Area Between Sun and Moon Mountain

I have come to what is quite possibly the most beautiful place that ever was. The sun shines hot around me, but I’ve found the shade of a ponderosa, the only of its kind among hundreds of piñons, its vanilla scented bark wafting through the air on a cool, whispering mountain breeze. My companions are the birds, piñon jays, squawking in contempt, and broad-winged crows soaring high in the palette blue sky – black against the pure, celestial blue. My rock is flat and covered with lichen, clinging to an existence on this granite stone, nourished by sun and rock – no more and no less. Why are humans fascinated by such a phenomenon? Why shouldn’t the lichen subsist on merely heavenly rays and granite? Because our species cannot? We come from the same explosion of life as the lichen – pale green, gray, cracking and dry. We are relatives. The songs and calls of birds give me confidence in nature’s longevity, just as the lichen-mottled rock does, the yucca which has spring forth from dry, powdery, dusty ground.
These things are miracles just as I myself am. My existence is no more than a combination of chemicals, healthy parents, all my ancestors having survived – none of them having succumbed to disease, drowning, or warfare – the age old plague of mankind. All the way back to Sumeria – and further to some archaic African valley –my ancestors have lived and given me life. Perhaps more of a miracle than the desert moss. Yet it has whittled survival to the barest essentials while here I sit, clothed and wearing shoes, immunized against disease, writing on paper processed and created in a factory, cell phone resting on this ancient rock upon which I sit.
A brilliant, royally azure jay scampers through the branches of my shady sentinel. We exchanged glances, two life forms on one planet floating through space, and he flew off to continue his existence. I hear a pecker tapping at the ponderosa’s bark. Perhaps he too is enticed by its sweet smell. Oden’s crows are circling overhead, stoic above the constant screeching of the jays. Here some desert grasses are growing through a crack between rocks, the blade’s bases holding onto the last exuberance of green – life – which has long faded from the desiccated tops. Behind me are two mountains named by man Sun and Moon – mountains I’ve climbed innumerable times with shameless comraddes to discuss “the inexhaustible variety of life.” Some men have chosen to build their dwellings at the base of these hills, erect property fences. I surely trespassed someone’s land to arrive upon this spot, and my heart aches with the thought of a proprietor persecuting me for seeking peace in the hills – Moon Mountain belongs to no man.
The city stretches before me, dotted with juniper and piñon, before deferring to a brown sea of dead grasses, its shores lapping up on the bases of the Cerrillos Hills, and the distant misty blue megalith of Sandia. When will man next sit upon this spot and have these thoughts? Or has it already been, some barefoot Indian come to this flat rock to wonder about his place in Nature, which is naught but everything. I come to the woods to see how the Earth truly is, to escape the new wilderness – the concrete jungle – which a certain animal species chanced to transform it into. These gray and decomposing needles at my feet are the Earth. They will soon – incredibly soon on a cosmic scale – be reduced to nothing more than those basic elemental atoms which have always been, particles of which everything is and always will be constructed. There is naught in this universe that at one time was not part of a single particle – a particle surrounded by nothing yet containing all within its infinitesimally incomprehensible dimension. The sun is now shaded behind a cloud, and I must go.