When I was in high school, I discovered a cure for anxiety-driven insomnia: sleeping outside. When I returned from a summer in Afghanistan between my junior and senior years, I suffered reverse culture shock. I’d lived a slow, down-to-earth life in Kabul, where homes seemed to grow out of the soil. I woke up to rooster crows and donkey brays echoing through the neighborhood. I was immersed in a culture that reached into the fourteenth century’s Timurid dynasty. Life revolved around friends and family.
Returning to the malls and traffic, air conditioning and speed, consumerism and affluence of Scottsdale, Arizona felt like being locked into the Truman Show decades before the movie appeared.
If you haven’t seen Truman, it follows the life of a young man in a perfect neighborhood who begins to wake up. He discovers that what he thought was “reality” is a television stage set for a show driven by corporate interests. All his world really is a stage. His life is not a mystery to be lived but a product to be marketed. That’s how I felt, and believe me, it makes for anxiety.
Recently I camped near Lake Mead in Nevada and rediscovered what Wendell Berry calls “The Peace of Wild Things.” When I wake up in my Tucson apartment, I rarely hear a rooster in the distance. More likely I’ll hear a beeping car-door lock or a slam or an engine start. If I walk out my front door to look at the pre-dawn sky, I see few stars. Night-defying security lights bleach them out.
But I woke up in wonder at Lake Mead’s Las Vegas Bay campground as I stared up through my tent’s skylight:
Just Wondering
For how many millennia did this pinprick
Of starlight
Stream from its world-burning furnace
To witness this cricket singing,
These limbs clacking
In the wild wind
Along the canyon rim?
March 28, 2024,
Las Vegas Bay Campground
Photo above depicts the view to the southeast from Las Vegas Bay campground.
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