A lot of the times I start to write something for this blog I write “this is one of the best experiences of my life”. This time I’m going to write about the best experience I ever lived. This is about the time I spent in the middle of a toxic wasteland in the Bombay Beach desert in Southern California, Mars.

It feels like the edge of the world here, or literally another planet. I wonder if the pioneers of the far west, hundreds of years ago, felt the same way I do: a hopeful colonizer of an anarchist impossible dead land that exists in the faint equilibrium between the everything and the nothingness.

As time goes by I become more convinced that this place might as well be Mars. A high-tech, low-life cyberpunk fantasy world lost in time and space.

I want to tell you about who we are, but it’s hard to describe Martians, we’re an elusive and diverse kind. Most of us live on the edge of society, some of us are exactly what society tell us to be, some of us seem to have lost all connection with it. I think it’s fair to say our unifying trait is that we are settlers. Colonizers of this devastated land for yet another time in the history of human kind. Drawing from the non-duality of every possibility due to its emptiness, to build our dreams.

And I also want to tell you what Mars is about, but I’m afraid the vastness of the experience can only be understood by someone who has been there. Mars was wild. I heard stories of suicides whispered as murders, received death threats, and was told of assassination plots. Mars was vast. I went to the church on Sundays and watched, as a man told the tale of how he met god and was reborn after lifetimes of suffering. Mars was magical. Together, we alchemized a philosopher’s stone that was an inexhaustible source of creativity and willpower. Mars was sureal. We danced in storms, we read each other’s minds, we built a whole world and tore it apart.

We were so far but also so close! The world’s artistic center for cinema lied near us. Sometimes I wonder if we were just clueless actors in a free man’s piece. Somewhere in a millionaire’s dreamscape, caught in between a tacky western and a desolate post-apocalyptic world. Posing as fortuneless criminals, wealthy intellectuals, scruffy hippies and beautiful artists.

In Mars I was nothing special and would passively watch the world unraveling around me, mesmerized by people’s magnetism, intelligence and madness. In Mars was also special, making lifelong lasting impressions in others. I taught and learned lessons. I felt very full and very empty, very important and very irrelevant. I had all this time to feel and I’m so very grateful. Grateful every time the train passed by.

Every morning I sat to listen to my mind and to feel Mars. I’d head over to Huaqiangbei and sit in one of the chairs we scavenged from the local dumpster. I’d shiver through the freezing winds that carried the howlings of the coyotes. And I would pray for the sun to come up. Every morning, for a long time… Until the light finally warmed my soul and my body waking me up together with the desert.

Every night, I’d brush my teeth star-gazing, wondering about pragmatisms and metaphysics. Relishing every second, trying to keep myself in the moment and to hold within me this whole universe, so I could never feel alone again.

I shared my very few very precious spiritual practices with strangers that I came to love later on. Some of them were gone. I know some will be gone. That hurts. Though I’m grateful. A friend once taught me how everyone that touches you lives forever through you, and that gives me peace.

In the desert I internalized the notion that loss is a facet of pain and an inevitable part of life, nonetheless suffering is a choice within you.

I’ve recuperated my long lost loves for so many things. I was healed.

It was suddenly so cool to like what I liked and to have long discussions about all of these things. I was accepted.

It was so fulfilling and easy to focus and to not see the passing of time. I had arrived.

I met a couple of the most incredible people I’ve ever met. I learned so much about the restorative power of communities and now I can’t see my life without them. Everything looks so much clearer after I waited for the ripples to dissipate.

I left my castle. I saw an old man, a sick man and a dying man. And now I can’t go back to it.

Pictures in this blog post were taken by many Martians!