"We are witnesses to this opening of time, vertical and horizontal at once."

"The desert is time, exposed time, geologic time. One needs time in the desert to see."

"The Coyote Clan is a raucous  bunch: they have drunk from desert potholes and belched forth toads. They tell stories with such virtuosity that you'll swear you have been in the presence of preachers.

The Coyote Clan is also serene. They can float on their backs down the length of any river or lose entire afternoons in contemplation of stone.

Members of the Clan court risk and will dance on slickrock as flash floods erode the ground beneath their feet. It doesn't matter. They understand the earth re-creates itself day after day."

well friends, we are home from the sojourn to the desert intricacies, spires and hoodoos: nature's surprises and explosions and cathedrals in southwestern utah. my eyes and skin and heart are so full that i hardly know where to begin. today i will use quotes from the ever-inspiring Terry Tempest Williams to try to capture the splitting, shifting, growing,emptiness-and-fullness-at-once, pure love that happens in these red canyon lands. her book Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert is full of tales about these very lands we have been traversing, and she tells so perfectly how you fall in love here, "falling in love with a place, being in love with a place, wanting to care for a place and see it remain intact as a wild piece of this planet." 

here your heart aches with such great love and wholeness that you know, finally and surreally that you are one with all. With "pink sand underfoot and ravens overhead and the joyous sensation of finding red dirt in every pore of your skin."

in the desert, water is rare and magical. always a much needed place of refreshment and vigor, restoration. "We are water. We are swept away. Desire begins in wetness. My fingers curl around this little frog. Like me, it was born out of longing, wet, not dry. We can always return to our place of origin. Water. Water music. We are baptized by immersion, nothing less can replenish or restore our capacity to love. It is endless if we believe in water."

"This is wilderness. The tenacious grip of beauty."

"The desert heat loosened the muscles and spirit of the group. Joy crept in and filled their boots."

 

 best of all: experiencing this with my family. together finding this "mythology born out of this spare, raw, broken country, so frightfully true, complex and elegant in its searing simplicity of form. You cannot help but be undone by its sensibility and light, nothing extra. Before the stillness of sandstone cliffs, you stand still, equally bare."

to open our bare hearts together and be here at once, is to know the fullness of the world and catch of glimpse of some universal truth. timelessness, scale, mirage, revelation.

to be in this together is to be fully alive, to make the most of life, to learn. 

to return with hearts burst apart at the seams, full of light.