Waves Become Wings
This month was going to be about my new obsession & thing that keeps my mind off the heat, our new found 1973 Excella 500 Airstream Trailer. Beautiful!!
I am thrilled with the new temporary house for Oregon & it feels like we are moving forward again. Today though was one of the most horrible days I can remember having in a long time. This blog is about the wolf dogs, some strange desert stuff & people we encounter on the way to our new home, wherever that ends up being. It’s not a forum for politics but now the destruction of the economy has crept into every crevice of my life & those around me & it is definitely now part of this one. I have kept relatively quiet about losing everything we own, Noel losing more & more work, getting lower pay (having to work more hours for free), losing benefits, higher copay, insurance now not even paying their claims, every year things getting worse & worse (while the stockholders of his company continued to make a bigger profit every year – Eight million OVER their targeted profit this year), finally we lost our home & I guess this is really how this next chapter of wolf dog ownership happened… Living in the middle of nowhere, in a trailer, in a big dog pen, to keep us all together until we can get where we need to be. We were headed to Oregon before it all came tumbling down & we ended up here in Joshua Tree a few miles from our old house instead.
My workplace has been threatened plenty & we never know really if we can keep the doors open (being state funded) but they managed to keep pulling it off year after year until now. This month to stay afloat they had to cut everything in half & I was one of the few lucky people who got to stay. I was also one of the few that got to bare witness to those coworkers that weren’t so lucky, as they left. It was like being drugged & watching someone cut your arms off. Nothing you could do. Left with no way to help anyone else. Friends, people who had worked there for 10 years or more gone with one quick slice to the gut. Noel had already seen this happen at his work last year.
When this depression started here there was not much evidence. It is a community of people on welfare, desert people in hiding, artists, what’s left of the middle class & the self-contained military. Mostly things went along as usual until the glue, the workers that commuted to the lower desert started losing their homes & leaving. Then the small businesses started closing. Almost the only things left here are chain businesses, liquor stores & gas stations. One in every four houses are empty or for sale.
All this outside depression creates an inward depression but you keep going through the motions. While I was at work watching everyone get laid off, my beautiful amazing friend with breast cancer was having both her breasts removed. It was a hell-of-a day! I can’t remember ever crying so much for so many people. I cried for friends, the Ranch, the community & the future of this country that I suddenly felt more attached to than ever.
What seemed to happen as everyone drifted in despair, was that we finally found each other. We found a common bond & a drive to go the extra mile for one another like never before. Suddenly we all had a purpose bigger than ourselves that needed us to get up off our couches, turn off our televisions & be a part of this big beautiful change. It is evolution in the presence of chaos, like the forest fire frees the seeds of certain pines & clears the ground for new growth. It is the gift that comes from loss & change, giving us gratitude & a love for the simple & meaningful.
So it is on wings of courage & great aspiration to save the world that so many of us are caught up in this strange moment in time all of us connected but finally free.
And the wolf dogs? Happily oblivious, as it should be…
(sennnnnd meeeeeeeet)
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We LOVE you Val!