By Christie Gardiner
I am perched like a desert blue jay on a cliff’s carved face, dangerously close to the edge of the world. Twenty feet from me is a collection of trees, each with clusters of spindly alien-arm branches reaching from the red Sedona dirt like the beginning of an apocalyptic event. Google will tell me later the alien-armed plant is called an Ocotillo tree. Its tiny leaves, the color of ripe limes, appear only after a good, deep desert rain and last but two weeks before falling to the earth.
Four million journeyers come here each year, hoping Mother Earth will speak to them through the pulsing of the Hopi-named Kachina and Warrior red rock formations on Boynton Canyon Vortex in Sedona, Arizona. “Journeyers” are the mostly middle-aged people with average lives who, having been good all their days, now find themselves realizing goodness doesn’t buy freedom from being human.
In the unsurety of midlife, they seek. Seventeen Google searches, a booked flight, a few called-in-sick days, and they end up in Sedona, the “spiritual healing capital of the world.” At least, that’s what the visitor’s bureau brochure promised. I have come to meet with mystics, Mother Earth, and God (the only one with enough sense of humor to have put me on this planet). I have come to decide what to keep, what to throw away, and how to go on.
Deep, dramatic red rocks, formed across 4.5 billion years, surround me, their tops touching the blue of the troposphere. It’s a breathtaking place to do this really, to deconstruct.
Between the Ocotillo leaves are camouflaged thorns with a wicked ability to tear skin, a fact I learn the hard way. Now navigating the thorns, I touch a leaf. It is as soft as it is lime green, soft in a vibrant way. Though my skin barely makes contact, my touch is too heavy. The leaf surrenders its hold to the alien-arm branch and falls to the ground. The leaf lands by my feet, the only discernible sound my quick inbreath. I want to pick it up, to put it back, to explain I had only wanted to learn, to tell it I didn’t know what wisdom cost.
A little nugget of profundity is in this moment. I don’t feel it yet, but the way my stomach falls, I can tell I’m about to feel it. The panic in the almost feeling makes me reach for my phone. Feeling is something I cannot afford. If I pause to consider what it means to be a leaf with a lifeline so fragile it requires thorns as defense, or to feel the guilt of being the human whose weight separated such a holy, delicate thing . . . What then? I too might break apart and fall. Instead, I wield my defense, my thorn, my lidocaine: my phone.
I open my most used app and take five pictures: the alien plant. The leaves of the alien plant. The alien plant with Kachina. The alien plant with the entire landscape. The alien plant’s thorns with Warrior. I am trying very hard to frame Warrior rock in front of the sun so the sun’s beams will make it look crowned. I crop out the other journeyers, who are likewise holding phones, attempting to cut me from their framed reality.
There are 39,329 pictures on my phone, taken since 2018 when I started paying for extra cloud storage. Many hundred pictures from this collection are moments captured under the pretense of remembrance. The truth is they were moments so exposed I couldn’t bear to be with them. Instead, I expose them with a phone’s camera and pay Google $2.99 a month never to look at a single one again.
I don’t take a picture of the lime-green leaf. But without looking, I feel it there by my feet.
I’m sorry I touched it.
I’m sorry for the weight it cannot bear; for the weight I cannot bear.
I’m sorry I cannot open my arms, wings to the wind, in the wonder it is to be birdlike and breathing.
I’m sorry to be numb.
Journeyer.
Dear God—
Was I ever here at all?
