The soul of the desert west

I was raised in the religion of the American Southwest in a place known as The Sonoran Desert, The Old Pueblo, Homeland of the Hohokam, Scorpion Country, The Sunbelt, Rodeo Town, The Wild West, The Middle of Nowhere, Dry Land, Chuk Shon, or Tucson, Arizona. 

The tenets of this religion included snaky little creek beds, stones that glow, collared lizards, Palo Verde trees, the many-limbed Saguaro, trails of quail, yucca blooms, cat tracks, Cottonwood and vast, breathtaking vistas.  

The landscape surely formed me, though this has really only occurred to me gradually and in retrospect. Time after time I have found myself compelled toward places a little bit on the edges of things.

Growing up in Tucson’s valley basin, we looked out toward the Santa Catalinas, with their promises of mountains made of Lemons and a magical thing called snow. My imagination was sparked by the changing landscape and the call of wonder, mystery and quest. 

What is pared down in the desert to its essence can sharpen one’s concentration, can invite expansion, can conceive the dust devil. 

Essence, Guddjieff, tells us, is a child.  And a child I was. 

In the open Sonoran Desert were old abandoned refrigerators, abandoned dogs and cats covered in maggots, colonies of tumbleweeds, spent bullet shells and piles of empty Coors cans alongside delicate arrays of morning glory. 

The sublime will find its place among the unthinkable.  Carcass, meat, feather, stone. Welcome to your home, says the Sonoran, the elements are spare. There is much to understand. Pay attention. 

The desert teaches us that Time, as Ocean Vuong says, is a Mother.  

Here, all things scoured by heat, thirst, wind and time will be transformed under a light feminine rain.  

My father was first generation Lebanese-American, my mother a Roman Catholic from Boston.  A rebel with the red hair to prove it, my mother had had enough of school by the end of third grade and was done with Boston at the age of sixteen.  A bit of a misanthrope, she was adept at wiping her hands of things. Her power was self-evident. She trusted no institutions, sans the Catholic Church and had no interest in the details. Conversely, my father placed great value in the details. He graduated magna cum laude, was versed in theology, history, the maths and languages. Deeply invested in civics and world events, he wiped his hands of nothing. 

Even physically, my parents cut a beautiful figure in contrasts: my mother being pale skinned, freckled and blue-eyed — a sovereign, small-framed being, and my father, dark-skinned, dark eyed, bushy-browed. 

They were deeply devoted to one another and settled in what was then the outskirts of Tucson when I was five or six years old.

Each spoke a very different tongue to deconstruct the world and to carve out their own unique place in it. From an early age, they seemed to me entirely estranged and miraculously aligned. 

Though their differences were remarkable, both were inclined toward a kind of communion when walking in the desert wilderness, when exploring new terrain, when collecting large stones, when hiking Sentinel Peak or Picacho or riding old burros down into the Grand Canyon.  

With such dramatically disparate influences early on, a child learns a little something about language, religion, education, and story. One learns even more about the quickening of the spirit, the dimming of the sky, the shifting of the sands, the softening of the edges, the sudden gusts of wind. 

My natural inclination then, was to grow up and marry a Jewish guy. In retrospect, I suppose some subconscious part of me knew I needed to fully round out my understanding of the Abrahamic religions.  In turns, my son married a Hindu and my husband practices Buddhism today.  Religion and ancient traditions have taken root in my consciousness.  

The desert has clearly taught me something about confluence, has offered some illumination into the limitations of our human kind, about the dangers of ethnocentricity, about the thirst of our collective souls. 

So it made sense that that I should eventually make a home at the confluence of two rivers. It made sense that I should find myself, both literally and figuratively, in a dwelling on the very edge of a ravine. It seems perfectly right that I should live out  my days at the foot of a mesa in the high desert region of the Uncompagre Plateau, in a place known as Ute country or the Western Slope of the Colorado Rockies. 

Here, we are offered daily sacraments, from the silent, sacred pause to the turn in the weather to the subtle invitation, to the invariable awareness of f transformation.

Here, it appears, everything is windswept, river dependent, fire inclined— and written and unwritten in stone. 

