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Orient

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                                                                             Desert

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                                                                                                                                                               Sky

 

                                                                                                        Sagebrush

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                                     Sun

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                                                                                                                            Ruins

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                                                          Wasp

 

 

Sight! How wondrous: that the world is open inside me, all this light and space somehow mirrored wide-open inside me: desert, sky, sagebrush, sun, ruins, wasp! Sight, dragon-eye sight!

 

 

                                                                                                                                                   Ridgeline-Scrawl Distances

 

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                                                                        Cottonwood

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                                                                                                                  Sun-Quick Lizard

 

 

 

Experience defines us. It makes us what we are. Places wandered and people known, books read and ideas pursued, the events of our lives: experience is narrative, history, story. What books are normally about. Story is how we define ourselves as human, how we know ourselves. And the singular stories of our lives make us each unique individuals. So it makes sense people are interested in experience. And sight in and of itself is so altogether immediate and empty that there seems nothing to notice, nothing to think through and understand. But it’s miraculous, all this light and space mirrored wide-open inside us. Miraculous and fundamental, something prior to the definitions of experience and story, something we are more entirely even than we are ourselves. Looking for the least possible definition and story, for sight’s most expansive emptiness and all the ravishing depths it reveals, I set out into horizon-wide desert, follow a sun-baked trail across dry washes and uplands (rattlesnake keeping cool in pinon shade), passing petroglyphs of bighorn sheep and cougar, moon and stars etched on clean sandstone walls beneath the mud nests of cliff-swallows that enliven the air with their sleek flight. Occassional lightning-haunted clouds and sprinkles of rain drift blue skies. And when I reach the village, I begin wandering desert distances and ancient ruins, wallstones tumbled and scattered—edge where the last remnant of human self-definition is feathering away into everything else. It’s bewildering. What am I this empty and mirror-deep? And where am I amid these desert distances outside stretching away inside? It’s summer solstice, day long with light and all its clarities. I wander, and soon begin gathering stones one by one. I settle stone beside stone on earth, laying a foundation, beginning to build a small cairn, to orient.

 

 

                                                     Circling Hawk (Red-

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                                                                                                                        Tail Sun-Flash)

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        Deadwood Shadow-Twist

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