Day 86: Zozobra; Day 87: Painted Desert

Zozobra before his demise, 9/8/2011

Tardy for 9/8/2011


Today I am grateful for the opportunity to burn my gloom. What I learned from the 87th annual burning of the Zozobra in Santa Fe was that gloom, fear, and misery will appear to be big, ugly, and indomitable from a distance. And they will protest fiercely when you decide to burn them, to eliminate them. They will make a huge fuss and it will seem like they will never go away. But we are more powerful than despair, misery and fear; in the end when we decide to get rid of them, we are ultimately more powerful and we can vanquish them.

There is something incredibly cathartic about writing your worries on a slip of paper, putting it in a box with the cares and stresses of 40,000 other people, and then watching a giant effigy with your worry-slips in it go up in flames. Whether it was Zozobra who took my worries or something else, I have banished Old Man Gloom in my heart and I am traveling lighter.

I'll add too that this year's Zozobra experienced a lengthy delay because the winds wouldn't die down enough for the fire department to allow the burning to take place (I guess a 50-foot burning man in a field with 40,000 people is probably a bit dangerous and a tiny liability...). My mom and I kept wondering if Zozobra would burn, or whether we'd be standing out in a chilly field in Santa Fe all night. It was taking forever! And we had changed our trip - stayed an extra night to see Zozobra, specifically - so it would have been a huge shame if we didn't get our gloom burned. And, like everything in this transition has been for me, it couldn't be rushed. I had to be patient, accept things in their own time, and steadfastly believe that things have a way of aligning when they are meant to be. Sure enough, at about 3 minutes past the point when we had said we'd leave, the ceremony began. I think in the end, it started right on time.

(I do have some great video, which I'll post here when I'm not in Kingman, AZ, where the wifi connection is not quite beefy enough to handle all the multimedia I want to share with you!)


For Friday, September 9, 2011
Wow I am grateful that tomorrow is the final day of the road trip. It's been long, and the cats and I are starting to show the strain of travel, exhaustion, and frustration. I am so excited to be in my new space, which is not my car.






I am also grateful for the opportunity to visit Petrified Forest National Park, which includes the Painted Desert and the Petrified Forest. It was a lovely detour, and I constantly am amazed by the desert's beauty. The colors in the painted desert were incredible, and it was great to see this gorgeous place: I found myself thinking of the desert painters I had seen at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe and at Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu. As for the petrified wood, I had seen small pieces of petrified wood before, but never giant logs that still resembled trees. I'm so glad places like this exist, that they are protected, and that I am lucky enough to visit them. It's a great reminder of a few things: first, these trees that are now petrified wood are 225 million years old. 225 million! And in their lifespans, they have turned from wood into (precious) stone: proof that life works change in us that is completely unanticipated, and can turn the banal into the beautiful - if we but let it.