To Let Feeling Free
City of Rocks State Park, NM. Day 26 of 6 Weeks of “Desert Solitude.” The sun is warm this morning, the air cold. Words are not quick to surface to the page. Those that come are sensate, imagistic: the sun waking the day, every tip of prairie grass in staggering relief; a wash of tenderness, unexpected, where the belly of the heart drops into the soft flesh between ribs; tastes of herbaceous desert air riding the coattails of northerly winds; enchantment as steam rises from my tea mug, the aroma sweet and woodsy, a hint of bergamot; rhythmic movement, the touch of feet with desert floor – foot to path, foot to path – and the sound: a drumbeat, limbs meeting earth in harmony with the pulsing of the heart.
A gradual space widens between thoughts as the weeks of solitude wear on. The inner work has become a practice of cultivating within a “zone of silence,”1 by which impressions come and beckon an inner “magnetic center”2 to meet them. This zone of silence a pregnancy; this magnetic center…