Sacred Earth: Part 2

In a sentence, when a story-teller decides – perhaps from respect or maybe from a sense of importance – to set one thought apart from the rest, yet still do so within the context of a surrounding paragraph, she or he may create a parenthesis. With the simple tracing of a gentle, curved line, one can hold in abeyance from all the rest, a single thought, perhaps a sacred thought, even when it is amidst countless others. By cordoning off a specific area with a light, delicate bracket, it is possible to carefully shield something of intense value, and provide it a discrete position apart from all else. In this way, this man and the rest of a small band of seekers took their first steps into a realm outside of not only space and time, but beyond the strictures of subject and object, or of matter and mind.

∞

Once they stepped outside the circle, they disappeared. The vision quest elders made as if not to see them, for indeed they were now on the other side, beyond the world as it was known. So it was, that on an already hot desert morning, before the sun could reach its zenith and the hills become the flaming walls of a brick oven, they set off to the place where they might learn more than they knew. They had found a portal between the busy voices of cultural norms and the chatter of anxious minds; a curious portal, adorned in a particularly gritty way with the raw physicality of thorny shrubs, furtive coyotes, flies, and the parched Mojave floor. Here, the draconian grip of concepts were fewer and farther between: invisible, yet towering fences that would normally guide and decide the nature of self and world, held in place by language, maintained by use, and reinforced by structures of human construction. Perhaps in part, because it was a world that many others would overlook, they came to find their freedom beneath the searing Mojave sun and spread their fingers of perception.

∞

This, then, is the story of a man and a region, told by a man enfolded as an integral part of the later. He was a piece of the Earth, a chunk that arose that morning and pulled itself upright, a part of the Earth that would later that day, step from a circle of others and walk a quest. One might even say it was the Earth, seeking itself.

He moved forward in truth, awareness and love, his eyes intermittently looking up from carefully scanning the desert floor to glance at the ridge for which he was headed to reassure his course. The desert demands that those who dare walk, fly, scurry or crawl there, travel with care, for those who do not, become another experimental data-point as to what works, and what doesn’t, in the Mojave’s self-education.

For the man, it was rattlesnakes, unstable footing, jagged rocks, poisonous spiders, scorpions, and legions of sharp thorns that demanded his continued awareness. For both the snake crossing the lonely desert road and the lizard scurrying from creosote to creosote, it was the hawk that circled far above. For the mouse hiding in its hole beneath the woody shrub, it was the snake: for the insect it was the mouse. The lizard searched unblinkingly around and above, for he was sought by both snake and hawk. The quail shivered at the footfall of coyote; the jackrabbit’s tall ears straining for the imperceptible pad of bobcat. A large black beetle took its last steps within of reach of tarantula, and a line of ants beckoned the horned lizard. In this way, the Mojave had learned how to nourish itself, carefully balancing life and death.

∞

Beneath each of the man’s footfall’s, there had once been a warm, shallow sea extending in all directions, though it fled, disappearing into the west when eruptions of rock pushed to the surface with the implacable power of great tectonic plates, warping, folding, and then finally shattering the brittle skin. Then, Gaia’s breathing slowed, and the surface of the land rose and fell more gently for another 200 million years.

But this was not to last. In a fit that lasted 60 million years, the thunder of volcanoes pierced the silence, first from the North, coming closer and closer, heaving blankets of ash and cinder in wave upon wave upon the land until one day, they burst from beneath the land itself. Mountainous jaws reached up from below the surface, spitting fire and molten stone.

Large blocks of continents lurched past each other, leaving a trail of deep valleys and high ranges, while what became the desert floor continued to descend as the land was stretched and pulled apart by some giant hands. Then, the rain and wind, incessant, slow but unyielding, reduced mountains to gravel, and sand to dust, washing all before it to wherever the valleys were most low, bringing nine thousand feet of sediment.

But Gaia’s growing pains were not done, and she began a new weather pattern, a bitter ice age, which in turn created vast lakes, eventually to disappear before a returning sun into yet another, smaller ice age. This in turn left smaller lakes that again, disappeared as the climate warmed, leaving their stay written in salt on the desert floor.

After the shuddering of tectonic plates, eruptions of volcanoes and the grinding of ages of ice, wind and rain, Gaia appeared to fall into a restful calm, but it was only a seeming calm. Silent and sinuous streams of molten rock were moving far beneath the landscape, nudging and exploring tiny fissures, melting their way forward to flow where they may. And, every so often, they would encounter groundwater, the sudden meeting erupting in a shattering explosion of violence and steam, tearing open the landscape, leaving huge craters gaping at the sky.

Yet none of these things were in the mind of this man, save perhaps when his eyes followed the edges of a jagged boulder, or when he paused briefly before an uplifted sandwiching of tightly pressed rock layers. Only then did he hear the desert’s whisper of ages before men and women, for he was on a quest, and was single-mindedly climbing the first slope. In search of vision, his thoughts restrained themselves, and when they had to speak, did so with softness and respect.

He picked his way through the strewn pieces of geologic tumble, his shoes crunching against the grainy scatter of once-looming mountains, now mixed with the salt of ancient lakes. A lizard, followed by a tail twice as long as its body raced ahead, darting beneath the peppered shade of a creosote, not unlike the hundreds surrounding it, or the tens of thousands that reached for the next hill. It did not occur to him or the lizard, that such a meager bush might be the oldest living organism on the planet. Nor was he privy to the silent biological politics of the creosote community, where the older ones intentionally inhibited the growth of the younger. All he saw was how in all directions, they were spaced with a curious evenness, as if by a divine hand.

That evening, as he rested against a giant rock, a jackrabbit languidly hopped down next to him, suddenly breaking the desert quiet. Under the glow of a waxing moon, the man picked up his head with a start as they eyed one another for a moment. Alarm turned to a smile, the man rested his head once again against the rock and the jackrabbit proceeded on, foraging through the shrubs and short, yellowed growth, slowly making his way down the slope.


to be continued...