P&PC at Joshua Tree National Park

P&PC has just returned to drizzly Salem from a brief Spring Break trip to L.A, where, among other things, we visited for three days with P&PC Consultant Drew Duncan. One of those days, hoping to get away from it all, we hightailed it out of town to Joshua Tree National Park, home to the famous Dr. Seussian forest of Yucca brevifolia. We drove around. We hiked the Lost Horse Mine trail in the miserably high winds that put Duncan's rock climbing plans on hold. And we figured that out there in the high Mojave we could put our poetry radar on hold. That's when we ran into longtime California resident Robinson Jeffers near the end of the small, one-mile Hidden Valley trail near the park's West entrance, who reminded us—in the last of a series of informational placards—that

Integrity is wholeness...
The wholeness of life and things,
The divine beauty of the universe.
Love that, not man apart from that.

It's always a strange and beautiful thing to come back to oneself so far from home. Thank you, Joshua Tree, and thank you, Mr. Jeffers, for helping us better center ourselves by first uncentering our minds from ourselves.