45
So that changed the whole dynamic of the journey. In the best kinda way imaginable. They stayed up til dawn that first night, sharing themselves through a language of emotion, there was too much intrigue in the words for their fingers to stray beyond their warm-blooded origami. Not even a kiss.
Miles didn’t find himself yearning for more. He spoke a truth unknown to even himself. He was quite content with the sincerity of connection. There was no urge to derail the train into full-on collision.
She was traditional in her approach to romance, no interest in a casual form of intimacy, she wanted to find the warmth of his heart before she got lost in the heat of the moment. She’d been hurt before, a few times, it was hard to let her guard down, hard to open up those wounds again. If he was genuinely interested in becoming her person, then it was gonna take some time, a slow process of mingling trust and emotion. And if it was meant to be what both of them imagined it could, then there was no hurry to rush through these earliest moments of enchantment anyway.
“I used to focus so hard on where I wanted to be, that I lost sight of where I already was,” she looked back. “Not just relationships, with pretty much everything. Like learning songs. I studied some tapes our medicine man had recorded, tried to memorize every word, kicked myself when I messed one up, and totally forgot that the songs were prayers, not a homework assignment.
Then one day we were sitting there watching Ancient Aliens and he felt compelled to share his own path with me. There’s so many songs out there that you could never learn them all, some handed down from the ancestors, others that have come to medicine people on the hill, but it’s not about memorizing the words, it’s about feeling them in your heart. He said that some people would find their way to ceremony and try to learn them all in a month, and most of those people didn’t make it back the next year. They were intent on experiencing everything at once, making the most out of their visit to ceremony, because they only had a small window available along their itinerary of spiritual tourism.
But our leader, Harvey, he knew that this wasn’t a passing fad for him, he was committed to our ways, so he had plenty of time to connect with the songs in a good way. What’s the hurry if you’ve got your whole life to discover the nuances that would otherwise be lost in translation? That resonated with me a lot. Made me less anxious to take it all in at once. And made the songs that I did carry, mean that much more to me.
And we could see the same mechanism with spirituality in general. It’s a long red road, not an overnight flight. If you’re committed to this path, then be ready for a lifetime of hard earned lessons, but you have a lifetime to learn them.
Those tourists show up though, and want instant enlightenment, they want a medicine man to bless their journey so they can be on their way, or want to eat a cactus and unlock the universe in one night. And you’ll see some get into the Sun Dance arbor their first year, before they even know what it’s about, before they could ever fully understand their role in our sacred ritual. Out there with no clue what they’re doing, or why they’re doing it, and that’s enough for them, and they never come back, having already experienced everything Sun Dance has to offer, and they’ve got the selfie to prove it.
If this way to pray is for you, then you’ve got all the time in the world to let it build inside you. It would be way too much for everything to hit you all at once, there’s a great mystery out there, infinite, and every time you think you almost have it all figured out, you simply open another door to an even bigger mystery. Even Harvey’s still opening doors, otherwise he’d be bored to death by now, while those who framed their ticket stubs only walked up to the gate and turned around, convinced that they already knew how this one ended.
So ever since that day, I hold my baby steps in a sacred way, appreciating each delicate moment and not getting caught up on what might be next. And I can see how this same principle has parallels all over the place, especially with relationships.
If you’ve got no intention of being with someone beyond the surface, then it only makes sense to rush through the subtleties of love as you look for another challenge to conquer. You shortchange yourself on the most magic of memories, in fact, all you can remember is the pursuit of completion, which means that it’s over, because how can you keep the magic alive when it was never really there in the first place?
But if you’re really present, with genuine desire for a connection outside of physical obsession, then you’d feel foolish rushing past the butterflies to get to the flower. You’d want to savor every drop of fragrant nectar that brought you to the field in the first place, not cut through the chase as you add another notch to your lifeless bouquet of carnal collection.”
She had him at the butterflies, and so began his own foray into the cozy corners of monogamous celibacy. She wasn’t into the whole open relationship thing. For this to work, it would be a commitment of sacred union, a commitment to their time together, but no expectation of eternal bliss, just a day at a time as they explored the depths of one another. She admitted to being the slightest bit jealous of his chemistry with Brooke, perhaps that had been what prompted her into making moves, but she knew the difference between a healthy dose of envy and the distrust of a partner.
She didn’t want to stifle his growth as a person by restricting the things that made him who he was, that was who she caught feelings for, it wouldn’t make sense to capture his essence and lock it away in a cage. She wanted him to keep blooming, and she wanted to be a part of it, but she knew that everyone else would be a part of it too, even other women. And it was even possible that he’d fall for someone else, and that would be okay, it would be a beautiful thing for someone she cared so much about, but she wasn’t going to settle for less than all of him.
It was a tad different than the third wheel of a new moon, and he was into it, way into it, their connection grew by the moment as passion peeked around the corner. No frisky business, but the slightest touch set them on fire, intimate whispers caressed their desires, the deepest of conversations held no pretense of expectation, only a deeper appreciation for what they both knew was brewing.
Miles still bounced around the caravan as he infiltrated the horseback montage, but they often found themselves bringing up the rear together, sidetracked by private jokes and nearly falling off the map.
“Alright you two,” scolded Brooke. Who, by the way, was over the moon about the budding romance. “Ya’ll ready to do some sketchy shit?”
“Born ready sister,” affirmed Tiana.
“I wasn’t,” confessed Miles. “But I am now. Whatcha thinking?”
The women looked to each other and glanced at Miles, he smelled another setup, but he was still in.
