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Copyright 2004 Two Letters to the River Vision Clear blue sky, blazing sun; the desert baking. Brown sand searing, shimmers. The plants are parched, branches brittle, and roots burrow deep below the skillet stone surface of a bleached and barren soil. The skin sweats, spits, sizzles, blisters. Moisture moment-by-moment is sucked away into a furnace-like heaven. The flesh is burned, browned, cracked like mudflats, etched, eroded, and carved like the canyons. Our character is tested by fire and our faces formed in testament to beauty, power, and the harsh hand of the living earth. Snow-capped peaks smile in the distance, seemingly pregnant and pure against the azure horizon. Their promise of richness, refreshing and cool, is a beckoning image across forty miles of bare, burning ground. It's tempting, tantalizing, almost unreal. This far-off fantasy of wonder, wealth, goodness, and mercy must be a flimsy facade, a miasma, a mirage spun by demons or devils. It's a hypnotic hallucination delirious and mesmerizing. It's an illusion, a trick of perception, a deceptive dream of smoke and mirrors. It's a promise of power, comfort, and cold-quenched thirst, the riches of the world cast before Christ in his hot and lonely vigil in a waterless wasteland. Jesus, Moses, Mohammed, and the prophets were drawn to the desert with its bare rocks and burning bushes, pulled by some invisible, common, and holy thread. What brought them beyond the borders of human habitation, where landscape and experience lie unbroken by streets, appointments, or any confines of civilization or common sense? The answer comes gradually. Silence and empty space whisper to the inner ear. Time slows or stops altogether. What was once separate dissolves in the vast distances, and a synasthesia of new sensibilities sprout in its dry deluge. Fire and air, air and fire. The earth turns, and the sun travels westward, the heat slightly abating. Dust devils dance in evening celebrations, and a soft breeze washes the dry and dirty skin. Life is hard. It is filled with work, disappointment, and sorrow. But we are not alone. The earth holds out its hands in friendship. Beauty, joy, and wonder are also embedded in the fabric of existence, and healing is an ever-present possibility. What is vision? Is it a promise, a path, a potential? Is it a goal, or a guiding light? Is it an event, a revelation; a meeting on a road or in a market that changes our lives forever? Perhaps that is how it goes, a singular occurrence that alters our trajectory and spins us off toward a new star. But in this silence I sense something different - a living presence, an active force. The door to the Dreamtime is slightly ajar; the Gods cavort just beyond the gates of my imagination. A hawk, an owl, or a falcon wraps its wings around us and enters our awareness. We stare into a world same as before. The pots must be washed; there is food to be made, coffee to brew. But something is rising to the heavens as we pick up the dishes. The distances grow and our small life plays out before us. The wind tells us secrets; the horizons limitless. Outside the ego, cravings, dissatisfactions, and discomforts slip away. We are beside ourselves with wonder, and our hunger is satisfied as we are swallowed by the sky. —March 18, 2001 Dream of the Deer Life is a great and holy mystery. A deer wanders into camp and bolts away, shocking me from sleep. “Awake, awake!” the herald cries. I see her bound into gully and out, slowing on the other side, stopping, sniffing, looking, listening. Finally, she stalks off amidst the pinion and sage. I arise, curl out of my sleeping bag, pull on my shoes, and step away to heed nature’s call, but the deeper call still echoes in my inner landscape. It would be easy to forget. This was likely a chance encounter, an interesting thing, no big deal. I could ignore it, make my coffee, write a letter, read a book, look over my list of things to do. Everything I’ve learned steers me in that direction. After all, nature has no intelligence, purpose, or soul. It’s flesh and body are background to the human drama. God grants us dominion over the earth; the universe is random, circumstantial, physical, made for our use. It is the place our mind momentarily inhabits and finds itself in. The deer thought me dangerous, though sleeping. But I am more than sleeping, I am unconscious, foolish, blind and dumb. She has is calling me: “Awaken! Awaken!”, startling me to a more alert and attentive awareness. Oh yes, something is dead, something mechanical. This dream is a nightmare. It is a story without love, prose without purpose. It is body without beauty, measure without music. It pursues hard facts, cold reason, drab data, dissection; hungers for dead specimens, knowledge on a blackboard, life with a white lab coat. The creatures are observing us. The deer’s soft brown eyes look into my soul. They sense our fear, anxiety, disease. Like profligate children we spend our inheritance, forgetting our home and family. We place origin and destiny in the supernatural then plunder the world. Our mad myth of mechanics severs thought from feeling, soul from body; and casts the circle of creatures out of our story. We must awaken from this dream. It is a nightmare. It is a curse, a foreign installation. It is toxic to our humanity and poison to the seeds that search out a deeper destiny. Love, beauty, compassion and communion want to root in us. A magical universe shimmers under the surface of hard and flattening facts. We are the Prodigal Son. The slop in the pig sty will not fill our emptiness; we must come home. We must remember what we’ve lost, what primal people always knew. A greater dream demands it. The painted walls of mesas rise above me. The desert hums tunes through buzzing cicadas; canyon wrens sing in descending scales. Sun, soil, drought, and deer shift in dynamic balance. Great depth and beauty abound, and I must cultivate them in myself if I’m to meet it. I am not an object, nor am I observer, visitor, or steward. I was born here, out of the womb of sun, sky, and living earth. I feel her body all around me, but those soft brown eyes remind me my mind can go astray. I live within the limitations of my language, but when I look upon my mother’s face I am bound by love. I belong here. My words will tell another story; I must sing another song. Dawn and deer arrive together; —May 31, 2001: Chama River | ||
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