The Desert: Email Update

I am in Twentynine Palms, California. All the cafe's here are playing
an acoustic singer-songwriter station with unplugged versions of old
nineties songs and Tom Waits playing. I am reading the Times, being
stealthy about my eavesdropping on a girl doing a bible study in the
corner. She is tattooed and sandpapered from the desert, and is
talking to her study partner about her favorite book of the Bible
which is all about truth and forgiveness.

The bus is more than forty-eight hours out from its starting point,
and we have not reached our geographical destination - but we are
truly on that road where every moment is, indeed, the destination.
Jonah asked me on tape what I was looking for on this bus full of
seekers. I said, "I'm looking for a bus full of seekers."

Dale gave a woman sixty dollars and a cigarette last night. I don't
remember where we were. Riverside, maybe. She had a broken hand and a
child in the passenger seat. We related this event to the clerk at an
outdoorsman's store here in Joshua Tree, and Dale mentioned that again
that he was giving away his possessions and that he had a feeling that
American currency really wouldn't be worth saving up anytime in the
near future.

As a generation, we're going to be learning what it is to live by our
wits. A cohort of seekers and seers, spurning possessions,
enlightening ourselves out of these dark ages and into a new age of
truth and forgiveness.