The Jemez: Heart of my World

This was going to be my good-bye tour, then the angels brought me a buyer who will be away a semester each year, so I get to rent.  The roller-coaster of emotions getting to this point has been rough, but now I'm able to slow down, look around and reconnect with the magic here.

What I saw today...

Underwater scene?

Seaweed and anemones?

The old oak's lichen!

Staying Home has meant wandering around our field day after day.  I'd photographed all the wildflowers I could find.  Then, one afternoon, I happened into the world of lichen.  My timing was lucky because they're drying out fast.  My iPhone 8 doesn't have great focus, but it's not bad!

The small orange splotches drew my eye and camera.  The enlarged image surprised me -- I didn't know what I was seeing...moss?  fungus?  lichen?  But don't lichen just grow on rocks?  Lichen it is, and there's lots to learn, but I'm satisfied just knowing about the basic shapes in front of me:  fruticose, the leafless, shrublike ones; foliose, the ones with leafy structure, including the little orange platelets that look like anemones; and crustose, the flat ones often seen on rocks.  They're not bad for the trees.  They're actually algae and fungus living in mutual symbiosis, not parasitically.  Bottom line:  They're beautiful!

When I focused on the trunk instead of the branches, I found all these fibrous, hairy filaments curling their way through the bark's passageways.  I haven't figured out what these are yet.

Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness Area

"The Tibetan's textual maps had an ambitious purpose: to convert wilderness into a sacred realm and to chart the interface between mind and landscape...In a passage through a landscape lush with symbols...the lake, the cave, the cliffs all offered fulcrums where perception could turn to revelation and open the gates to some previously inaccessible space, whether within the outer landscape or the mind."   Heart of the World, Ian Baker

a walk in the field

a walk in the field

zillions of tiny flowers

hiding in plain sight

again, Loren Eiseley

                                                                                                                              The Bisti Badlands Wilderness

"...this was a country in which time had no power because the sky did not know it, the stones had not heard it passing, the river had been talking to itself since before man arose and in that country it would talk on after man had departed.  I was alone...looking upon a time thousands of years remote, yet so meaningless that at any moment flame might spurt from the ash of a dead campfire and hunters come slipping from the rocks...No bird sang no beast stirred...I had come across what seemed to be a hidden fragment of the days before creation...I had brought time in my perishable body into a place where, to all intents, it could not exist."

                                                                                                    The Invisible Pyramid
                                                                                                    Loren Eiseley

A quote from Loren Eiseley

                                                                                                                The Bisti Badlands Wilderness

"As the long months passed, I began to live on the slower planes and to observe more readily what passed for life there.  I sauntered, I passed more and more slowly up and down the canyons in the dry baking heat of midsummer...I sat once on a high ridge that fell away before me into a waste of sand dunes.  I sat through hours of a long afternoon.  Finally an indistinct configuration caught my eye.  It was a coiled rattlesnake, a big one.  How long he had sat with me I do not know.  We were both locked in the sleep-walking tempo of the earlier world, baking in the same high air and sunshine...It grew cold finally, for autumn was in the air, and the few things that lived thereabouts were sinking down into an even chillier scale of time...so thin and slow was the time of my pulse by then that I might have stayed on to drift still deeper into the lower cadences of the frost, or the crystalline life that glistens pebbles, or shines in a snowflake, or dreams in meteoric iron between the worlds."

                                                                                                   The Star Thrower (p. 85)                 
                                                                                                   Loren Eiseley

a subtle calligraphy

Rare rainwaters trace

a subtle calligraphy

across tawny sands.

Out in Ojito,

crusty place of space and sky,

blooms a desert rose.

kaleidoscope

The numbered wheel's marble

drops a darkly dicey spice.

Pretty patterns break

as the kaleidoscope churns

rainbow-colored lights.

one crystal moment

one crystal moment

a twist and the pattern's gone

none remains for long

Out to Ojito

Out to Ojito

The world sometimes feels upside-down

with senseless violence and pain...

I go out to Ojito then, 

seeking solace and reminder 

that the earth abides

and humanity may yet

set itself right

again.

evening gold descends

evening gold descends

settling molten on the pond

sandhill cranes alight

the ruddy sunset

the ruddy sunset

smoldering yucca aglow

candle burning low

Tessie

the rustle of leaves

the rustle of leaves, 

fall whispering up your spine --

the silent pause

sheep bells and stream ice,

ravens winging by, framed in

 the canyon's silence 

circling overhead

circling overhead

a raven strokes the still air

checking on my health

we play with free will

till nature's long arm reaches in

closing on the loan

the sun's flaming tongue

the sun's flaming tongue

licking the dusky surface...

swallowed by the sea

pipers lounge atop

their watery reflections...

just another day

two turtles sunning

Two turtles sunning,

hugging the pond's precipice.

I...step...and...PlopPlop!

after the squawking

after the squawking

clusters of goslings here and there --

sun-haloed puffballs 

springtime geese

The geese are pairing,

the male making a racket!

She's unimpressed!

Breaking morning's peace!

Raucous, he pursues, she flees.

Oh those fucking geese!

a feathered cloud floats

a feathered cloud floats,

dissolves into the vast blue

like foam on the sea

such a fine feeling

that rings with the bell

of recognition

window open wide

window open wide

morning fragrance and birdsong

breezing gently in

such powerful wind

tearing branches from the trees

while flowers curtsey

whose hand, this fine piece?

sun-drenched color

textures subtle as etchings --

whose hand, this fine piece?

bright butterflies dance

atop gangly wildflowers,

wings gently breathing

some bright boy's mischief

an old crumpled Dodge

splashed blue, green, purple and orange --

some bright boy's mischief

deep in the Valles

far up Alamo Canyon --

what's this old car's tale?

this pastel tableau

corals, creams and greens

time painted in rocks and trees --

this pastel tableau

evening approaches,

shadows gray the hills and vales

with a wash of ink

the moth, pale white

the moth, pale white with

faded stains, tattered edges...

granny's worn hanky

roaming the mesa

collecting clay sherds and hope --

a vessel, a poem

the mind meanders

the mind meanders

like an ancient waterway

burnishing old stones

earth crumbling and cracked

tendrils branching toward the sun

fractals everywhere

cheerful profusion

amidst somber news

spring flings flagrant color in

cheerful profusion