Summer 2010 --
We arrive in New
Mexico trailing streamers of desert heat. Here it is quiet and cool, jade
green and burnished buckskin. Prayer flags join Indian blankets and Georgia
O’Keefe style hats and Remington bronzes to make a style. Some people arrive
with momentum and fashion homes of adobe and pools near the rocks of El Morro.
Others take on the hardscrabble land and build a challenge. They raise goats,
open businesses, offer services, make meals an art, shape clay, interpret the
magic of the canyons and mesas. The days are long and bright and the wind spins
rainbow kites. The place works a spell. A place opens. It waits on the other side of work and fire. The barrier looks impossible to pass, but my heart rests on the other side of the wall. I have to find a way, the one that is not direct, but out of my line of sight, just in shadow, on the periphery.
***
Navajo rugs, Taos
drums as big as a table, antlers, incense, flowers, this place has the feeling
of an altar. There are places to sit, converse, contemplate. Corners, couches,
hogans, seat cushions. There is a place where people do the work and live the
dream, follow the fine thread laid down through time. Paintings, churches,
woven pillows, more Taos
drums as cup holders, sheepskin covers, family photos, but no microwave, TV, or
computer that I can see. Even those words sound foreign here. I feel small and
weak in this big place, this thin air. We are on the edge on the rocks leading
up to El Morro. It is sunrise. What will I do today, this the first day here? This
is a million dollar opportunity: time, place health. The gun is loaded. The hay
is in the barn. I’m at the starting gates. Ready, set, sit.
***
So I was watching Maqui yesterday to figure out how it is he
handles a business and a restaurant. He and his cook make sure people are
served and treated well. Also he focuses on whatever it is he is doing. I
watched him squeeze lemons and then de-leaf a strawberry for Megan’s lemonade.
He did so with utter intention, mindfulness, and attention to the tasks. He
does one thing at a time, doing whatever it is he is doing.
***
How clear, dazzling, and empty the air. How ephemeral my
prints in the sand in the wind. The paradox of presence and impermanence dance
like dust devils. Torn and faded prayer flags flap their happy message to any
who will listen. Get up, pilgrim and do what you can do today. Find your vision
in the quiet, then pick it up and carry it into the world, clinging tight so
that you don’t forget, don’t forget. It is too easy to forget when too much of
the world tugs at your attention.
Kate took us on a walk on the mesa this morning. We passed
ruins, saw tracks of deer. Then a kestrel perched in front of us on a juniper
branch. He stayed there while we walked past, headed over to a place not yet
finished, a draft of a poem needing some revision. “What about moving up here
into Tony and Jasmine’s place?” Kate asked.
***
Who is this observer who speaks from the junipers, so sad,
tireless, and insistent? He scares me and sometimes shows himself in the
corners of my sight, never quite touching the range of direct gaze. I am so
glad to sit, but not so glad to stand up and take steps toward fashioning my
love. Help me dear God to be so full that I cannot contain my joy, that it
spills out of me in actions that fill me even more, a cycle of cascade and
filling, the miracle of step after step. Go and look for prints.
***
While I was sitting this morning, I heard something, some
kind of a cry, close to the house, human-like, a woman’s voice, it seemed, but
not. Once, and then again, more insistently, out behind the house. I went to
check on Megan. It was not her. I then called Kate. Not was here, so I wondered
if it had been him. No go. So what was it? It had to be La Llorona. But in the
morning? I don’t know. A mystery.
***
A fierce wind buffets the valley today. It howls through the
windows and the juniper branches. Dust comes up the road in drapes, sweeping
the dust before it. In a hurry, it stops for nothing.
***
I took the bike and the truck down to Chain of Craters this
morning. Nice road, but I had to learn how to ride it. It’s not a mountain bike
trail nor is it a road ride, but something in between. Like many things here,
it is new and unfamiliar. With contact, however, I begin to see the landscape,
the terrain so to speak. I learn new repertoires, new ways of responding. I am
also getting acclimated. I can ride the bike for an hour without dying, and
even stand up for a while. I am moving into being here with some strength, some
physical adaptation.
***
Joy that cannot be contained. Boo bounds across the sidewalk
and then leaps up on the table. She lies
on her back and wants to be rubbed. She is a Tibetan pony in terms of
toughness. Even her fur is so thick it feels like fleece. She delights in what
she is given and accepts what is withheld. She shows up with greater and
greater frequency at the window in the morning. She runs to meet us when we
arrive. She does this show at sunrise to show us how happy she is.
***
On my ride to the Ancient
Way café, I passed a car freshly rolled over in
front of Bria’s. The driver was just getting out and the EMTs were putting away
the backboard. How fragile… It was lucky that no one was in the oncoming lane
twenty minutes before. I spoke with the Navajo officer who was writing up the
report and taking down notes. He saw tracks in the road I did not, but I nodded
anyway as he pointed them out.
***
Kate made dinner for us at her place. Bria, Kirk, David,
Jim, Chon, Megan, and myself. Steak, lamb, wine, vodka, asparagus, potatoes,
peppers, onions, cous cous. Bria made blonde ale that may have been one of my
favorite beers ever. Kate gave us a tour of the gardens and the plans. I rode
my bike in the dark home. A crescent moon hung over dark streaks of clouds in
the ultramarine blue, Venus higher up in the heavens. Chon spoke about Cambodia. She
knew the reign of Pol Pot to the year, month, and day. About not having enough
to eat, eating any animal they could catch.
