Spring Bee Hiving Moon
The snow has come, as predicted. Heavy since around 2 pm. April?
As it falls, so has the night and with the night the quiet. While on my trip, no matter where I was the rooms were noisy: traffic outside, television leaking from the room next door, the heaters and air conditioners working in agony, basketballs thumping on the court next to my room at the Resident’s Inn. I have become used to, dependent on the silence here. It’s absence grates, draws my attention and focus away.
Of course, there are the noises here, familiar ones that I incorporate. The train whistles far in the distance. The occasional great gray owl hoots. The metal clicking, contracting and expanding as my gas heater responds to changes in the room’s temperature. But these are gentle noises, not so much intrusive as atmospheric. At least to me.
It’s interesting though how, once back in the familiar, the far away can come to seem dreamlike, maybe not real. Were those great kiva’s built of stone, yet curved into perfect circles? How could that be? Are there vast expanses of land filled with catci and other desert adapted plants? Did I walk through a hole in the earth, past a twilit zone where light from the sun vanished forever? Did I keep going then, deeper? Were there those others who gathered to listen intently to their own inner life? Was it hot there? Did I visit a city where many of the buildings, businesses and homes alike were made of adobe and had fireplaces built into an interior wall?
Bishop Berkeley, the English idealist, is famous for his dictum, Esse est percipi. That is, to be is to be perceived. Once I’ve stopped seeing something, touching it, smelling it, hearing it, tasting it it’s reality, for me, begins to fade. In fact, Berkeley would go so far as to say that I have no way of proving Santa Fe exists apart from my mental idea of it. The same for Chaco Canyon, the Saguaro, the Intensive Journal Workshop. And he would be right.
Yet there is, too, David Hume’s equally famous response. He kicked a table or a door frame and said, “I refute it thus.”
So, though I can not convince you of the desert’s reality with my words about it, I do expect it to be there the next time I visit the southwest. That’s how stubborn our minds can be.
