In A Dream

In the deeper recesses of Canyonlands, we traveled the bottoms along the Green River. It snakes a corridor of buttes and mesas, sometimes opening up into the flood plains of the side canyons, most of whose interiors are even deeper recesses. But it was up one of those arterioles that we navigated, across rough badlands on a dirt track crisscrossing its wash, another five miles deeper, to the end. We set up camp, in an amphitheater of red rock cliffs, talus slopes, and Wingate monoliths. In the silent witness of desert and sky, even our words were spare. They say there are vortexes, like Sedona, where psychic forces swirl. I have found myself in places that hold a magic of their own, independent of us, where the power of the land just exists in the arrangement of features that somehow sync with our sense of universal order. Perhaps we can’t help trying to humanize that. This was such a place. It is always surprising, this far from civilization and the absence of artificial light, how swiftly the dark descends...twilight seems just a word in passing. I stayed up awhile, fighting off the sleep that long days of exploring bring, waiting for a full moon that would rise behind me. But sometimes these places don’t wait for you, moving on of their own accord. After a time of darkness, moonlight was greeted by the songs of coyotes, and washed down the walls of the circle, spreading across the desert floor. Horizons pushed closer, tendrils of cloud blown ahead in vanguard, pushed by currents I could not feel. We turned under the universe above, all of it powered by forces I cannot explain, that people have prayed to from time immemorial. I awoke in the morning, a new energy pushing the night away, as if I was still in a dream.

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In the deeper recesses of Canyonlands, we traveled the bottoms along the Green River. It snakes a corridor of buttes and mesas, sometimes opening up into the flood plains of the side canyons, most of whose interiors are even deeper recesses. But it was up one of those arterioles that we navigated, across rough badlands on a dirt track crisscrossing its wash, another five miles deeper, to the end. We set up camp, in an amphitheater of red rock cliffs, talus slopes, and Wingate monoliths. In the silent witness of desert and sky, even our words were spare. They say there are vortexes, like Sedona, where psychic forces swirl. I have found myself in places that hold a magic of their own, independent of us, where the power of the land just exists in the arrangement of features that somehow sync with our sense of universal order. Perhaps we can’t help trying to humanize that. This was such a place. It is always surprising, this far from civilization and the absence of artificial light, how swiftly the dark descends...twilight seems just a word in passing. I stayed up awhile, fighting off the sleep that long days of exploring bring, waiting for a full moon that would rise behind me. But sometimes these places don’t wait for you, moving on of their own accord. After a time of darkness, moonlight was greeted by the songs of coyotes, and washed down the walls of the circle, spreading across the desert floor. Horizons pushed closer, tendrils of cloud blown ahead in vanguard, pushed by currents I could not feel. We turned under the universe above, all of it powered by forces I cannot explain, that people have prayed to from time immemorial. I awoke in the morning, a new energy pushing the night away, as if I was still in a dream.