The High Desert...

There is something so beautifully austere about the desert.  Like life here is reduced to basics, and it is easy to miss all that is really going on.  Like you have to pay close attention because what looks like great expanses of nothingness, is in fact, tiny ecosystems that astound and delight when you are paying attention.

I love the light here best I think.  The barren landscape stretched out over miles, and the way the clouds and sun play with each other across the vast and desolate land.  There is a show in the air, but also on the ground as the light casts shadows on the earth.  Fantastic displays of white, grey and brilliant blue sky that play hide and seek with you if you are in the mood.

The weather is a constantly changing backdrop to life in the high desert, sunny and brilliant one minute and then when you look out towards the mountains or the plains, you can see the storm clouds moving in fast.  I love that you can see rain long before you actually experience rain.  I especially love the Virga vapor.  For me it just might be the best kind of rain...rain that falls but then evaporates before it touches the earth.  And I most especially love that I can see virga and actual rain long before it arrives.  It is like the landscape exists to alert me to the coming weather, the long flat distances ready to call out whatever weather dares to enter the space.

Saturday I time travelled back twenty plus years.  Driving through all the Pueblos (Santa Ana, Zia and Jemez) and their beautiful surroundings.  The red rocks, the mountains, the streams that run red instead of clear, the twisted rock formations, the shock of Aspens and Cottonwoods that puncture the dusty terrain.  I drove through the Pueblos, each with their own history and pain, which is now forever etched on the land.  You can see the poverty and the wealth.  The way the people have accommodated the trauma inflicted by life and the government.  How the land has responded in kind.  But you can still see the beauty, in the people and the topography.

We drove through Jemez Springs, a long time favorite of mine.  Hiking was cast aside due to too much rain and a desire to not be covered in red clay, but the drive was beautiful nevertheless.  I saw Soda Falls and Shiprock.  The rain only made the drive more enjoyable because the weather added to the drama of the land.  We wound our way up the mountain through Valles Caldera National Preserve, through Los Alamos, down into Santa Fe.  It was an amazing day of ever changing vistas and the weather.  And oh my god, the smell of the earth and the rain.  It is something I wish I could bottle and keep, but it must only be stored within my mind and memory.

We ended the day at Ten Thousand Waves Spa which is always a treat.  A Zen hillside retreat in Santa Fe.  I haven’t been there in probably 25 years but it didn’t disappoint.  An evening of soaking in the lovely grand bath, heating up in the sauna, a massage, and then a final soak before heading home to bed. 

On the drive home, the sky cleared just enough to see a shooting star streak across a dark sky.  Wow, what a day!

I feel like life in the desert demands a certain level of presence from you, otherwise everything that is happening is just completely lost upon you.

I feel so blessed to have once called this place home and now to come back and revisit and live a new experience with this dusty, dry land.  Fitting that it rained while I was here, always challenging me to get past my prejudices and allow what is actually occurring to sink in.

I love the high desert.  I am grateful for all the dusty miles of ever changing and deepening landscape.  I always feel like “if I could count infinity, I would know the desert well...” which is a line from singer Christine Kane.  I have always thought an apt description of anyone attempting to know the desert.

Again, still...