It’d been a depressing start to the day. More bad news on the virus, on riots, on another type of depression we were all going through, only they spelled that one with a capital ‘D.’ I’d spoken via phone with my normally ebullient mother back in Chicago, but she was depressed, too. Everybody seemed to be. So many reasons.
I got out of my house near Summit Lake, in southwest Colorado, just to clear my head. Strong winds and bright sky, unseasonably cool. I wanted the wind to squeeze through my right ear and out through my left to blow out some of that sawdust.
It felt like a fall day, even though we were nearing the first day of summer. I grabbed a scythe from in front of the garage and wacked some weeds as I hiked through the forest, taking out some of my anger along with the thistle. I left the scythe leaning against a fence post and set off through a ponderosa grove. The pines swayed like a chorus line in the relentless wind. I mounted the ditch and berm for Summit Lake. My plan was to walk the dam.
Didn’t take long and I did encounter another someone. I decided to head down toward the water’s edge below the berm. I was scouting the lake for my cousin and her family, who were due to come down from Carbondale. They were looking for some places to paddleboard. The spring melt had started its run down from the mountains, but the back basin of Summit Lake was already emptying out in favor of the sedges and water plants that came as soon as the water retreated. I treaded across the newly green flats, making my way across the dried mud to the east shore, a place of forests I’d only explored in winter.
I crossed over the drying lobe of the lake and entered tall stands of oak brush which began just the other side of the water’s edge, just beyond the cottonwoods with their huge, exposed roots that clamped like dinosaur claws to the leaf littered shores. The cottonwoods gave way to the drier story in the low hills just above them. The water loving species surrendered quickly to the ponderosa. I walked beneath their limbs, which roared in the gusts until I reached an oval meadow with a lone juniper in its middle, surrounded by an isle of Gambel oak, an atoll amidst the grass.
My bearanoia came back out of nowhere. It comes and goes unexpectedly. The tall stands of oak rustling in the sunny gales brought back in my memory the words of outfitters and native Coloradoans’ that the bears just love the tall oak and you can often scare one up there. I even imagined I heard a bear growling on the far side of the meadow.
Should I cross the lea, where I might find a final view of the La Platas before they lost the last of the snow in their crags and cirques in this drought? I thought on it for a moment, and then stepped out from the edge of the paddock to confront once again my irrational bearful fear.
I’d been having these strange experiences lately. Who knows? Maybe it was spending all this time alone without interacting with another human. But I’d leave the house for the post office or for an errand in town, and when I returned home, everything seemed alien, like it did when I’d come back home after a long trip. Or I’d see the ponderosa stand to the southwest of my porch and it was like I’d never seen them before. I’d been reading Landscapes of the Sacred by Belden Lane, and he wrote about how it’s the eyes that see something anew, in collaboration with the land itself, even though you might’ve stared out at the same scene a thousand times before. The imagination co-creates the sacredness of a space along the with landscape itself.
By now, the depression had all drained away like the bottom lobe of the lake I’d just crossed. The wind just vacuumed it out along with the cobwebs in my gourd. I made it across the field of grass without any bear tackles. I treaded up the shallow knoll to – as the bear did when it crossed over the mountain – see what I could see.
From the top of a low hummock, it was like I’d never even seen the La Platas until just now. I had a vision of them with new eyes. A score of houses smattered on the east shore of the lake spread out in the new grass beneath groves of Fremonts. I’d seen these homes many times from across the lake, or when I drove the highway to Mancos to get my mail. Usually, the encroaching development bothered me, but now I overlooked it. The homes were even beautiful in their own way, and from my hilltop I could pretend to spy into their distant attic windows and imagine dusty antiques and chests in the moted, swirling air. Yet the mountains drew my eyes. Seen from a new perspective, a new place. The summit snow brightened the headwall of a hanging valley miles away. From here, ridges of ponderosa and oak and P-J rolled endlessly southeast, a seamless carpet atop the foothills mile after mile until they were broken by the cliffs and canyons that surrounded the mountains on all sides.
