Sands of Time

Spotify is a mystical DJ sometimes and one day a little while ago it played this song for me. I had to stop everything I was doing, completely overcome by its beauty. Then I listened to it many times in a row, with no idea what language it is sung in or what he is saying. Tears flowed. When I closed my eyes, I wandered in a desert and came upon a man in white spinning in the sand, spirals forming and spreading across dunes, filling with water. His singing took pain—mine, those I love, places the world is burning—and with his beautiful hands, he lifted it to the sky for the sun to fill it with light and then it rained down on us in diamonds.

I decided not to try to find a translation of the song and instead let it take me places for weeks.

I have learned it is a poem by Hafiz from the 1300s. And in the probably inadequate English translation, it speaks of things I felt. How wild is that. Music and language are magic, even when we cannot understand the words—magic beyond words.

And now every time I close my eyes and listen to it, I go to that desert and feel that love as strong as when I stand in our own desert sun.

"Where are you, wild gazelle, my beloved?
I have known you for a while, here.
We are wanderers, both lost, both forsaken

...
It is time to cultivate love
Decreed from one above
Thus I remember the wise old man
Forgetting such a one, I never can
That one day, a seeker in a land”

Whispers from Holy Mountain

Yesterday I got accepted into my first market! It's a little one here in Albuquerque, yet to me it feels like the biggest.

I have a really gigantic mountain to climb, and I feel like the last several years I've been scouting it, trying to figure out how I'm going to be able to do it. Now, I can leave my camp and begin the early steps.

Nature, in its ever amazing mirroring, feels like a brutal cold mountain outside this morning—snow is spiraling sky high from winds bending the trees. I once stood on a mountain at the top of the world and one of my eagle-visioned dreams is that I stand there again, a circle complete from all the things that I offered to the wind that day.

These photos are from atop Helglafell, Holy Mountain, in Iceland, a place people—"heathens" and Christians alike—have been going to perform a certain praying ritual for nearly 1,000 years to speak with their gods. I was told, by an elder man in the village below, of the certain way to climb the mountain and what I must do there. I thanked him and walked out into the wind on my pilgrimage along the well worn path.

My tortoise spirit-stuck in mud Taurus ascendant-Saturn & Pluto all up in everything-self is thrilled over moving this significant boulder. Instead of rolling it up the mountain, though, I'd like to crack it with the hammer of the gods and with all of the little pieces I shall make glittering jewels!

On Colorado

sawatch mountains!
one day I'm gonna find aquamarine
so high up in those rock cathedrals
this time it was just a most enchanting place to camp
a granite heart
and lots of chipmunks
—Oct 2018

Somewhere in the San Juans, 2009

Vallecitos, 2009 or maybe 1809

Fully immersed in the power of Winter. In every visit to Colorado I feel the he, the raw masculine within the indomitable peaks, the rough rugged land, and the wind that tears into my being. It is wholly invigorating and fills me with visions and swirls of blue, ice, snow, biting wind, the opposite, the balance, of my feminine heart. It is the sturdy counterpart to the warm and ethereal enchantment I find in my New Mexico. The primal North and the beckoning South. A heart beats hard and wild.
—Jan 29, 2017

On a lake in Colorado, watching storms that keep the mighty mountains green... dreaming of where these bones shall settle.
—Sept 9, 2017

You are like reading a new, very good, book and I am thankful to have wandered into your story. We soaked in warm earth waters staring up under yellow cottonwoods until the sky fell black.
—Oct 20, 2017

Random notes:
Today we saw a lot of snow (yay) and learned that some parts of Colorado are browner than the desert (nay). The mountains are often impossible, you cannot climb them... unless you are part mountain goat or a touch mad I suppose. The feeling this gives is unrivaled and to feel their cold teachings is a gift. I still love the way Silverton feels the most—old west spirits abound and I am still trying to articulate why they are some of my favorites. I want to live in a forest, not out in the open looking at one. The way the trees go silent and frigid when the sun catches only the tallest peaks is a place I need to find myself. The lack of people in the places we have seen so far is freeing. Snow makes me happier than any other weather.
—Oct 21, 2017

I had one conversation with someone new in the town I loved most during my visit to Colorado. He had the kind of eyes that offer a lifetime of wisdom if your energies blend and he decides you are someone he would like to meander with. I consider time with an elder such as this one of the greatest privileges. They are my favorite people. They do not need to tell you everything they know, and they are in no hurry. He gave me little tidbits of treasure that lie in wait there; stories of shamans and aquamarines—my spirit stone—and sacred mountains. I told him about how I have been waiting for a particular stone for many years but I thought they grew only in Peru, and now here is one in his shop, from the land nearby, and I would like to acquire it. What a surprise! It now lives with a piece of smoky quartz from Mt Antero in a coyote bag and since I have been sleeping with it my dreams take me to that mountain. There is always a snake there the color of this epidote that winds between my feet as I walk. The wind blows so cold from snow and ice 14,000 feet in the sky, but the snake, my dog, a coyote, the sun, and me are all warm with fire while ravens fly overhead. He told me he will be there when I come back.
—Oct 24, 2017

