The End of the Beginning
Well friends, it’s the end of the beginning, if you can believe it. A friend asked me a while back “How will you know when this first phase of the book coming out will be over?” I told her that when the events had been cleared from the Events page of the website, I would know I had arrived. November 21 was the date that I had set for myself where things would settle out—this was the day of my last scheduled book signing and the day of the big legislative hearing that would also wrap up my current project at my day job. My astrologically-minded friends (of whom there are surprisingly many), inform me that November 21 this is also the start of Sagittarius, so I can expect some kind of realignment that will help me emerge from the sleep deprivation crevasse and shadow-self encounters of Scorpio season.
The book is still out there, making little ripples, but I’m taking a break from throwing the weight of my time and care behind promoting it.
And my calendar is somehow starting to repopulate. Book events, I am finding, tend to beget more book events. 2026 is already booking up with travel and new opportunities.
Do you have an idea for where I should head next? I’m thinking of stops in Chicago and Tulsa; I’ve got an opportunity or two near Detroit, and then more to do here in Santa Fe.
While I’m taking a break from events, I’ve made some updates to the website. There’s now a spot where you can watch past talks, and I’m adding some press coverage as well. I’ll also be doing a short series of “book tour superlatives” on Instagram, so be sure to follow along there. I’m planning to take December to experiment with other formats and content for yonder Desert Dispatch. If there are things you’ve been enjoying or would like to see more of, let me know!
In the meantime, thank you for reading, supporting Through the Long Desert, and coming along for the ride.
One Time, One Meeting
“I was a footnote in other people’s vacations, an unexpected opportunity to kill an hour at the local indie book store, or a chance encounter that set someone’s trajectory on a slightly different course.”
Sometime in the past month, a late night YouTube algorithm recommended a BBC travel video about the Japanese concept of ichigo ichie, a proverb that roughly translates to “one time, one meeting.” I’m surprised that I hadn’t encountered it before because it comes out of Zen Buddhism and the Japanese tea ceremony, topics in which both Wright and O’Keeffe were well versed. The idea is that each moment is unique, unrepeatable and thus it is imperative to meet each other with attention, kindness, and gratitude.
Over the last few weeks that phrase has been in my mind as I’ve signed books, answered reader questions, and flashed through a litany of Powerpoint presentations.
In all those moments, I felt wholly present. I listened to personal histories and shook hands and tried to inscribe my books with meaningful sentiments even when deep down I felt like an ungainly middle schooler writing “YOLO” in an acquaintance’s yearbook. It’s the unrepeatability part I’m struggling with, and the strangely lopsided nature of being the main character of your own story and a mildly interesting cameo in the stories of others. For me, there’s kind of a strange gestalt to the book tour experience, a richly textured whole that carries emotional weight. But I recognize that from the other end, I was a footnote in other people’s vacations, an unexpected opportunity to kill an hour at the local indie book store, or a chance encounter that set someone’s trajectory on a slightly different course.
And now the entire experience is still rattling around my nervous system like a virus I can’t quite shake. Does the brain necessarily build monuments to these kinds of experiences? Why is it easier for people like me, people drawn to narrative and exposition, to let these kinds of past experiences ossify into emotional talismans that shake their bones impotently at the present? Why can’t I just let it be “one time, one meeting”? Can’t the past just stay sedately in the past, divorced from rumination, desire, regret?
But I suppose I wouldn’t be a good historian if I didn’t believe at some level that the past is still present, a palpable ebb of precedent lapping on the shore of the future.
I think of the single meeting that O’Keeffe and Wright had at Taliesin… one time, one meeting, but an experience that would echo across many years as an evolving pattern of mutual influence. The letter she wrote him, the books he sent her, the painting she made for him, the buildings he designed having internalized the strange lessons of that painting. Maybe it’s actually enough to be attentive in the moment and then let things ripen and metabolize as they will in the aftermath. Maybe I’m still too close to the experience of the book tour to understand how the many gossamer threads of the last two months tether to the future; which were fleeting connections and which will retain their hold.
One morning at Taliesin West, my body still stubbornly on Mountain Time, I was awake at 5 am. I made a cup of tea and sat down to write a Dispatch in the living room while I waited for the sunrise. I suddenly felt a prickling, inarticulate prescience at base of my skull—I was being watched. A bobcat, illuminated only by the interior light through the windows, sat inspecting me with twitching tail. Her self-serious, wild eyes glinted with that feline perspicacity universal to all cats. I had the sensation of watching myself from her view, enacting a tableau of ritualistic solitude in the style of Edward Hopper for the benefit of this crepuscular desert animal. We watched each other for long moments. She turned to leave; I followed her along the window, pressing my face to the glass. She cast a long, sphinx-like glance over her shoulder and then vanished.
I am waiting now, and will be, in the weeks and months to come, to see what of this experience will linger, and what parts will slip away silently like a bobcat into the encroaching dawn.
Communing with a bobcat at Taliesin West