Earth Song
My Celtic ancestral identity is strong in me. I fully embrace that love of story, the energy field that is formed from a landscape of verdant, mossy hills, forest and water. It is the outline of my response to what my senses encounter. It echoes the energies of the landscape that surrounds me in my Oregon home. The stories of that heritage are the stories that I love and that are a part of my identity. I felt happily rooted in that identity….and then, I was given a reminder that Life does not like to be stagnant. Life loves to create, to tease and laugh and flow into something new.
We took a trip to the high dessert of New Mexico to visit family. I was expecting a dry, dull, lifeless brown landscape, something foreign that would have no resonance for me. The picture in my mind was of the signpost squeaking in the wind over a deserted landscape of scrub and tumbleweeds. What I found instead was not at all a match to my expectations. I gazed ou the window through bright, clear sun, at a landscape with scattered Piñon, Juniper, Ash and Chamisa, a landscape filled with the fluttering of birds and warm colors. After driving through rolling landscapes of vibrantly colored mountains and rocky outcrops, something new was awakening. The soft lines of the adobe and stucco homes rimmed with rustic Coyote fences were beginning to smile at me. My sister/friend, JP, describes the desert as a place of revelation, the bare bones of a thing, that deep foundation of what lies beneath. I began to see that even with it’s own kind if verdancy, the spaces between were breathing.
Removed from my experience by a few weeks, I feel a new and surprising energy call to me. I am being pulled by some force in that landscape, it’s shapes, it’s spaces and what the light reveals. I feel the energy beings calling for witness of all that has happened in response to the song of this place. I am coming to understand that it is not just the inner DNA of my ancestry that informs my responses, it is also something deeper in the landscape itself that has a voice and entity. There is something in this landscape that calls for a response. What does it want to express through me? What does it want me to witness? I am reminded of what my brother-in-law said as we stood watching the sun expanding over the hillside, “Do you feel it, the ancientness of this place?”
As I say this I feel like a naive pilgrim. Isn’t this revelation a common experience of many who, unlike me, travel a lot? JP says that is less frequently true than I think. So maybe, it’s my Celtic sensibility, and truly, all people who are close to the land, who have tuned to the energy and language of a place, who will understand what this naive pilgrim experienced in the high dessert.
