Three weeks in the desert, Rancho Mirage, a community adjacent to Palm Springs, to baby sit the house and dogs of some dear friends. I've never spent a summer in the desert, so am apprehensive about how to find some level of pleasure and comfort in temperatures that excel many hot spots in the world. Perhaps the air conditioning, an unheard of phenomenon on the central California coast, will allow me a few days of comfort?

I am hoping to be able to adapt to the heat and do some writing while locked indoors with the big dogs. If the friends were not dear to me, my wife and I would not go watch the home. In winter: si, no problema!

But maybe 120-degree days will prove to be interesting. I've always wanted to try to fry an egg on outdoor concrete. The opportunity is soon to come to me! As one of my newly adopted favorite poets, David Whyte, says, everything is waiting for me:

Everything is Waiting for You

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.