Santa Elena Canyon

At Santa Elena Canyon, I am the only one – for a moment at least. It has become a difficult thing to find in this park, solitude, unless one goes off map of course. Something I am prone to do often, but not today.

Today I sit, in the middle of the resting Rio Grande.

Today I sit, between the ever present yet-to-be and the ever present what was.

Today I sit, just out of reach of walls so hardened by the past it takes a torrential river to bring them home, back into the earth of sand and rock.

There are things in this world bigger than us. For many years, I thought those things were human. It took me decades to realize it wasn’t so. To realize, what is bigger than me does not walk on this earth with two legs but rather it flies like a bird.

The stones know, they always know - worn smooth and round by time. They have heard and seen so much.

As the sun falls illuminating the southern wall, the canyon ahead becomes more intimate, folding into the shadows of its own creation. I hold back speech and breath for fear of disturbing something unknown. At these moments it is important to respect The Silence.

When in the trees, the canyon, the mountains, I am shut-in, enclosed and overwhelmed. I am blind. I am afraid. I go anyway.

But on the ocean, the plains, when in the desert - which was ocean before desert – my eyes are clear and wide.

Tomorrow and today blend into one. Every single night there is a full moon. Every single night there is a new moon. Every single night the milky way stretches east to west, north to south, and I gaze up at a shooting star. Every single night I fall in love all over again.

The prospect cannot be denied. It is a grounding without need of blankets or electrodes or any modern assistance at all. It is a grounding despite these things. The hermit of the desert knows.

I think about him, about his society of hermits, his family of recluses. I wonder if perhaps I am one. If I am unknowingly a part of it all… or perhaps knowingly a part of it all. I tell myself, in the voice only I hear, “Do not be afraid to investigate the dark places my friend. You too can be a hermit in the desert.”

Meh, maybe I already am. The line between knowing and unknowing is so tricky, isn’t it?