In the blazing peace of the desert night I sprawl across the bed diagonally sprawled across the loft floor, and read about this landscape, it's unexpected vitality and fragility, through the words of Terry Tempest Williams. Soft voices hum the song of simplicity--crickets chirping their infinite prayer, and the lovers downstairs pouring warm cups of tenderness from their lips. The aroma drifts up to kiss my nose. 


I had spent the morning carefully documenting their lives. Collecting the images that are day-to-day to them, and dream to me. The smells hanging in the kitchen don't show up in the photographs, but settle on my clothes and in my hair, and I breathe them in until they sit at the pit of my being where they will permeate into my deepest longing. The colors stain me like the walls. Years-old swaths of plaster paint tests and small patterns that were once a solid vision, have settled into their incompletion, completing the dream for me. There is more story left to tell.

This is how I know I enter right in the middle of their lives. I stay out of the way, for once not wanting to change anything--actually wanting not to change anything. Even as I tiptoe closer to description, I risk crushing the cryptobiotic crust that holds their roots to this ground.

In the Fiery Furnace you don't step off the slick-rock; that kind of sand takes decades to build and I am afraid of eroding the already-slim margin of life that somehow manages to take root here and grow. The brush flowers grow up through the tiniest cracks of solid rock and bloom in the shadows.


10/2, TBC

Moab, Me