Richard Lee's Letter Dated September 13, 1996

Desert heat

excerpt from a letter dated September 13, 1996

...The desert has been one hot place this summer. I guess all of Southern California was, but wow! up here it seemed relentless, the very worst summer in the ten or eleven years we have been here. Now today, almost suddenly it is windy and chilly, sweater weather. Maybe that's why, after all, I am attracted to the desert, the shifts and changes, the contradictions and the richness and the drabness. You never know, but you can be pretty sure that there will be lots and lots of blue and bliss! Today--grayness and blustery over confidence.

...I guess my life has become very simple and very basic up here. My meditation is just being here, at one with rocks and stones and trees and sky and yuccas and animals, birds, reptiles and wind. That's about it for me. Well, true, I sometimes get bored, but being with one's boredom is very much part of the dilemma, isn't it? Very much part of one's spiritual progress. It is only by going into and through boredom that one can see the other side, the farther shore.

Now I go. I hear an airplane overhead. I am going out and raise my fist at it. This is no place for airplanes. (Actually it turned out to be four helicopters, big gun ships. So I was about to get out my bazooka, but then I remembered I don't have one. So. Anyway they've gone now.)