TAKE IT EASY —
January 14, 2022
Here is a combination of transcriptions of voice memos from a drive to West Texas (the one where my car didn’t break down), interjections into those lines with thoughts from the present, and photographs from home and from this roaming.
Here I consider lovin’ in the anthropocene, the temporality of the spaces I encounter and how they hold me, and prehistoric pictographs of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands.
I left my camera on the dash of my mom’s truck with the lens cap off. Maybe letting the sunshine in will do some weird shit to my pictures and I'll like them more than I have been recently. Last night I slept on and off and was very much in my head.
Love is endless, right? Otherwise what the fuck is the point. And if there really is no end to love…then… that’s great. I think it’s like the horizons my wheels are humming towards. That means there’s something kind of worthwhile to live for. Right? Like, maybe everything ends, except for love.
Does that mean it’s the same thing over and over? I’m also coming from the place of, if i’m entertaining this thing repeating itself, yet again, why not?? Life is horrifically short. I feel that I can't spend all of this emotional and mental energy trying to solve this puzzle I don't think will ever be solved. I can choose to step away, or I can let it unfold. Reminder - we’re not in control. Just following my guts out here. Trying to let my heart be open, too.
The first night I stay in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands. There are pictographs all over this region that I’m hungry to see. The site I saw yesterday is in a rockshelter within a limestone canyon caused by flash flooding. The pictographs are thought to be around 4,000 years old – older than the pyramids in Egypt. Our guide told us this to give us perspective in space and time, as if those structures could be more significant than these figures – I don’t think it’s possible. The art is incredible. It’s unbelievable. You can’t describe it. It’s just so…it just means so much more to see art in its context. And that it’s art not just for the sake of art. And we don’t really know much at all about them. These were creation stories, death stories… They depict the cosmologies of people that have been in and out of Texas for thousands and thousands of years… doing exactly what I'm doing right now. Which is just navigating. Looking for shelter and retracing familiarities, breathing in and out.
I think about the pictograph site I visited on labor day weekend earlier in 2021, where the archeologist leading the tour said that there was a certain spot where the people intentionally placed figures and other things beneath a leaky spot in the limestone of the rockshelter – KNOWING THAT ONE DAY THOSE PARTICULAR FIGURES WOULD BE GONE – washed away from the seepy water in the soft limestone or covered with limey scale. Their portals were black and red, with squiggly lines bordering the anthropomorphic figures, deer, and panther.
I saw fossils in that rockshelter yesterday that were 100 mil years old. What could do a better job of putting us in our timespace place.
Like dang, weren’t we just hunter gatherer bands in the neolithic era a min ago??
We’re very short sighted. It makes my head spin. Maybe the group was washed out by a flood that filled the canyon. I don’t know. I'm imposing my ideas here but a lot of the changes happening presently are because of manmade changes in the past 100 years in this area. The tour guide said that with all of the chaos crisis times we’re in – the only way she is able to find peace now is when reads about geology. It reassures her to know that one day we’ll all be gone. None of this will be here, and it will be something else or return that takes some form unknown to us. I think she’s right. It’s cynical, a little fatalistic, but it’s also where we find ourselves. Where we need to face the reality that yeah, we’ve been here a min., but we’re definitely on the way out.I find peace in that thought too. It’s the saddest thought I could have, in a way, but I feel solace in that too. One day all of our bullshit will be gone. It's a beautiful thought too. We try to fortify our structures, we try to ….it’s futile. I think that’s beautiful. No raging against the end. No protecting ourselves, no trying to avoid this life with its teeth. Gnash away. That goes though, that while we are here, apathy isn’t sustainable and I’m certainly sick of my own. If nothing matters, then nothing matters. I don’t follow that at all. That is a peaceful final thought. But in this moment now, we do need to preserve what’s important, what really matters, and excuse what doesn’t serve us anymore (and never really was in the first place).
Did I come out here to reimagine the world? I don’t know.
While driving into Marathon, I call my friend. She says she just worries about me getting hurt. She’s right – I probably will. But what else is there?? should I only save myself for situations and people who won’t hurt me? Tried it, hated it, would take heartbreak any day. Maybe I want to cry and laugh all the time. I want magic. That means it matters.
Heading home, avoiding i-10 at all costs, I watched a huge dirt devil through the passenger window as it whipped along the field toward the road I was traveling on. About a minute went by and I thought about pulling over and standing in the truck bed to watch it, make a photo of it if I could. But I kept going and it intersected with me. It ran right into me. I was delighted when the gravel and tumbleweeds slapped the side of the truck.
Much love and be good,
ANNEKE
