If you take anything and apply enough pressure, it changes into something else. Plants become peat or coal or oil. Mud, silt and sand becomes rock. The earth applies heat and the composition changes. Two components are poured into the subterranean kiln, melt in the crucible and become one. In the photo above, you see primarily sandstone, which is sand transformed into rock. Even I know that one.

The view at the top of the post is from Canyonlands NP, in the Needle District, on the way to Chesler Park, looking east. I’m standing between two hoodoos. They’re fine needles from afar, but massive pedestals things when you get close to them. I come here more often than just about any other NP, and I live in an area rich in national parks. Most of my novels and short stories take place in or near here, in the Four Corners heartland. I always write part travelogue, because the region is too bizarre, too austere not to share. The landscape becomes a character, an adversary with which human characters must wrestle and reconcile.

When you’re out here, you can’t ignore the surroundings. Not just because they’re so fantastic, they call out to be seen, but because you ignore the desert at your peril. It forces you to pay attention to the place you’re stepping now so you don’t fall 30 feet, to regard the amount of water on your back because there’s no water anywhere else for miles. What direction are you heading? What time did you set out this morning? Are you dressed for now, and for later as well? This, you see, is meditation: the attention to the moment. When you’re in a desert, the moment is forced on you. Meditation doesn’t have to be forced. Yet sometimes circumstances require you to be here, now.

I’m not boasting about my adventuring qualities, the peaks I’ve bagged, the canyons I’ve bouldered. It’s not really like that with me. I’m kind of run of the mill, hikewise and campwise. But when anyone ventures out into a desert alone or wanders up the side of a mountain or traverses a slot canyon by themselves, that person is required to pay attention. That’s all meditation is. It’s really all life is: paying attention, here and now.

Whether you’re wiping down a counter or performing ballet, it’s all about focus. I come out here for that focus. Because when my mind is back there, then, or planning what may be tomorrow, I’m not alive. When my mind is over there, back when I went through that surgery or lost her or maybe when they set my wheels in a nursing home or lower my box into the ground, I am not alive. In the past or future, in the there and not here, I experience a suspension of consciousness. That’s the definition of sleep. It’s a temporary dying to what is. So, I come out here to the slickrock and at least give myself the chance to wake up.

Maybe my life slaps me cross-side the head with egregious circumstances to revive me out of my stupor. I smash into a tree in my truck. I go broke and have to rent a room. Someone I didn’t expect to die dies. When shit happens, a deeper part is tapping me on the shoulder, trying to get my attention. I become lost on a mountainside and don’t know how to get down. I’m alive then, aren’t I?

This place, this hot and naked, brutal and waterless sea of stone wakes me up. The deeper part, the self that knows I can only be present to what is here and now, drags me down willowed bottomlands where mourning doves coo improbably in triple digit heat. It hauls me up washes strewn with chokestones so I can hear my heart pulse like a cat’s purr. And then I know – whatever chooses to live itself through my experiences knows – that I am singularly alive, as locust thorns pierce my fingers and draw gems of glossed blood. I feel the sweat drool down my flush, old man’s cheek. I grind the gristle of sand between my teeth in the violent wind.

It seems a long way to come, I know. To move from a city all this way and then to drive all this way and then to walk all this way. But for those such as me – distracted, unhumbled in the comfortable settlements of humanity – the only way to chance humility, to dare cross over into the heat of humiliation, is to come here and try climbing the boulders, forcing me beyond my limits in lands laminated with desert varnish.

There’s usually a point along the hike when I just wish I was home, or at least in shade and at rest. Yet when the trail is done and the hike has ended, I’ve reclaimed a small sliver of the present moment, of the immediate location of the body in which the soul that sees through the eyes stands. To reclaim this here and now is a part of God reclaiming itself. It’s the only truth I can know on earth.

© 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