I live in the desert now and it is an odd landscape. Moon-like in places, but expansive and vast and barren in others. We went driving this afternoon with all the weekend recreators. They towed their boats and their trailers with all the mobile fun apparatus you can imagine. Hundreds. Thousands of them driving to this campsite or this national park or this tourist site. And when you drive the miles of desert between these stops you realize how adulterated we have made the land. We have thrown down thousands of tons of asphalt creating an insult to the desert and a sad reminder of how weakly connected to the earth humanity has become.

As I start putting together my “short” bucket list (because at this point it may well happen that I have fewer hours than most to work on it) I want to find the native American people and apologize to them. We have been a blight on the landscape and have done grave injury to the land here. We should be ashamed.

I want to talk to a Shaman and ask forgiveness.