Gila Wilderness – Riding the Light

I feel like a solid rock sometimes, the indissoluble solid, mid-creek. Every once in a while, karma … or grace … approaches with a large lever & sets me into motion. “The Lever” frequently is preceded by the sound of metal dragging across rocky ground: It foretells change.

I let this Lever upend me to where I live now. I moved from the ocean to live in the elbow of Percha Creek. In the running stream of consciousness that is my life, I taste everyone else’s. As they taste me & mine…it’s something Biblical (at least for me.) So, as it is with water, I am everywhere, as all of us are.

Books can be a Lever, as can movies & other creative works. For me, it’s been serial walkabout which has most changed my life. When the wind spoke in one ear only, I knew it was the way to turn when time came to leave.

Right now, I hear birdcalls, water running over rocks too big to put in my pockets, I hear the metal stanchions of the bridge quietly flexing.

With nothing but these in my awareness, I now also hear faint chimes of bells & bamboo, footsteps crossing behind me & a dog panting. These are bleed-throughs from a parallel time-stream, the “when” that these happened not mine to directly perceive. Yet they swell my awareness. So much is possible over magical running water.

Straight ahead of me rises a wall of sheared & shattered rock, sliced by centuries, a southwestern sculpture garden in the vertical.

To believe this now-miniature creek – Percha Creek – wore through this eternity of rock jumble is farcical, fantastical! Yet, since the glaciers left long ago, since the ocean formed & filled & fled, this creek has had full charge of wearing out the walls I look at, wearing them smooth & carving these edges. If there is a song from rock, there is only a chant in sharp whispers here.

Vegetation is sparse & spiky, clinging to a dust of soil & worn-down pebbles with scrabbling roots. Along the ridgeline, the yucca plants display their seed-stalks, like so many feathers in a headdress. The mesquite provides some variation to already roughened texture.

As I sit, balanced on a tiny chair & leaning one leg against the fence, lap desk astride, the sun beats down on me. The sun is the reason I am out here, as well as some sweet isolation & nature quality time. September offered itself on the breeze in last night’s windows. I want to be brown again for my birthday, coming soon.

Elsewhere & everywhere, the world wears itself into existential frenzy. Friend’s ships sail in different directions, one to sea & one to land. But here & now, I am aware of only the love that created this earth & this water to bring them to this harmonious co-existence. The shapes all interact & indwell with each other far from the tiny world of my perceptions. I am not of centuries; I am now. There is only this moment.

I’m ready.

What is inner; what outer? How can I convey the utter timelessness of this place & what this conveys to me? The nourishment to my soul; the expansion of my heart as I try to encompass the environment too large for li’l ole me to assimilate…how can I relay these feelings?

I move in a kind of concert with the ground, my eyes roving over the rolling landscape. I can understand why being on horseback is the way to really see this land – the height increase, even of a few feet, lifts one over the low-growing shrubs & permits a wider angle of view of a territory so vast it can only be appreciated in increments. Much as my eyes would love to take this all in, I see it in layers & slices: I perceive a tree, a cloud train looking for all the world like an ephemera of mountains, white shadows of the peaks below so solidly holding up the horizon. I long to be walking all over it while knowing there are slants & dips & lifts & hollows which would swallow me indifferently as a leaf blown from a tree. Nothing is as important as this gravity of gravel & grit; I don’t even register as an afterthought to this landscape, after all.

Here & there the risings of land are slashed open. What seems like a small crevice is wide enough to pull a car through. The distance shrinks the measure. Close up, I revise any thoughts I had on, “That’s not so big, is it?” Indeed it is. What caused this separation in the land? Is this how whole continents pulled apart in division later magnified by water? And where is the water here? How did it figure in…or did the land simply pull itself apart, divided by time & climate?

And after I see the dizzying enormity of it all, I realize I hear nothing. At all. I feel my ears expanding into satellite dishes on either side of my head as they attempt to hear the silence. I am so unused to absence of sound. No rustling of trees, no lapping waters, no traffic noise. I will have to become accustomed to this by retraining other senses.

I will never know the answers fully for how I respond to this environment. But that won’t stop the questions either.

Tag: Gila Wilderness

Local Roads

Rambling