The high altitude
desert-living is my most familiar state of knowing, where the clean oxygenated
airand deep pure well water make both my lungs gasp for more breaths because
it is deliciously breathable, and my mouth seek more gulps of quenching water
because my body-needs flourish in its cool, sweet purity.
Something about quality
feeds these physical states like none other.
I breathe, I drink with a knowing and need that is unquenchable and
mandatory--that feeds my entire being--physically, mentally, emotionally, and
spiritually.
In the heat of the desert,
when wind dries the air, robbing moisture from the pores of my body, I, too,
turn from the sunlight along with the aspen leaves and ponderosa pine needles
to reserve my energy for the cooler hours when later, the wind stops and a
centering and calming is possible—that moment in the evening when all stills in
the meadow, forests, box canyon, and in my mind and heart—enough to take that
deeper breath, to recognize change with gratitude and prayer, and to finally
quench my physical and emotional thirst.
Desert-living is like
prayer—a day with a beginning, a middle and an end—a rosary of sorts, where all
the prayers join together in one circular possibility—never-ending, but connected
in a series of gratitudes that continue to offer blessings when we set
intention and breathe upon the beads and utter sounds onto the ethers.
When dearths in the dry, windy
hot desert climate stretch the physical and emotional limits beyond one’s own
human limitations, there is yet another place to delve deeply—the places within
that hold vast stores, rich with unexplored pathways—and gifts, if we find the
way to access and journey the full course.
When will and instinct
battle against thresholds, and surrender is all that in the final hour remains,
even this exhausting defeat bears triumph in the spent hours when nothing more
is left, but full and utter collapse--a going within, a giving into Nature’s
inexhaustible forces can release what otherwise might be bound like an element
without receptors, without molecules to rob and subsequently change the very
structure of that element. But we, too,
are carbon based, and within the powers of nature’s storms and stillness, can
be transformed-- remade--reborn.
The power of the desert in
the high altitudes where air and water, made of carbon and hydrogen, rob and
mix and flourish in their dance of chaotic exchanges, we mere humans, while
fully a part of this orchestration, need only bear witness to our own part in
this amble—this scramble—this mix and match of stillness and force.
We will be changed. It is so.
There is a law of Nature that nothing, no one, is free from the
subsequent change. It is life and
celebration.
Kat
16 March 2015
