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# Orientation
- URL: https://www.jamesreeves.co/orientation/
- Published: 2023-05-23T00:11:06.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-15T03:48:33.000Z
- Description: Here I am at last, living in the landscape I’ve craved since the first time I drove across the country.
- Author: James A. Reeves
- Tags: Notebook

Here I am at last, living in the landscape I’ve craved since the first time I drove across the country. Twenty years ago, the desert appeared through my windshield, and it felt like driving into a cartoon: a yellow rectangle beneath a block of electric blue. To my Midwestern mind, accustomed to damp fields and pale skies, the Mojave was another planet. Although I was only twenty-five years old and not yet thinking about god or regret or reinvention, I heard a spiritual hum beneath the silence of the mountains. Tribes of dune buggies crawled across the dunes, and I thought I saw the future. I’m going to live here someday, I said. 

Instead, life led me through cities, snow, and swamp—New York, Helsinki, New Orleans—and it took my parents and delivered terrible scenes. A pandemic. Berserkers in the Capitol. Mass shootings like the weather report. Screens that scrambled my sense of space, time, and self. And all the while, I fantasized about the desert as a refuge where I might heal my battered brain and *really* get to work. 

I’m finally here, perched on the southwest edge of Vegas. But I’m older now and fighting to resist the exhaustion of the twenty-first century, or worse yet, resignation. My view of the desert has changed too. The future is still here, but I also see the past. I think about all those ancient ascetics who wandered across the sand in search of the sacred, and I wonder if I can do the same.

#### [The Date Palms – Honey Devash](http://jamesr323.sg-host.com/radio/Honey%20Devash.mp3?ref=jamesreeves.co)

###### Honey Devash | Mexican Sumer, 2011 | [More](https://datepalms.bandcamp.com/album/the-dusted-sessions?ref=jamesreeves.co)

[http://jamesr323.sg-host.com/radio/Honey%20Devash.mp3](http://jamesr323.sg-host.com/radio/Honey%20Devash.mp3?ref=jamesreeves.co)

A sun-soaked desert hymn that veers into the otherworldly at the six-minute mark.