31 August, 2010
I’m ready to be disappointed yet again. Uninterrupted azure coaxes the golden-orange orb from its depths in the east… the journey towards scalding, dry heat begins anew. But this morning something is different. I can smell it: a fragrant moistness infuses the air. Wispy streaks of condensing promise rise above the peaks, twisting like giant cobras uncoiling from within the basket of the Sangres, swaying to sublime rhythms of the greatest snake charmer of them all. Winds and currents weave fibrous strands of cottony wetness into supple curves, colossal atmospheric question marks. Will She or won’t She?
Mesmerized, I watch and wait. How long have I lived under this radiant blue canopy yet never witnessed a storm birth from within Her unseeable womb? This requires patience. One must ignore the incessant tyranny of have-tos and I-musts to become present to Her craft. We take for granted, even ignore Her careful, patient artistry as She generates and regenerates Life in every moment. Ever present… Like the heartbeat you never hear, the breath you rarely feel. But who has eyes with which to see, ears with which to hear Her anymore? Mine have quietly called me home, to Wilderness, to revel in the miracle that is Mother Earth. This morning I bear witness to a Blessing.
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26 July, 2010
It hasn’t rained in months. Not meaningfully, anyway. A drizzle here, a short-lived cloudburst there, but nothing that makes any difference. Every day I watch the land shed its lush green skin and burn a deeper yellow-brown. An inch and a half or so of rain in three months: that volume could restore this land overnight but She’s doled it out in fractional increments that evaporate well before the soil has a chance to slake its thirst.
Day after day I watch thunderheads cloaked in charcoal gray wreaths of promise gather over the peaks and I think “This is it. This is the day.” But nothing falls from the sky. Engorged dark clouds pass over my land leaving nothing in their wake, teasing, taunting, apparently casting off their precious cargo somewhere farther east. Nothing but disappointment and dashed expectations here. Dust and disappointment.
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2 June, 2010
Evening, shortly before dusk. Day three of the most incredible journey I have ever been upon. I climb up onto a massive sandstone shelf in the canyon wall, about a hundred feet above the valley below. I am inside a hollow half-circular depression, a graceful vermillion arch formed by millions of years of erosive wind and blowing dust.
The final rays of setting sun dance on the opposing canyon wall. Shimmering, glowing ambers and golds painted with brush-strokes 93 million miles long. At once taken back by the awesomeness of the place I’m in, I am humbled by Her magnificence, Her eternity. For three days I have been witness to Magic, unmistakable, undeniable… things I dare not speak of. Am I insane? I suppose not, but aren’t all crazy people usually the last to know it?
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6 May, 2010
Time for a walk. It’s warm today, following an unseasonable three day cold-snap, so the wind blows fiercely. There’s some science to that, the effect of warm air meeting cold resulting in high velocity currents. I used to know, then I forgot. Now I just don’t care. The moment you label and explain, you lose the experience. You stop feeling the wind in your hair and retreat into your head, removed from beauty of the magical, miraculous world about. Wilderness speaks only to the heart.
I’m wearing soft-soled moccasins so that I can be here fully, head to toe and everything in between. Sun-baked vermillion sand warms my feet, every pebble, every twig, every bump and texture transmitting a subtle, sensual caress through my soles while my face yields to the invigorating, pulsing rhythm of wind on skin. Hot sun and cool wind embrace, like reunited lovers dancing on my flesh.
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27 April, 2010
My cabin sits perched atop a foothill, overlooking the valley below and a horizon that never ends. I’m staring off at nothing in particular, just taking in the scene, simply being Wilderness. In the distance: snow-capped peaks of the Sangre de Cristo mountains and a hint of the jagged San Juans a bit farther south. Spring thaw is in full force now. Warming rays of sunlight caress snow off the more exposed areas first while gullies and couliors wind-filled with deeper snowdrifts seem to divide the range into alternating ribbons of white and dark. Light and shadow amplify the effect, exposing intricate textures that only conscious, intimate effort to see reveals.
Nowhere to be, nothing to do… I’m simply at peace.
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18 April, 2010
Not quite night and no longer day, not quite spring and no longer winter… I step outside into crisp mountain air, greeted by the faint sound of running water somewhere down slope from my cabin. Running water?! This is high desert; no water runs on my land.
But it was a “good” winter: Over eleven feet of snow, all told. The water table has risen and the springs which the Ute Indians relied upon only a century and a half ago are flowing again, having retreated underground for a multi-year drought that has only recently shown signs of abating.
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29 November, 2009
Morning. Coffee. Sometimes I wonder if my primary motivation for back country exploration is the morning joe. Coffee tastes better out here. It is my meditation. Sitting in camp and sipping, present to the all-encompassing darkness while the rest of the world dreams their anxious pre-work dreams, my mind is renewed, unburdened and clear, a canvas swept clean with sleep upon which the sun will soon paint radiant hues of fresh inspiration.
First light slices through the crisp pre-dawn air. A sliver of brilliance cracks the canopy of gray-blue over an eastern mesa, the sun’s warming rays shattering the few remaining vestiges of darkness, highlighting the desert’s starkness and reminding me of my own mortality. Light and dark, night and day, life and death. Our time is all too short, my days are numbered. I hardly ever miss a sunrise anymore; there are far too few in any man’s lifetime to let even one pass willingly unnoticed.
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4 November, 2009
This is it.” My voice startles me, as though it’s not my own. Any noise out here, any sound not native to the land seems a violence at worst, a disrespectful intrusion at best. There is a silence in the desert so profound, so deep, so far beyond an “absence of noise” that I’m certain it will swallow me whole if I let it. So dense it’s palpable, so thick that any sound I muster is immediately enveloped by a nothingness so rich that I’m left doubting whether I had said anything at all.
I’ve come to the edge of the Great Basin desert, canyon country, to find something that first called to me two decades ago in the most unlikely of places, perched thirty-one stories above the canyon of materialism known as the “Magnificent Mile”, Chicago’s Michigan Avenue. A young commodity trader pursuing that most elusive prey, the Big Bucks, my newfound quest for Something More, something real led me to a series of spiritual writings centered in the southwestern desert. There was magic out there for me, I could feel it. But it’d be another twenty years before I’d have sufficiently bled myself of the Lust for Stuff, the artificial World of Man, and deemed myself worthy to trek through its polar opposite.
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