Protect the Mojave
a 35mm photo set of the sky after late summer monsoons
The desert isn’t for everyone. Our relationships as humans to place, is something that was once honored in many of our ancestral practices, but is often lost now. Since most of us in the so-called United States / turtle island are not living on our ancestral lands, and our ancestral lands are fractured, many and often largeley unknown, it is so deeply important to cultivate a relationship with the land we live on.
The Mojave Desert- my home- was not the home of my ancestors. It was taken and developed by Morman colonizers, extracted for it’s riches in minerals. But since I live here, I have the responsibility to treat this land as that of my ancestors, to care for it as if it were a part of me.
This coming weeks marks 7 years since I packed up my 2012 Nissan Versa and drove to Joshua Tree to start a new chapter. Turns out it would be a chapter a lot about land based art and ritual; the desert reached out it’s long arms from shadowy mountains at dusk and it handed me this rite of passages- to connect my magic to the land beneath my feet.
Makes sense- I am an earth sign (Capricorn Sun and Moon). They say that the earth aesthetics of Capricorn are that of a rugged, jagged desert mountain landscape- it’s relationship to Saturn and the bones, ligaments and tendons of the body. Mountains may be the bones of earth.
This will be my 8th winter in the desert, and the cold never ceases to shock me. The way it grips on to you and lets you go, penetrates each fragment of the being. The desert can be unforgiving. But it walks besides us on the tightrope to remind us, it can only support us as much as we are willing to support ourselves- and it!
This is a photoset I took late summer, on Phoenix Harmen 35mm film. The sky was wild on those days and I wanted to capture it.
When people tell me they love my photograpy, I cannot take it as a compliment. I cannot take credit for simply walking this earth and observing it’s beauty. I cannot take credit for having my camera with me, and capturing it’s beauty.
But to take photos is an act of recording a moment in time, perserving a history and a truth.
Protect the Mojave, don’t just use it as a playground for your psychedelic vision quest journeys. Know the plants and rivers and mountains by their name. Honor the land unceded by the Coahilla, Serrano and Chemehuevi peoples.
