RIPPLES FROM THE CENTER: A Fecund and Sensual Nature

PREFACE: This post is inspired by a much needed sojourn in late May into the Jemez Mountains. The photographs are of the Divine and Fertile Feminine.

A couple of weeks after taking the following photographs in the Jemez Mountains in late May, I journeyed north, very north to Michigan via NM, TX/OK Panhandle, Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Lake Michigan. I began writing what would become this two-part post from a cottage near Green Lake (thanks to my generous Austin framilia) in the northern woods of the lower peninsula of Michigan. It's been a very wet and late spring in the Midwest. I'm surrounded by water here at Interlochen... between Green Lake, Duck Lake with marshes, bogs, and creeks beside, between, and around them. It's a mere 25 miles as the crow flies to Lake Michigan, which I crossed via a four-hour ferry ride. I spent 5 hours one afternoon blissfully paddling in a pretty red canoe... across Green Lake then up and down the verdant little stream that feeds it.

But back to my beloved Land of Enchantment.

I write in the present tense as it returns me to the immediacy of the moments of my experiences. I recall Anaïs Nin's words, "We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect."

Jemez Mountains, New Mexico. Last full week of May, 2013.

I sojourn...

north into the Jemez Mountains ~ poignantly aware of this historically severe drought. Even my soul feels fine dusty dry... in want of rain.

I ruminate...

900 years ago a fifty-year drought sent the ancient peoples of Chaco packing. I moved to the southwest a mere thirty years ago. I'm 53. 50-plus years is a long time to live in a drought. I contemplate time in this timeless landscape... how it is that a mere 75 million years ago this sacred landscape formed the bottom of an inland sea... an apropos baptism. Miraculous.

I recall...

Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things...

“Then to give the kids a historical perspective, Chacko... (How serendipitous! Chaco and Chacko... converging here in the middle of this stream of thought?!) ...Chacko told them about the earth woman. He made them imagine that the earth - 4600 million years old - was a 46 year old woman... It had taken the whole of earth woman’s life for the earth to become what it was. For the oceans to part. For the mountains to rise. The earth woman was 11 yrs old when the first single celled organisms appeared. The first animals, creatures like worms and jellyfish, appeared only when she was forty. She was over forty five - just 8 months ago - when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The whole of human civilization as we know it, began only 2 hrs ago in the earth woman’s life…”

Geological time perspective can be enlightening, soothing. But our wee selves in our daily fleeting lives live a more temporal awareness.