We sat in silence for a while as Chon spoke, fighting back tears, the
picture of courage, strong heart.
***
So, in a small way, I engage. I paint. I ride my bike on new
trails. I learn to cook in other people’s houses. I am blessed with being able
to do things. If I want to do something, I need to just do it and let it go at
that. Some things will happen and others will not.
***
The sun has not yet risen, but the El Morro Valley sits in
the pre dawn light. Only mocking birds and mourning doves break the silence. No
wind stirs the trees or the grasses. It is the good time, the quiet time. I sit
and count breaths into heartbeats of twelve, hoping that if I can control my
breath, I might be able to control my thoughts. Not much luck there yet. I am
grateful for this day, for all these days on the high New Mexico plateau. The light continues to
reveal more of the valley. Soon the sun will come over the crest and we enter
the dazzling day brilliance and shadow, or direct and intense light. Soon it will be my time to get up and move. I
ask that I move with grace and presence in whatever I do. The direct light hits
the high buildings first, Kate’s among them. It looks like it will be a bright,
dry day. Where I sit all remains in shadow, still cool, anticipating. The
Japanese lantern is on the table. Chairs wait for visitors.
***
My sister Sarah came over from Albuquerque for a visit. We walked the mesa
last night around sunset. A crescent moon was waxing and Earth shine lit the
moon’s shadow. We climbed up and down the rocks as wind and sun kept the gnats
down and our worries at bay. This blending of heat and coolness mingled around
us as the vistas opened up. To the north, broad green, grassy plains at the
foot of the Zunis, and the hoodoos called Los Gigantes standing apart from
creamy sandstone cliff faces. To the west, El Morro’s escarpment and the
craters of El Malpais. To the south, Kate’s house before a Mormon pasture
stretching south the other half of the Davis anticline, a huge arch of
sandstone that has since eroded, and more buttes. To the west, Zuni Land
and the low setting sun. It all spreads before us, inspiring and humbling, so
beautiful, enduring, vast, fragile, changing. There is a pull coming from the
land, a pull I feel in my heart, a call I hear in my soul. The low hum asks for
reverence and worship and dancing. The mystery lies in how this can happen. The
only way is through fears and straight into surrender. It asks nothing less
than heart and hands. It whispers “Join me;” “Honor me;” “Wake up.” “Live me a
life worthy of this place.”
***
Boo follows me around like a dog and rolls over in front of
me, shamelessly, waiting for me to rub her belly. Her one good eye looks at me
full of trust and pleasure. She purrs before rolling back over a scouting
ahead, tackling grass blades and balls of fur. I don’t know where she goes at
night, but so far she has eluded the owls, hawks, coyotes, and big cats. I look
forward to seeing her when I return to the house. Booster, Boo-boo, Boonkimous.
She plays on the flagstone chasing invisible prey. She sees something in me.
She knows.
***
I follow Kestrel
Road in my dreams. It winds through pastures
dotted with juniper and sage. Last night, as the sun set, I watched swallows
dip to the water, skim and sip it before rising again in tight turns on their
search for bugs. Water ran over a little waterfall into a pond bigger than the
pool at El Morro. It is backed up against the rocks, a testimony to human power
to shape the land. The sun, the air, the birds, water, and scent of sage added
up to making this one of the most beautiful places on the planet.
***
We sipped soup, crackers, beer, and talked small talk.
Stores, projects, walk over the rocks, food, dogs. Not ran alongside us as we
drove Kate back home through the dark down the one lane road and up the bumpy
stretch to her place. We got out to look at an iris the color of midnight, of
deep purple, almost black, an iris of mystery, the rarest of plants.
***
Father’s Day. Still in the saddle on Kestrel, riding the
range of possibilities, holding the reins of my destiny. I am not up so early
that I cannot see the computer, but the sun is still far below the horizon, the
quiet when the veil is still thin. Time in El Morro is running out. The last
grains of sand are waiting to drop through the hour glass of our sojourn.
Moments feel compressed, more urgent, poignant, but still inevitable in their
passing. Only my attention notices them sliding past, the great river. My arms
are sore from helping Briana yesterday. I shoveled back fill around her septic
tank, helped place the D-Box in the intersection, dug out the trench leading to
the next field, and generally breathed in lots of silt. It was a windy, dry,
nasty job. But my reward was a swim in David’s pool. After that Diablo and
Angel would not leave me alone. Hungry for affection, lonely, like part of me,
they see the walker at the edge of sight, and look to live the possibilities.
***
I guess I could leave it at that, but there is more, so much
more. Megan and I had dinner with Kate at the Ancient Way Café. The light of
the setting sun hit me square in the eyes as we savored Jamaican spiced
chicken, sweet yams, mango salsa, rice with red peas, delicious strawberry
lemonade, slightly melted cheese beneath slivers of coconut. Kate is getting
ready to leave for her trip to Indiana.
The jade lantern still sits on the table waiting for the visitors that surely
will come. My life is standing outside the door of this episode. He is smoking
a cigarette, and has one foot propped up against the wall. Not in a hurry, nor
entirely patient, he knows that time swiftly passes, and opportunities are
lost. He is the stranger in the trees, the watcher in the clouds, the whisper
on the wind. He has no need for me to listen, but a strong hope that I will
join him in finding the way, the live wire, the under current of beauty and
energy in all things. Which way, dear Pilgrim?
***
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