When the Desert Follows You
The thing about the desert is it gets in your head.
Not in a dramatic, haunted-by-the-dunes way. More like… it rewires your baseline. You spend enough weeks rationing every drop, calculating litres against kilometres, knocking on strangers’ doors with your best please-I-promise-I’m-not-a-threat smile — and suddenly that becomes normal. The mental math runs in the background constantly. Water: where is it, how much do I have, when’s the next source.
So when I walked around a bend and there it was — a waterfall — I did not respond like a normal person.
I stopped. I stared. I may have made a noise that Wombat found concerning… but fortunately he was on a holiday also discovering new wonders, like what it’s like living in a house.
The Most Significant Reaction I Have Ever Had
I’ve seen waterfalls before. I’ve seen beautiful waterfalls. But I don’t think I have ever, in my entire life on this planet, had a physical response to water like that.
It was right there. Just… falling out of the sky. Free. Unlimited. Not behind a locked gate or at the bottom of a two-day carry or dependent on whether a farmer and their suspicious dog felt like being generous that afternoon.
I just stood there staring at it.
And then, out of nowhere, I was emotional. Like — properly emotional. Not crying-crying. But the kind of feeling where your chest does something unexpected and you realise: oh. I have been holding something.
“The cure for anything is salt water — sweat, tears, or the sea.” — Isak Dinesen
I wasn’t desperate out there, technically. The desert I’ve been walking through is fairly populated in stretches — there’s usually a house eventually, a tap around the corner if you time it right. I never came close to a genuine crisis, plus in the most remote parts I was supported. But here? Where I am now? It’s isolated. Beautiful, wild, nobody-for-days isolated — which I love, actually, it’s exactly what I came for — but I was still running on defensive mode aka. desert mode. Carrying more than I needed. Anxious about something that wasn’t a problem anymore.
And I didn’t even notice until a waterfall fixed it.
That’s the thing about stress that lives below the surface. You don’t know you’re carrying it until you put it down.
Water: A Love Story (Current Status: Obsessed)
I keep going back to look at it.
This is not normal behaviour. It’s a waterfall. It doesn’t need me to check on it. It will continue to fall whether I’m watching or not. And yet.
Here’s what I’m most excited about, which tells you everything about where my brain has been: I don’t have to carry water for Wombat anymore. That’s it. That’s the joy. Not the scenery (stunning). Not the sound (genuinely one of the best sounds in the world). Not even the cold splash on my face after weeks of dry, gritty heat.
WATER. WHENEVER. I WANT. And relief from carrying the weight of responsibility to safeguard others.
The transition from desert to this has been wild. Like — not geographically far apart, either. That’s the crazy part. Desert. Waterfall. Not separated by some vast journey of weeks and weeks. Just: one, then the other. The landscape does what it wants out here.
And so, apparently, do I.
I’ve been saying for a while that it’s been hard lately. I haven’t unpacked that much publicly because sometimes things are hard and you don’t have the words yet, and forcing the reflection before it’s ready just produces bad sentences and suspicious positivity. But the truth is the last stretch has ground me down in small ways I wasn’t fully tracking.
And then: a waterfall. Just sitting there, being beautiful and free and completely excessive in the best possible way.
I’m not fixed. I’m not suddenly healed by a geographical feature (that’ll cost more). But something shifted. The desert mindset loosened its grip a little. And I got to stand there, slightly overwhelmed, staring at something that felt significant .
If you want to follow along properly — carrying too much water, crying at waterfalls, slowly unknotting six years of desert brain — join Entangled. It’s my inner circle and it’s where a genuine community lives. Or if you just want to shout me a warm-up-coffee or a self-pity-hot-chocolate to keep me moving: same link.
Lucy + Wombat 👩🌾🐶
