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Everywhere the cliffrose is blooming, the flowers shivering in the wind

October 27, 2015 by 14 Comments

flowers-desert-mallow-atacama-chile-santiago

“Mallow blooms in the Atacama region of Chile, 466 miles north of Santiago de Chile. Every five to seven years, the arid Atacama desert becomes a flower carpet. The amount of rain that came down in recent months has led to the most spectacular blossoming of the past 18 years.” (Maria Ruiz, European Press Photo Agency, October 25, 2015)

Post inspiration – “Everywhere the cliffrose is blooming, the yellow flowers shivering in the wind” by Edward Abbey in Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness.

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Hello… they seem to cry, who… are… you?

August 11, 2015 by 15 Comments

Also invariable present at some indefinable distance are the mourning doves whose plaintive call suggests irresistibly a kind of seeking-out, the attempt by separated souls to restore a lost communion:

Hello… they seem to cry, who… are… you?

And the reply from a different quarter. Hello… (pause) where… are… you?

No doubt this line of analogy must be rejected. It’s foolish and unfair to impute to the doves, with serious concerns of their own, an interest in questions more appropriate to their human kin. Yet their song, if not a mating call or a warning, must be what it sounds like, a brooding meditation on space, on solitude. The game.

~ Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

Notes: Related posts from Edward Abbey: Desert Solitaire

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Sunday Morning

August 9, 2015 by 14 Comments

delicate-arch
Many have made the climb to Delicate Arch, so many that the erosion of human feet is visible on the soft sandstone, a dim meandering, path leading upward for a mile and a half into a queer region of knobs, domes, turrets and coves, all sculptured from a single solid mass of rock.  What do the pilgrims see? The trail climbs and winds past isolate pinyons and solitary junipers to a vale of stone where nothing has happened for a thousand years, to judge from the quietude of the place, the sense of waiting that seems to hover in the air. […]

If Delicate Arch has any significance it lies, I will venture, in the power of the odd and unexpected to startle the senses and surprise the mind out of their ruts of habit, to compel us into a reawakened awareness of the wonderful – that which is full of wonder.

A weird, lovely, fantastic object out of nature like Delicate Arch has the curious ability to remind us – like rock and sunlight and wind and wilderness – that out there is a different world, older and greater and deeper by far than ours, a world which surrounds and sustains the little world of men as sea and sky surround and sustain a ship. The shock of the real. For a little while we are again able to see, as the child sees, a world of marvels. For a few moments we discover that nothing can be  taken for granted, for if this ring of stone is marvelous then all which shaped it is marvelous, and our journey here on earth, able to see and touch and hear in the midst of tangible and mysterious things-in-themselves, is the most strange and daring of all adventures.

~ Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

Notes:

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Sunday Morning

August 2, 2015 by 10 Comments

moab-utah-arch

These are natural arches, holes in the rock, windows in stone, no two alike, as varied in form as in dimension … formed through hundreds of thousands of years by the weathering of the huge sandstone walls, or fins, in which they are found. Not the work of a cosmic hand, nor sculptured by sand-bearing winds, as many people prefer to believe, the arches came into being and continue to come into being through the modest wedging action of rainwater, melting snow, frost, and ice, aided by gravity…

Standing there, gaping at this monstrous and inhuman spectacle of rock and cloud and sky and space, I feel a ridiculous greed and possessiveness come over me. I want to know it all, possess it all, embrace the entire scene intimately, deeply, totally, as a man desires a beautiful woman. An insane wish? Perhaps not — at least there’s nothing else, no one human, to dispute possession with me.

~ Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

Notes:

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Suddenly it comes…

July 31, 2015 by 16 Comments

moab-utah-arch-sunrise

Well – the sun will be up in a few minutes and I haven’t even begun to make coffee. I take more baggage from my pickup, the grub box and cooking gear, go back in the trailer and start breakfast. Simply breathing, in a place like this, arouses the appetite. The orange juice is frozen, the milk slushy with ice. Still chilly enough inside the trailer to turn my breath to vapor. When the first rays of sun strike the cliffs I fill a mug with steaming coffee and sit in the doorway facing the sunrise, hungry for the warmth.

Suddenly it comes, the flaming globe, blazing on the pinnacles and minarets and balanced rocks, on the canyon walls and through the windows in the sandstone fins. We greet each other, sun and I, across the black void of ninety-three million miles. […]

That’s the way it was this morning.

~ Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

Photo: Stray Light Effect

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What else is there? What else do we need?

July 26, 2015 by 23 Comments

waterfall-gif

I am pleased enough with surfaces — in fact they alone seem to me to be of much importance. Such things for example as the grasp of a child’s hand in your own, the flavor of an apple, the embrace of friend or lover, the silk of a girl’s thigh, the sunlight on rock and leaves, the feel of music, the bark of a tree, the abrasion of granite and sand, the plunge of clear water into a pool, the face of the wind — what else is there? What else do we need?

~ Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

Source: Thank you Whiskey River

 

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I am pleased enough with the surfaces

June 30, 2013 by 22 Comments

woman walking barefoot

“I am pleased enough with the surfaces – in fact they alone seem to me to be of much importance. Such things for example as the grasp of a child’s hand in your own, the flavor of an apple, the embrace of a friend or lover, the silk of a girl’s thigh, the sunlight on the rock and leaves, the feel of music, the bark of a tree, the abrasion of granite and sand, the plunge of clear water into a pool, the face of the wind – what else is there? What else do we need?”

– Edward Abbey

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