I finished my last homework assignment yesterday, I have two days of classes left during the next week. I've quit my job at the store hawking pills and herbs in capsules and my last day is Thursday.
I've given notice to my landlady, and will be moving out in three weeks time.
I have three weeks to pack up the few belongings I've unpacked since I left the desert a year and a half ago....
Three-and-a-half weeks until I head home to the desert.
We've deliberated, decided, and changed our minds countless times about where to go next, what to do...but have come to the decision that it's time to go home. Home to the desert. Home to the land of coyote sunrise, saguaro dawn, monsoon summers, sky islands in a sea of chaparral studded valleys. The Sonoran desert is home; it became home 6 years ago to a girl who hardly knew herself after spending four years in a nest called college.
I found myself in the desert. Wandering among saguaro forests at dawn, listening to coyote laughter at twilight, cicadas singing in the monsoons, flooded arroyos in the spring wet, walking barefoot with my feet in the warm trickles filling the arroyos, licking raindrop crystals from the manzanitas, sitting with Grandmother Juniper and Oak, teaching me every day lessons I needed to learn, I got lost in the rhythms of that strange desert, and found myself. Once a stranger, and now a friend and family member to the cactus and coyote. So many tears I shed into the rocks, so much heartache rendered into knowledge and self love under the whispering pines....
Sometimes you have to leave something, let it go, before you know what it truly means to you.
I left the desert searching for a teacher to give me confidence as a healer, a guiding hand to support me as I spread my wings. But like any teacher, one eventually does fly away, and that support is not what is needed.
I have to go home, to my community, my family of wild plants, desert critters, my canyons and rivers, my pine topped peaks, and the people who live there, and need the healing that the desert has given me. It's time to give it back. It is time to go back home and be the support.
So it is, that in three weeks time, I'll be packing my bags again, and heading south, into the blistering heat of the desert in May, waiting anxiously for monsoon songs, and offering the gift plant medicine to the people of Tucson, AZ again.
We've found a nice person to share a house with, and will be looking for a house to make home as soon as we arrive in town. As soon as we get settled, I'll be available for in depth personal herbal, nutritional and flower essence consultations in the Tucson area. I'll be planning herb walks for the summer, and maybe a class or two on medicine making.
Come August I'll be taking a personal sojorn into the Gila Wilderness at the Anima Center , and then in the fall I'll find a space to turn into my herbal clinic/apothecary and hang my shingle, a home for Blue Turtle Botanicals.