I went walking today, not in the woods because we haven’t any at this elevation, but not quite desert still either. It’s a middle ground, chaparral and scrub brush, framed by the gorgeous bark of the aptly named Alligator Juniper. They are all plants that I know, and there is a great comfort in that, a sense of place that for which I find I have been reaching for years.
The sun was setting, throwing its languid winter light across the hills. I settled myself on a bench to watch the light change, everything bathed in gold and grey: perfect early winter beauty. The sky mostly clear with a few large, high clouds, mainly to the west. From where I sat I could see some junipers crowding a point-leaf manzanita, and some scattered shrubs – Gregg’s Ceanothus, skunkbush, mountain mahogany – in various stages of nudity. Some oaks burdened with mistletoe, a lone Pinyon pine.
The sound of traffic and the sight of human development are unfortunate additions to my sunset scene. I want a place that is removed from all that, an open night beneath the stars, with only the sound of wind and birds.
Ah, but there are birds here. I can hear them, though in the fading light and my untrained eyes I don’t see them. There is a single high-pitched chirp that seems to be answered by one slightly lower, across the field: yeep, yawp, yeep, yawp. There was a cricket for a while, but then he ceased, perhaps not finding the evening to his liking, perhaps growing tired of speaking to a meadow where no cricket answered back.
There is a high chittering coming from a juniper down the path; I want to guess that it is a squirrel and not a bird, and find myself annoyed that I do not know which.
I sketch some of the denuded bushes, all sharp lines and skeleton in the fading sun. Their shadows stretch long across the trail and I can feel the air around me cooling. People walk by with their dogs or jog by with their headphones; we exchange perfunctory smiles, muttered good afternoons. I try to say hello even if they aren’t looking at me, even if the advance seems uninvited. The place and time are too beautiful, the liquid evening, the quarter-moon hanging above us, far higher than the clouds, demure and serene. The birdsong swells, the same call and response gathering urgency – yeep yeep yeep, yawp yawp. A thin, regular note sounds from behind me, almost a squeak, and I crane my head to find it. Strange: I turn my head to the left, and it seems to be farther and farther to the left. Eventually my vertebrae give up, and I swing my head rightward, but then it seems to be ever more to the right. I turn around to face it but I still can’t seem to find where it is. I wonder if an owl, with its satellite-dish feathers and lopsided ears – one higher than the other to facilitate triangulation – would be able to do better. I suppose there is no question.
The walk was intended to clear my head. I am exhausted, mentally and emotionally: school has been infinitely more demanding than I had expected, and the negotiation and immediate termination of that quasi-relationship has sapped more than I think I realize. So a walk, into this nominal parcel of nature, a park set aside in the middle of one of the fastest growing counties in the Southwest, where there will be no mountain lion or bighorn sheep or true wildness, but at least there are birdcalls, and juniper, and some trails to walk.
And it is startling to realize how much comfort I take from nature, from just the pattern of leaves against the sky. Walking home one day, I suddenly felt nauseous and lightheaded, my teeth buzzing and my stomach in upheaval; I rested my head against the trunk of a cottonwood along the street, pressing my cheek into the rough bark. We stayed like that for a long minute, skin to skin, the tree serene and solid as only a tree can be. Eventually my body settled, and I pulled myself back up to standing, whispering a thanks.
A man on a passing bicycle looked at me strangely before breaking out into a broad grin. I smiled back, still weakly, and we share a moment that makes me think: namaste. The divine in me honors the divine in you. (Though sometimes translated simply as I bow to you, but I think we Westerners have a hard time with bows. We don’t understand them really, not the way I think they are meant here, so perhaps the first translation is the more accurate.) I find myself pressing my palms together, inclining my head, but he has passed, his bicycle carrying him away from me.
The Himalayan Academy notes that “the whole of Eastern and Western culture (can be) summed up in the handshake which reaches out horizontally to greet another, and Namaste which reaches in vertically to acknowledge that, in truth, there is no other.”
For one moment, there was no boundary between the cottonwood and my body; in the next moment, there was no boundary between myself and the man on the bike. But the moment passes, and I am again my own self, isolated and whirling, preoccupied and dizzy in the world.
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