Genderless and knotted up, relaxed and yet weathered

red soils and being free

I hear the sounds of muffled rapids, moving over small rocks and boulders.

The sounds, a noise of no thing at all but a collection of constant changes in a cacophony of multitudes that is never the same at every moment yet collectively co-creating a pattern of beings in singularity, sandwiches my position by the river. One rapid downstream to the left is forced all the way to one side, a little whitewater, a load of gravel, overhanging branches of halophytes, prickled xerophytes just above, privet and willow clog its swift flow.

To the right the rapid marks the entry into a meandering valley of low river, open and framed with upright cliffs of millennia of sandstone eons, Juniper, Ephedra, Sagebrush, Saltbush, on up to the mesa tops where the sunset still lingers in the form of a line of light, showcasing cracks to climb if one dares to traverse boulder fields to get there, ancient erosion obvious at demarcated points pulling downward, time pushed into sandwiched layers of metaphoric intense pressure, igneous acute heat and sedimentary roaring movement.

I sit on my tailgate, bare legs, dry and dusty, tanned from the desert sun. I have been here many times before, and this is a kind of home. In m

y own company with the land, weird if I want, grief-stricken if I want, costumed or naked or unable to move for hours, I am whatever state of non-performance suits me. Blonde hairs on my legs are bleached from the light, hair I used to be told was dirty and meant I was unwell if I choose to keep on my body instead of shave away. I fought against it so hard when I knew no femme with hairy legs to normalize my feelings, and yet I understood it was bullshit the pressure to take it away. I look at my blonde leg hair and admire and love it, like a forest that gets to finally be its damn self after so much pressure to log and commodify and fit in to be bought and sold as wife or lumber or child rearer. It’s just a part of me, and I get to choose if I want to keep it or not. The dirt is red and driven over, or washed from the river’s up and down. There is no cryptobiotic soil in the regions of disturbance and moment. The floods haven’t gone this high in awhile and shrubs have established for some time. Barefooted, a datura tattoo on the top of one foot, I got poked when I was in my lowest point, cheeks sunken, underweight, dark circles under my eyes, to mark I survived, knowing I had something to do, out here, for awhile. A datura, symbolizing the medicine that grows out of grief and madness, the medicine of poison, and of death, decay, wanting to die, almost dying, and still being alive somehow blooming at night on the sand banks and cliff sides or open fields where cow dung and compacted soil birth her white spiraling blooms reaching outward. You may go mad, but you can still bloom.

I remember when, in other red soils that made by bones, I wasn’t able to be myself. I remember I neurotically constantly checked my expression in the mirror at home, in school in the bathroom, at the gas station mirror— am I doing it right..right…right?. Am I doing it right? Am I performing right the pleasure of my body for the masses so they leave me alone?!? Let’s check.., the color of my cheeks, the fullness of my lips, the shade of my eyes, my eye lash length, the shine of my cheeks, hair behind or before ear over and over and over obsessively. equating my value to my face’s textures, the exact way my hair fell. My curves, feet, breasts, legs, knees, calves. I equated my value in that red soil churned over for tobacco season after season without a breath of fresh air, to the shape of my belly, and how it matched the jeans I wore, the same jeans everyone else wore. I grew so fatigued, I could not stand it anymore.

When I left that red soil for a time, traced with mica and thick of clay, my ego fell apart, as I went to the woods, and ate mushrooms as many young people do, the makeup came off, the clothes loosened, my mind quickened with clarity. After those initial moments of breakthrough, I went years of super sobriety from alcohol, sugar, weed, any psychedelics, tobacco of any kind, meat and dairy, even coffee. My mother thought I was high and reprimanded me for looking like a hippie assuming I was doing things, and yet, I was clear as day, partake in no drugs, or mind altering substances, clean of social expectations, and saw things for what they were. She had nothing on me. My grades were good, I was revered by my professors for my ideas and research, I had an amazing partner, I ate well, had sweet friends, held two jobs at one time. And yet, I was still a problem for the way I thought, the way I dressed, my hair, which was patched together through my neurodivergent landscape of monochrome and flowing textures, mended and altered to suit my sensory landscape. I sought to duty only to my art, and my mind, and my own definition of my gender expression, and I knew they were wrong— those who pushed me to be clean and organized in their way, comfortable and un-jarring as to not ruffle too much change. I knew I could not go back to conforming to what made the oppressors comfortable. And now still, surrounded by red soil in the heart of the land of canyons, I fight to be myself, in my body of androgyny and long limb, sensitive and fierce. Here in the sea of salt loving plants thriving where they don’t let the Dolores rise even 85% of her normal water flow, I sit in the red silt of her shadow (thistle and baby tumbleweed) that will one day be reclaimed when the systems that don’t let us be ourselves, individually and collectively—crumble. I sit with my bare hairy legs and datura tattoo, rotting tweed coat and company of naturally dyed deer hides I tanned by hand in rot and guts, and revel in the moment of being able to be myself in red dirt, unviewed by human but witnessed rawly and woven with rapids and ochre cliff faces, I let my feet crack, my frayed clothes be worn, soft and protective, my hair swept of silt and salt, sweat and sun. No man can gaslight me for talking opening about misogyny and patriarchal abuse. Noone can tell me I am crazy for crying over the earth’s destruction. No one can tell me what to do with my body or that I owe them access to it here. This is why I ran out here in the first place over a decade ago. Swallows make their spins in the dusky air, clouds coming through thick and looming over sitting here settling in for the evening to cover Orion’s last peek before summer season, settling threatening rain on the mud flats, the thirsty earth starved of free flow and wild expression that when being itself is seen as an exception to the norm, degraded, channelized, low and shallow. Shaven and sullen.

I don’t know whether to be happy or sad. The pits in the hills sunken inward eroded full of muddy bird nests bring sorrow and glee, alone and yet in company of togetherness with deep time, the rocks and the salt, sage and heart shaped cottonwood leaves that some call Fremont are the company of my extended body allowed to be limby, barefoot, frayed and free, genderless and knotted up, relaxed and yet weathered.