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