down (south) time

 

it has taken some getting used to - this idea that, despite a complete dissolution of plans, buoyancy can still be achieved. or, if not achieved exactly, can still occur when you least expect it. maybe especially so.

given that winter here is indecisive, manic, dogmatic and absolutely enraging, it is always somewhat of a surprise when it passes. although now it's still not clear if that's what It has decided on. where, in the East, water sprung readily from dry ditches to float detritus into a gay clog of gutters, here it is still frozen and resolutely clenched at the mountain saddles. the snowpack that lounges at the peaks of the Oquirrhs, the Henrys, the La Sals, all of it still accounts for our annual sum of snowfall- not counting the bulk that has already run and flooded the basements of the valley towns. a veritable crushing of stillmoving snow.

but we were gifted a surge in temperature, a warm smell- that prickling green waft that lifts your collar and fills your nose. without turning,  we could feel the lilacs stir into heady bloom and dip low into the grass. so we figured the best thing to do was to head to directly into desert country to see what sort of remote places we could take off our clothes and generally get back to feeling like real animals.

to our utter surprise there was water in the most unexpected places. (like, for examples, in the low draws of parched caps of earth whose linear scrawling indicated water had not passed for easily a year since the first snows.)

 

which is not to say there wasn't dust. it poured, it followed all movement. it filled seams and small places, and it had faces of its own.

 

 

but it was restorative. the desert has a way of belittling all the tangles of everyday life and smoothing them into a sandblown mass. manageable, if not slightly blurred. it was, as i sat there and felt a great red pulse in the ground , important to remember that, given enough distance, most things can be seen in their entirety and are thus navigable. it also helps to be surrounded by kindness and love and fur and bone. but profundity and a good dose of bone shaking heat is almost always a cure-all.