Absolute Stillness. Bears Ears and the Canyonlands, Pilgrimage Day 63

I want to write about silence.

No, maybe not silence. Silence implies a void. What I want to talk about is absolute stillness.

At 8000 ft, coming the back way into Bears Ears, I stopped at a vista. The view was spectacular.

I could see all the way to the Canyonlands to the south, Dead Horse Mesa to the west, the La Sal peaks to the east. Behind me the Abajo range, which I was making my way through.

The view is what first captured my attention. But the absolute stillness took over.

There was the sense of no sound.  A false sense because after only moments I could discern the cry of a hawk, soaring in the currents before me, a wren trilling their distinctive, happy trill. The familiar tones of a Meadowlark, my childhood favorite.

A bird I sat within fields of deep grass in for hours in west Eugene just so I could listen to it sing.

someone caught this one mid-song

 

The meadowlark’s contribution was sporadic. The wren, consistent. A crow, far away down in one of the canyons at the base of Bears Ears, chastised something. It’s throaty rebuke carried up to me on my perch in the Abajo Mountains, crystal clear.

A breeze sipped up a gentle caress now and again. To the west, storm clouds were building, white fluffs filling with water, turning dark grey, then black.

They would keep welling until another inevitable spring release. Which from the looks of it, would hit about the time I arrived down inside the canyons.

I stood in this profound silence, in the stillness, taking it all in.

Absorbing.

Time drifted away. Lost meaning. In its place, I became aware of the actual ions, microscopic refractions of energy filling the air.

Energy so palpable it buzzed.  A very faint, high-pitched buzz. Almost inaudible.   The buzz of the universe.

A bee, lonely traveler to the high altitudes, hummed its way from teeny, tiny, hardy, low growing yellow desert wildflowers. Arnica, I believe.

Good for aches, and pains     Sparse,

they bloom only for a brief time after the rain.

Stillness.

That union with the Divine.

Which is not really a union because we have been part of it all along.

The mountain, the canyons, the clouds filling with life giving water, the meadowlarks, the tiny wildflowers. Me. You. All of us.

All of us are it        This.

A few hours later, I made my way back from the Canyonlands National Park where people queued up to gaze at the stillness, too hurried to take it in,

I re-entered Bears Ears  Canyon.

so incredibly lush in May.

Thick, green, filled with giant oaks, aspen, willow, and the lonely call of a wild turkey hoping to lure a mate.

The canyon, meandering around the entire base of Bears Ears.

 

Newspaper Rock is a place in this lush canyon where travelers past did gaze at the stillness. Lived within it.

Wrote their stories for the next ones to read.        I killed this buffalo.  My friends and I killed these buffalo, these deer.  I shot this magnificent many horned elk from horseback with only a bow. These birds live in this canyon-they call me awake each morning. Our village goats are thriving this year.  I swear, it was the longest snake I’ve ever seen.  The sun shone at festival time. We skinned these two beavers. Or are they something else?  The Bear stopped by.  So did these weird ass men with horns who tried to tell us something about the wheel of time. Who were those guys and where did they come from?!!    

A few miles away, looking south in the stillness, the teats of Mother Earth,

                              

 

Ranchers and miners are hungry for Bears Ears. Lusting

for the possibility of minerals and gasses.

In a unique, somewhat hopeful move,  the Nature Conservancy in 1997 purchased the historic 5000 acre Dugout Ranch, owned by Cowgirl Hall of Famer, Heidi Redd.  The mission:  to create the Canyonlands Research Center, dedicated to studying grazing, ranching, canyon watersheds, and land management impacts on climate change.

 In addition to the 5000 acres owned, there are over 350,000 acres of “public” land, which has been continually leased as grazing rights to Redd, who ran her cattle operation for nearly 50 years.

It is still a working ranch, though now studied by scientists from all over the world. It remains controversial, however, because even with the Conservancy’s take over, the land  remains depleted due to overgrazing, while as always, the water used takes away from an already stretched system. Several conservation groups banded together to challenge the conservancy’s recent plan to build more reservoirs on the ranch and add more fencing.  The judge ruled in their favor after finding that the conservancy failed to adequately monitor and report on its own cattle operation.

I was stunned to see  overhead irrigation being used in such an arid climate. It is the least effective system, losing a high percentage of water to evaporation. I would have thought the Conservancy, as part of their research, would have switched to drip.

BTW, Redd, a very interesting woman now in her 80’s, still lives on the ranch, helping work the land in partnership with the Nature Conservancy.

A few more miles along the canyon and I found this corral set into the stone.   Been there a long time,

chose black and white

The free ranging cattle overgrazing the already sparse desert get driven into here come the fall, then loaded for shipping to market.  Your tax dollars at work!

Take a breath.  Let it go. Bring it in.

The air surrounding me is potent.

Rejuvenating. Clear, clean air.

Fresh and scented with rainfall, juniper berries, flowering sage, the faint top note one of a blend of Silvery Lupine, Blue Columbine, and the rare Sago Lily.

I breathe it as I crawl along the canyon floor, absorbing as much as possible.

Several times, I stop.

Step back into the stillness.

As if to check the reality of such a sacred thing.

Each time, I feel my place in the unified field of One-ness.

The Oversoul, above, below, around, within.

Timeless. Beyond time. Precious beyond measure.