This place in the high desert has been our home for thirty-five years now, and though we arrived in an old Chevy Blazer, were broke, witless, jobless and had set out from the bowels of Las Vegas, it was a childhood in the Sonoran Desert that seems to have brought me here. 

The crossroads, the backroads, the road trip, the practice of returning—there are just a few of the sacraments here in the religious sect of the American Southwest. 

From our backyard here in Western Colorado I’ve encountered the high desert at her most strange and her most intimate.

I’ve witnessed a massive slab of sandstone fall with a dark thud from a canyon wall.

During summer monsoons, contrasted against a dark mesa, I’ve watched double rainbows stretch across the sky—rainbows so bright it seemed I’d opened up a picture book and stepped inside. 

I’ve endured lightning storms so intense I was sure I wouldn’t survive.  Storms in this part of the world feature 360-degree lightning displays that pierce one’s consciousness and go on for hours. The Ute did not call this great mesa, Thunder Mountain for nothing. 

I’ve watched, transfixed, as a powerful dust devil scooped up a table-umbrella, and floated it, slow-motion halfway down into the draw. And I’ve seen that same dust devil turn around and gather up that same umbrella—lift it back onto the air and dump it in a crumpled heap back where it began on our back deck.  

Here on the edge of things, one becomes pretty familiar with the cosmic joke, with the universal wink, with the notion that one really ought to take another look. 

I’ve stood before 3000 year old petroglyphs along narrow rim trails and on outcroppings in Escalante Canyon. 

On my knees I’ve uncovered the lost language of clam and oyster shell issuing forth from the softly-spoken stories living in the Mancos Shale. 

I have seen lenticular clouds stacked like apparitions over Windgate spirals.

I have been silenced in the woodlands of the red rocks to the south of us. 

I have watched a luminous Milky Way spiral across the night sky, its galactic center appearing as a detailed form of architecture.  If design govern in a thing so sublime! 

I have survived thick blankets of smoke from surrounding wildfires— smoke that hung heavy in the air for months.  I have seen burn scars that would break your heart into pieces. 

I have seen The Round Mountain and the palisades at end of day become a revolution of color: salmon, apricot, bruised plum, copper, rose, crimson. I have seen the stones mirror the sky and the sky blush even deeper. 

I have seen, on bright winter afternoons, the sky grow suddenly dark— just before the ambush of a snow squall.

I have stood in gusts of wind that knocked me off my feet.  

If one listens, one hears all kinds of languages spoken here in this irrigated desert, here in this place where time burns down to its essence, here in this place which was once an ancient sea. 

Here in this particular place, one becomes a bewildered passenger on the ship of deep time.  Here we survive in the belly of drought and climate change, in the stories of dramatic weather, in the poetry of the long, unfolding horizon.  The earth has known these things before. 

Here in this place, gratitude is a wise old grandmother —and grace her twin sister, on whose door one quietly knocks. 

She does not always answer. 

Here I have bent to listen. From here I have taken notes, made inquiry, taught in correctional facilities, elementary schools, high schools, universities, spiritual centers, churches and river-side. I’ve written a few books, painted a whole bunch of canvases, scribbled a hundred notebooks and raised a few metaphoric barns.  

I’ve also raised a couple of beautiful kids with my beautiful man, all of whom have become my greatest teachers.  I have tried to control the winds and have surrendered to the winds.  I have made a few profoundly dear friends, have practiced my chosen crafts, have worn a whole bunch of hats, have shed a few skins, have enjoyed myself and suffered my sins. 

Other people’s too.

And I have encountered all manner of animal life moving through these dusty backroads. I have been in turns, quieted, charmed, frightened, astonished and humbled.

Through it all, I remain a wide-eyed child of the desert, a child of confusion and difficulty, a curious disciple of the great mystery, an aspirant of wisdom and wonder.

The existential crisis of our time blows through the desert like a faded, half-told story. 

Like Keats, and I suspect, Annie Dillard, I believe ours is a world of weeping and a place of soul-making. 

Just this evening, here on the fringes of East Orchard Mesa, we were offered a long, leisurely dusk, followed by a slow sea of stars finding their way into our shared field of vision.

Soon after, the voices of coyote filled the air,  pale, potent and familiar.