heart for my own safety and protection, and I guess those walls have stayed up throughout this trip. The truth is that earlier this summer I opened my heart wider than I ever had before, and tried to see with eyes of pure love, and it ended up leading me into some bad situations.
But perhaps the next time I open my heart, it will have healed and become stronger and wiser than before. And she was asking us to summon up unconditional love, independent of the past, after all. Unconditional love, beyond the flaws of our personal selves, of our little lives. Universe-sized, cosmic love is certainly the most potent energy force in the universe, and it is certainly far bigger than our individual past mistakes or heartbreaks or concepts of our own brokenness.
Then came the sound bath. I’ve been fascinated by sound healing for a while, and a lot of this trip has been about listening deeply to the world around me, so I was excited to try it in person for the first time.
During the sound bath, all kinds of emotions and memories came up for me. There was that desert magic again, making you confront what you’ve buried or what you thought you’d released a long time ago.
As the gongs rang out and the singing bowls hummed, I felt all manner of feelings and random pains coursing through my body, including an extreme tightness and heaviness in my forehead. Thanks to the heat, I was sweating profusely by the end of it.
In short, I can’t say the experience was entirely the most blissfully relaxing. But afterwards, I felt so much lighter, as if some toxins had been sweated out. The feeling of lightness lasted for the rest of the day.
From Crossroads Cafe to the Salton Sea
I started driving in a random direction, and when I stopped on the side of the road to check my map, I noticed I was only a few minutes away from an establishment entitled Crossroads Cafe.
Crossroads Cafe also happens to be the name of my podcast, where I interview people working at the intersections of art, social change, and spirituality, so I was excited to spot it on the physical plane. I stopped in for some vegan tacos and iced tea, read some Joy Harjo poetry, and ended up writing what I think are some of my favorite poems I’ve written in a while (coming soon!) The cafe had a quirky roadhouse atmosphere, and even though I hadn’t heard of it when I named my podcast, I think it’s a more than worthy namesake.
Afterwards, I headed back into the desert for some exploring. I took a walk around Hidden Valley Trail, an oasis-like loop through boulders and past the vibrant and strange desert ecosystem.
The desert is an unfriendly environment, but so much still grows there. The boulders preserve water and filter it into the cacti, which also conserve water inside of them. Birds and trees flourish under the scalding sun. Joshua trees reach their arms to the stars. As always with nature, I think we can learn a lot from deserts.
Afterwards I made my way to the Cholla Cactus Garden, where a million friendly-looking green cacti glowed and bristled under the setting sun. Then, as the sun was sinking beneath the hills, I drove to Keys Landing to watch the stars.
When I arrived, the last orange rays of sunlight were slipping below the horizon. From the viewpoint I saw fragments of the distant Salton Sea, spread out against a cluster of bright city lights. Somewhere out there was Salvation Mountain, a brightly painted hillside monument to God which I didn’t make it to, but which I think is the West’s worthy answer to the aforementioned Grotto of the Redemption.
I was lingering around the overlook when a traveler asked me for directions to the nearest campground. I ended up chatting with him and some other vagabonds about the road and the magic of national parks and the strangeness of America. One of the guys had been biking around the country for an entire year, camping in the wilderness and just going for miles and miles.
One of the others offered me LSD and I was admittedly a tiny bit tempted — this was Joshua Tree after all, and that would have been a wildly climactic ending to this story — but I had to turn it down.
The other girl who was there told us that she had recently read a story about someone who takes LSD in Joshua Tree and ends up getting lost in the desert, only to be guided home by a spirit inside a Joshua tree. So I’ll just say that in another dimension, this story went that way.
In this dimension, though part of me wanted to hang out longer with my new friends, another part of me most definitely wanted to enjoy my last night of true solitude for a while. I drove back to the Airbnb and settled in for one last night in this desert oasis.
That night, I did hear a couple strange scratching noises outside which unnerved me, but I assume it was the wind or some desert creature. Overall I felt open and light. Perhaps I had been guided by a tree spirit, in a certain way. If there are spirits in the physical world, I do believe they are in the trees, and I think the Joshua trees had a message for me, even if it wasn’t necessarily the one I wanted to hear.
Of course, if there are spirits, I think they are probably inside us, as is all the wisdom we need, written deep down in our bones, etched in our DNA. Sometimes we just need a little help unlocking it.
I think the desert, in its own way, gave me a key to something that was locked deep inside my chest, and showed me a new way out of a labyrinth I had not even known I was wandering around in. We’ll see where this desert wisdom leads.
But next, I was headed to Hollywood.
This is one of my favorites. I needed to read this right now…. Thank you : )