Colorado finally hit me in all the right feels today, it just took a really long trek on a cold cloudy day to an 1800s ghost town inside of 14,000 foot mountains. I want to live there and write a book. Curiously, more than one person remarked “Oh, you could be a ghost.”
—October 7, 2018

A Map for the Heart

There is something about spring snow in the high desert. It comes when it wants to. It will snow when the sky is blue. I have seen it snow over only one hill. It has blown in, spiraling, like a glittering tornado, in front of my window when I lit a candle in prayer and once it fell upon the pages when I opened a book. It is different than a snowstorm and when I go out to thank the falling flakes, the tiny drops on my skin seem to bring what is needed as they melt, water from the sky merging into my body. It seems they most often whisper to Keep going and see what shall happen.

I awoke this morning, on this day in mid May, to see unlikely snow falling. I had a dream just before waking that when I moved through it awake, tears began to fall, hot to the cold streams trickling down the other side of my window.

What was this dream, you wonder?

I was on the ground, pulling weeds from a bed of warm and beautiful rocks next to a house I do not recognize. I turned to look behind me and I was at my grandmother’s, at the spot where as a child two horses and I watched one another. There was no longer a fence, and the horses were not there. Their little barn was dilapidated and grass had grown into the places their hooves had once imprinted the rich clay soil. ’Where are the horses?’ I cried ‘Can we bring them back? We must rebuild the barn. We have to bring them back’. A man in clothing of all white, down to his boots, stood next to me. I looked up at him, studying the turquoise and red beadwork all over what he wore, stitches of gold, animals and vines and flowers, his braid black like obsidian and as long as mine, with skin the color of the rocks I had been tending and hands that seemed a thousand years old yet were soft and new. There were no words between us but we spoke with our eyes. We are waiting for you. Come. He handed me a bracelet of silver, a small bottle of liquid, and a soft bristle brush. Paint the bracelet. As I pulled the brush over indentions in the silver, it illuminated with marks he had hammered into it. It is a map. Wear it over the vein that carries blood to your heart and you will know.

I recalled this dream while the snow fell and when I was finished, vision and weather mirrored the tears drying on my cheeks, vanishing.

Some Kind of Puzzle

Questions as Pieces

I approach some aspects of life as a puzzle, embracing a question my brain tries to understand as something I will solve eventually. Why did this happen? Why does that feel that way? Why does this stick? Why does that make me afraid? I am careful about which things to let sit inside this way, I keep what I think needs studying or to be set aside for later examination or illumination. I think it is different than obsessing or holding onto what needs to leave. It feels more receptive, like an awaiting, while I focus on other areas of my life. They are things that when the pieces finally fit together, I anticipate they will be released, understood, provide growth, or affect me in a way I have not envisioned. Sometimes they become art, something I write, or share in a conversation. Other times they fade into nothing in release to the wind, burn into ash upon a fire.

All One

Lately, I have observed pieces from seemingly disparate puzzles—different, long-held questions—coming together. There is a convergence that I notice strengthens as time passes. A bit of clarity falls upon me here and there. I am realizing it is not actually separate puzzles. What I have thought of as separate, I am now watching all flow into one.

We receive pieces to our puzzles in many ways. It’s like this: I may come across a piece of art, a poem, a quote referenced in a book I am reading, a passage from the book itself, a conversation with a friend or a stranger while out and about, a suggestion to read or listen to something someone else has connected with, a dream, a conversation partially overheard; I have even had book pages that have blown into my yard and songs sung to me by strangers on the street. These breadcrumbs of sorts fall into our paths, and a thing I find interesting is that this occurs always unexpectedly. They feel like guides along the path of seeking, walking alongside and encouraging me with treats every now and then, a bit of fuel to proceed.

Love is the Skeleton Key

I love to make connections, I nearly physically feel the active parts of my brain, heart, and spirit alighting when connections are made. A surge of dopamine courses through me. It is addictive. I crave connection like I imagine some crave a drug. The body relaxes in some place where tension over a question was held. The heart smiles. The spirit perhaps glows a little more, reaches out like a growing vein.

These connections, piecing together of the puzzle, are making the convergence I feel. It feels very good in my body and through to my spirit. I carry some very longheld questions—things I feel that will arrive at some point with answers—not insurmountable things like ‘Why are we here?’—I do love mystery as well! No, these are questions that I wondered about as a child and that still have not been answered. Or things that have happened in life that I accept will make sense at some point. We all have those things, do we not? Finally, answers are arriving, but they are not revelations in words. They come in the form of falling into life. It is a merging with what is happening to and around me. I am drawn to reading words from teachers right now, and they say this feeling is Love. It is not a romantic love, although that can be one of this love’s metaphors, for certain. It is a spiritual love. It is this love that goes out to everyone, it recognizes itself in another, it takes all of the questions and puzzles and of them it says: Delight in being where you are, for your problems are already solved.