Joshua Tree National Park hike, Palm Springs
Arriving in Los Angeles for work, the narrator decides to seize a weekend road‑trip to Joshua Tree after being drawn to its “otherworldly” landscape on social media. With a rented car and a “frontier” motel on the highway, she reaches the park mid‑morning in 39 °C heat. A fellow traveler warns there is no shade, but she proceeds. She completes the Barker Dam Loop, explores Hidden Valley, climbs Ryan Mountain, and visits Skull Rock and Split Rock, noting that a companion she expected (“the dude”) never shows up and later ghosts her, leaving her alone on the trail. The desert heat and light feel like “paint stripper,” and she describes a visceral awe that shrinks her ego, comparing it to the Overview Effect and the Blue Marble photograph. At Ryan Mountain’s summit she looks toward Palm Springs, feels “insignificant,” and senses her cells “dissolve.” Returning, she observes crowds of tourists arriving in kombis and SUVs, taking brief selfies, and retreating to luxurious cabins, which she judges as missing the deeper “awesome precious experience.”
The next afternoon she drives 15 minutes to Pioneertown, stops at Pappy & Harriet’s—a biker‑style diner with mesquite‑fire cooking in an outdoor dirt courtyard—orders mac & cheese and broccoli, and watches a Marianne Williamson video warning that America is a Titanic heading for an unseen iceberg, urging spiritual activists to become politically engaged. She reflects on the desert’s historic draw for First Nations peoples of Australia and North America, hypothesizing that raw awe may be the underlying pull.
The following day she heads to Palm Springs, sits by the Zen‑style pool at the Ace Hotel, balances her finances while a DJ spins a 1993‑style house track, and notes that Donald Trump has formally announced a presidential run.
Shifting to a critique of contemporary wellness culture, she distinguishes “self‑care,” tracing its origin to Audre Lorde’s 1988 essay on self‑preservation as political warfare, from “soul‑care,” which demands confronting fear, privilege, and ecological guilt to act. She recounts a spike in “self‑care” searches after Trump’s 2016 election and argues that true soul‑care is inherently political.
Later, an email from Russell Brand invites her onto his podcast. She hustles for months, finally secures a meeting, and travels from northern England to his rural London farm cottage after a grueling 10‑hour journey by bus and train. Brand offers her cashews, asks why she wanted to meet, and they converse about “spiritual materialism,” the responsibility of the conscious, and the necessity of political engagement. Brand calls her “fucking mad,” they promise to keep in touch, and the encounter ends.
Subsequently, she video‑calls Sister Joan Chittister, an American Benedictine nun and activist, who warns against spiritual complacency, urging listeners to become “prophetic” agitators when called upon. Chittister stresses that most people should amplify prophetic voices rather than try to become prophets themselves, and she exhorts the narrator to write her book quickly.
The narrator then outlines a concrete daily practice: keeping a small radio on while brushing teeth, reading two independent newspapers online after meditation, watching evening news, and limiting total news intake to about one hour to avoid overwhelm while staying informed. She also describes a “Kondo”‑style social‑media purge, unfollowing accounts that lack life‑affirming joy and following those that deliver difficult, caring messages.
Finally, she reflects on her own white privilege, drafting an Instagram‑style confession that acknowledges benefiting from systemic racism and the “bootstrap” myth, and she urges readers to ask probing questions about their own practices—unattachment, “thoughts and prayers,” manifesting, abundance, and Zen‑likeness—to ensure they are not “gaslighting” or avoiding genuine action.