I’d been practicing having an open heart and an open mind. How do you do that? If you would’ve asked me when I was 20, it would’ve involved some cannabis and a Jethro Tull ballad. Yet now, I realize that all I have to do is imagine that my heart and mind are open. To envision that I’m open like the limbs of a great pinion to the cloud-powdered sky and the ceaseless wind.
I’d been practicing gratitude. Just trying not to take credit for anything in my life. Now, as I stood on the ridge of that oak-terraced hillock, I felt like I glimpsed everything that I’d seen many times before for the very first time, like I was being born in each instant. It’s so hard to do that, in each moment to have a new skin. I can’t keep that up for every long; to see everything as fresh, since with the wonder comes the bite of the cold wind.
I’m 58 and I felt for the very first time that I loved God. In my better moments, I knew for some time that God loved me. Yet now I knew that I loved God. Gratitude flowed from me outward like tears, and into me from the world like rain. The highway a mile beyond with its silent traffic. The red barn on Ute tribal land like a Currier and Ives print, with a herd of bison in the green and tawny pasture beyond it.
These moments, of innocence, we all know, are rare. And it’s unknown whether, even in an afterlife, they’re any more common. For by making the ecstatic common, it’s bliss no more. On earth, my humanness tries to capture the humility that makes possible the experience of this love. My mind intrudes and tries to perpetuate the moment and extend it to eternity. It uses memory of the last instant in this moment to try to prolong the purity. Yet as soon as recollection floods in, then time does, too. And with time is heaven lost. Clarity comes to obscurity. Eternity collapses back into time and presence becomes absence. Innocence dies in a reproduction, and paradise becomes just another model in my mind. I can’t help it. It’s part of being human to take a futile stab at recreating these instants of guilelessness. Yet in the attempt, newness precipitates and is swept into the dust of bones.
The echoes of infinity often reverberate for a while, like the background signature of the Big Bang in any direction I peer. On the way back across the lakebed, I frightened off skeins of mallards and Canada geese, though I tried not to. The fresh scent of cold water and the vanilla bark of the ponderosa. The gray till of the water whipped up by the wind. A small siege of blue herons flapped up from the drowning shore.
Meandering through tall stalks of milkweed, over the gargantuan roots of the cottonwoods near shore, the waft of the willows and the forbs. I zigzagged up again through the oak and then the ponderosa just a few feet from the sway of the willows onshore.
To know that you love something just by practicing gratitude, just by imagining that your heart is open. It takes a lifetime for that moment to be born. My profoundest moments blowing in on the tailfeathers of my saddest ones.
To be born in each moment with eyes that see the instant as fresh, the skin new and green, the snow as if it’s just fallen. How long it takes for that moment to alight upon a lifetime. Obscured by time, in time. It takes place in the eyes that see, co-making the wildland along with the green and blue and windy and white substrate that we’re each given in each moment to make with what we will.
That dance of the present. It’s always now.
© 2022 by Michael C. Just
Mike’s novel, The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy, is available in softcover or eBook formats through Amazon.
You can purchase the book through this website. Or go straight to amazon at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+dirt+journey+of+a+mystic+cowboy&crid=1S40Q4BXSUWJ6&sprefix=the+dirt%3A+journey+of+a+m%2Caps%2C180&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_23
Mike’s other titles, including The Crippy, The Mind Altar, and Canyon Calls, are available through this website or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002
Four of his short stories have recently been published online:
Lies, Ltd. has been published by The Mystery Tribune @ Lies, Ltd.: Literary Short Fiction by Michael C. Just (mysterytribune.com)
The Obligate Carnivore has been published by the Scarlet Leaf Review @ Category: MICHAEL JUST – SCARLET LEAF REVIEW
I See You, Too has been published by the 96th of October @ I See You, Too – 96th of October
Offload, a short story about a man who can heal any disease, is now live and can be read at The Worlds Within at Offload – The Worlds Within