To Freely Need

City of Rocks State Park, Faywood, NM, Day 32 of Desert Solitude. Moody is the sky today, the Great Horned Owl I encountered on my morning walk a beacon of what the grey portends. Perched there upon a boulder as unmoving as a night thick with summer, this winged creature gazes softly upon the rest of us as if to show: Sunlight returns by waiting not by pleading. I have been here at City of Rocks for twelve days, and in the deepening solitude nurtured by the vastness of the landscape itself, I note fewer and fewer words as I walk and move through the rhythms of the day, the mind emptying of self-made noise.

Walking has become more meditative, as it is at home in the familiar. I have been here long enough that the novelty now is not so much the landscape as what changes about it by day, hour, minute. Light and weather are in perpetual flux. Impressions come, and if I take on a quality of concentrated ease as I walk, I am struck by the soft blur of form as unexpected, color as raw, light …