schweblog

“Living in New Mexico is strange,” I was thinking to myself today as I pondered leaving the state/country for further studies. There’s this constant state of impermanence here, like one day the wind is just going to start blowing around, picking up bits of sand and dust. It will inevitably gain more speed and mass and velocity and then it will sweep into the cities, dissolving the buildings with erosion, picking up their remnants and bringing them along to decimate the next town. There won’t be any survivors and even if some magical elves wanted to come out at night and rebuild the city, they couldn’t–all the pieces would have sailed off into the Gulf of Mexico.

This kind of impermanence is especially prominent when you grow up on a farm. You’re working constantly–45 or 50 hours a week–sweating and burning and baking and getting lost in the exhaustion. The fruits of your labor literally grow before your eyes, though, and pretty soon they’re taller than you. Your own creations are formidable, strong. You exist to serve them–water them, keep the pipe laid down so that they can drink up your precious desert liquid. And then in a heartbeat it’s all gone, swept away in a swath of machinery.

That’s circular, though…expected and planned and purposeful–this is what you do when you farm. The impermanence is most noticeable in the weather. Sometimes the wind blows so hard here that the rain hurts–not because it’s cold (it feels grand on a hot day, actually) or anything like that. Nope, it’s just gigantic drops falling and accelerating and gaining momentum and reaching terminal velocity and then they hit you on the back of the neck and you run to get into the truck before another quarter-sized drop hits you and leaves a welt. Sometimes the wind blows the dust around so that you can feel it scratching your back and working its way into your ears and nose and every other orifice exposed to the air. That’s when you feel it–the impermanence–grinding persistently and if the wind gets up much more you’re just going to be eroded away and your molecules carried away into the wind. Maybe your work boots would be left behind, just for dramatic effect–a nice picture that will be on the front of a popular publication: boots in an otherwise barren plane.

I don’t know what I’m going to do when I leave this place to go somewhere else…concrete. Somewhere that, even if there is wind, dust won’t be around. And the rain won’t hurt. It will just drip on you for days and days on end, like some grueling Chinese water torture–that’s not a very respectable away to go, you know, going mad under the droplets. I don’t want that. If I’m going to be taken away by the elements, I want to melt away dramatically into the wind, carried away to be dropped into the ocean one day. This is why New Mexico is good. Because it teaches you to embrace that impermanence. And eventually you start to like it.

Filed under: general by Jesse