Spring \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Bee Hiving Moon<\/p>\n
The snow has come, as predicted. Heavy since around 2 pm. \u00a0April?<\/p>\n
As it falls, so has the night and with the night the quiet. \u00a0While 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. \u00a0I have become used to, dependent on the silence here. \u00a0It’s absence grates, draws my attention and focus away.<\/p>\n
Of course, there are the noises here, familiar ones that I incorporate. \u00a0The train whistles far in the distance. \u00a0The occasional great gray owl hoots. \u00a0The metal clicking, contracting and expanding as my gas heater responds to changes in the room’s temperature. \u00a0But these are gentle noises, not so much intrusive as atmospheric. \u00a0At least to me.<\/p>\n
It’s interesting though how, once back in the familiar, the far away can come to seem dreamlike, maybe not real. \u00a0Were those great kiva’s built of stone, yet curved into perfect circles? \u00a0How could that be? \u00a0Are there vast expanses of land filled with catci and other desert adapted plants? \u00a0Did I walk through a hole in the earth, past a twilit zone where light from the sun vanished forever? \u00a0Did I keep going then, deeper? \u00a0Were there those others who gathered to listen intently to their own inner life? \u00a0Was 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?<\/p>\n
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. \u00a0In 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. \u00a0The same for Chaco Canyon, the Saguaro, the Intensive Journal Workshop. \u00a0And he would be right.<\/p>\n
Yet there is, too, David Hume’s equally famous response. \u00a0He kicked a table or a door frame and said, “I refute it thus.”<\/p>\n
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. \u00a0That’s how stubborn our minds can be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Spring \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Bee Hiving Moon The snow has come, as predicted. Heavy since around 2 pm. \u00a0April? As it falls, so has the night and with the night … Continue reading Now That I’m Here; Was I Really There?<\/span>