“Just a chapter meeting of the Turtle Island Fence Cutters Guild, is all,” alerted Brooke.
“And another initiation for you, sweets,” promised Tiana.
They deployed camp and doubled back after nightfall, the target had been acquired a few klicks behind them, it was about time Miles got a little action.
Lookouts posted up a half mile in either direction of the lonesome straightaway. Brooke and Tiana grabbed a set of gear, Rowan and Miles took the other, game on.
He understood the animosity towards fences. After days of nowhere to go, he sympathized with the nomads of nature, it might behoove them to not unleash a highway of roaming cattle, but where could all this corn runoff to?
Barbed wire lined both sides of the highway for as far as you could see, which in the prairie is a long way, or at least it had been during the day. The moon was nearing on new, starlight covered their tracks, it was probably even too dark to contract tetanus.
Each team picked a side and slid off the corridor. Rowan held each strand of private perimeter near the post, as Miles clipped through them with a beat up pair of side cutters. They got through the three wires of the first bay, neatly piling the refused rubble along the fenceline, hopefully disregarding notice until further delay. They hiked south a quarter mile as the lookouts repositioned, they’d hit four locations along the stretch, should be enough emergency exits to meet code.
The veterans could identify the natural migration routes from the layout of the land, a patch of trees to the west was a good start, and the stream to the east made for an obvious commute.
In America, you can’t actually own the water, which seems like the first thing they’ve gotten right so far, but they’ll still let you hold title to the banks and the bed and the bridge. The water flows free, but there are no rules about simply boxing in every point of public beach access. It’s actually been publicly addressed by Nestle that water is not a fundamental human right, so forget about the corn thieving deer.
In a world of commoditized living, it seems unlikely that they simply forgot to ring up the water, though at this rate of climactic contamination, it won’t be long before we’re willing to give Nestle a third leg for a sip. And of course they flood the market, because water is free.
In Michigan, they pay two hundred dollars a year for a permit to pump 210 million gallons out of White Pine Springs, and that’s not a typo, it costs them less than a dollar per million gallons of stolen livelihood. Stolen with government approval of course, like most enguzzlement schemes, from the citizens of Flint who live a hundred miles away and are still plagued by lead poisoned pipes, also government funded. For the last six years they’ve had to brush their teeth from a bottle, and now they have to pay for it out of pocket, into Nestle’s.
Those blinded to anyone else’s struggle suggest that they simply move if it’s so bad, it’s just another person’s problem that they’ll have to deal with on their own, even if those who have tried to sell their handed down homes are met with mere pennies on the dollar, since no living creature in their right mind would want to live in a world without water.
And they do despicable stuff like this all over the globe, cutting deals with corrupt leaders to extract the land’s vitality, puts some coin in the purse, but nothing will ever grow there again.
Or speaking of the insanity required to live without water, how is cramming four million people into a desert and celebrating it as a city of angels, anything less than the most idiotic thing ever, unless that’s simply a prediction of the upcoming drought.
Oh, but they’ve been in a drought for a decade and seem to be doing just fine, just gotta suck and steal to get by, that’s LA baby, syphon the Colorado and bankrupt communities to the north, but that’s all just a drop in the bucket compared to the eighty percent of California’s water crisis that’s committed to their booming agriculture industry, in a desert.
Everybody’s heard the hubbub around the water hungry almond orchards. How it takes a gallon of water to make a single almond, nearly four hundred gallons for a gallon of their juice, and how the permanence of trees that have to be watered year round leave the farms unable to be fluid during a lifelong drought.
Of course, for all I know, those facts were pumped out by the California dairy industry, who require a thousand gallons per gallon, and the steaks increase, as beef requires nearly two thousand per pound. But that probably counts all the alfalfa they eat, it’s California’s most irrigated commodity, a hundred billion gallons of which we export across an ocean that somehow seems to be overstocked, as the cost of living rises with the tide.
But it’s not just the creamy crops that suck down the most vital component of producing life, the one that somehow doesn’t exist anywhere near the region that we celebrate as the most premiere farmland in the world, where they still manage to spend three gallons per tomato, over five for a head of broccoli, and every single walnut somehow takes five times the water as the almond that started this whole rant in the first place.
And that’s really why water is free, before it’s already spoken for by the agriculture industry that owns the entire social hierarchy it creates. They account for seventy percent of our national water usage, draining the aquifers that take thousands of years to replenish, leaving wells and whistles dry, as another sacred element of the Earth is rushed through before you've even had a chance to wet down your lawn.
By the time the whole water speech was over, the vandals had unworked their way to the last crime scene, two wires down and the walkie squelched with headlights. They crawled through the deconstruction and took cover among the stalks. Probably just another wayward traveler, but in the event of buckshot backup, they’d make like grits and stick to the south. The truck passed, but another was on the way, hold your positions, but this time they stopped short of the commotion by a few hundred yards.
The unmenders were braced for escape. No word from the recon. Considering all he’d been through, Miles couldn’t believe that this snag would be his downfall.
“Dome lights are on.”
Get ready.
“Pulling something out of the glovebox.”
Get set.
“They’re turning around, repeat, they’re leaving. Think they were just lost or something. Should we go help them with direction?”
And go.
They clipped the last few barbs and broke back to camp, another action sequence for the film adaptation, but if only there was a way to utilize the scrap wire to build a freer future.
Excitement was roaring back at the fire, adrenal glands pumped the celebration, the electrified embrace was overdue and before either knew what was happening, the world melted away as their lips completed the circuit.