The long empty skies of June are past now and clouds come over the mountains weakly, hovering for a time before abandoning us for the meaningless expanses of Oklahoma or Kansas where they pass into irrelevance. July is normally out time to bask in wet leaves in the mountains, dripping spruce after cold rain. July is out time to forget the human chatter and drown it out with the water sounds of creeks flinging themselves off small rocks and shattering clean water against the downstream edge of peace and beauty.
If you forget all this, the birds remind you with their songs to be present in place. Even if you don’t know the species of the bird making that song you hear, you know the bird has a full life near yours which may or may not involve flying across oceans to flee the inevitable winter and spend time among flowers and large tropical leaves. Even so we people focus on people and the dramas of our emotions every day. Meanwhile the birds land in the needles of pine and fly down to eat the moth. This is a complex story with deep roots in the eternity of our common past.
I went through a prairie dog colony yesterday at the Valles Caldera, slowing down for the young pups who ran across the road and teased at the grasses by their parents’ tunnels. I thought about the obsessive chatter of humanity, our fixation on our contrived dramas, and the ranting of the craziest among us. I wondered if prairie dogs are the same with their little voices out in the wildflowers and the nodding grass. Are they fixated on their own or are their spirits full with the wilderness? Does the beauty around them permeate their inner selves? How will we ever know?
Humans are locked out by our technology which speeds us up beyond the time of nature. We run over animals on the highway and we miss the sound of the summer wind as we fixate on technology and close ourselves into houses full of the onslaught of commercial culture emanating from plastic electrical devices tuned carefully to the latest group think. Even so, the wind blows outside, making the pine trees sing and though most of us don’t bother to listen or are bored by it if we do, the wind in the trees marks the measure of reality, the facts of our existence, the truth of our heartbeats and the blinking of our eyes.
This year the rains have gone around us, forgotten us or never materialized at all in the West. In the San Juan Mountains, the gold standard of Western mountain ranges, many of the creeks have dried up and fallen silent in their ancient rock beds. The rocky peaks crumble as the mosses shrink back and wait shriveled. The sky is like a stern parent depriving and demanding patience. It is empty and blue. It is full of smoke from fires eating the dry remains of forests.
Fire, rain, wind and seasons. Birds and elk and the grasses bending in the winds. Artifacts from ancient cultures scattered amongst the cliffs built of the remains of ancient mountain ranges. Time so heavy on the land that we cannot comprehend, we cannot begin to imagine how much time it has taken to build the landscape where we live our short little lives.
Independence day 2018. America and its rituals and its sad and uplifting history and traditions. The promise of America lies in the hope that we can perfect community, that we can use this experiment we call America to build a sustainable and kind life together and then hope it spreads around the globe. But right now our country has paused from this search for goodness as we endure the black sewage of the Donald Trump years, as we reel in the daily garbage of that man’s mind and his shallow enablers awash in greed and contempt.
I suggest we all remember the beauty of nature which includes death and eternity, green and decay as well. Let us take time to really notice the natural world, listen to it, feel it, run naked in it, feed it and water it. Let us pause from our thrills and our obsession with one another to notice where we are. Recharge your spirits this way. Remember to be alive in place. Listen to animals and notice the details of plants. These things reveal who you are.
-Tom Ribe
