Finding Words (95)

There are evenings where finding words becomes a sort of adventure. Like when you get in your car and drive into the desert of the upper Great Basin until you can’t see a soul or a dwelling or a trace of civilization in any direction. You stop, get out, and start walking. Any direction will do. In no time, what looked like a barren landscape, what looked like the same thing for mile after mile, what looked uninhabited and uninteresting, changes almost instantly the moment you hear your footsteps on the ground, feel the the wind whirring about you, and find your eyes lose their focus while the whole body and mind get swept up into something so grand and old and mysterious that there isn’t anything happening anywhere else. Time stops. The sense of time stops. The 360 degree vistas and open skies swallow up every worry and tension and thought. And all of a sudden there is room in you. In fact, “in you” gives way to just “you” and you are expansive and able to hear echoes from west to east and north to south. You follow the sound of messengers’ voices who have been waiting for you to shed one skin of separation after another and feel the ever-increasing boundaries of your is-ness stretching past the places where the echoes arose. You move with effortless ease across the landscape caring not for when or where or how. It all fades away into awe. Awe. Swept up in awe. You are swept up in awe, remembering who you really are. Peace Photo: Idaho || September 2018