Maybe I’m a Desert

Most of what we know to be the desert was once underwater and, though it has long since emerged from the sea, it still owes its shape to the movement of moisture.

Its peaks and valleys…
Its mesas and canyons…
Its plant and animal communities…

All of them, sculpted and nurtured by where water is, was, or will be.

Maybe I’m a desert.

Like the desert, I’m just a collection of cosmic dust shaped by the fluidity of a passing lifetime. When I think of the man that I am, I think of all the blood, sweat, and tears that brought me here.

…of iron and salt.
…of great joy and sorrow.

I think of the scars that I have acquired on my skin and in my soul as I crawl through the world with my hands in the dirt, of all the tiny moments that have drawn blood.

I think of swapping spit and tender gasps while my sweat dries on another, of how much I’ve grown by loving and being loved.

I think of all the tears that I’ve wiped away from the faces that I have held and all of the salt that I have left on those that have held mine.

Mostly, I think of the great current of the world and how I’m still learning when to surrender and when to throw myself against the turbulence of it all.

As infinitely complex as we are enchanted, maybe we’re all just deserts of our own making. Bags of meat driven by borrowed dreams on borrowed time, perhaps the secret to this whole game of life is to bleed, sweat, and cry.

Maybe, like the water that’s shaped the great deserts of the earth, we’re all meant to leave our own accidental beauty in the afterglow.

Maybe our gift to the world is our silt and our debris - the residue of a life spent learning how to be human.