Not quite night and no longer day, not quite spring and no longer winter… I step outside into crisp mountain air, greeted by the faint sound of running water somewhere down slope from my cabin. Running water?! This is high desert; no water runs on my land.
But it was a “good” winter: Over eleven feet of snow, all told. The water table has risen and the springs which the Ute Indians relied upon only a century and a half ago are flowing again, having retreated underground for a multi-year drought that has only recently shown signs of abating.
This is a visually turbulent land, rugged terrain marked by steep slopes, never-ending hills piled atop more hills, rocky crags, arroyos and slots sculpted by millennia of run-off, interspersed only rarely with flats. Early spring and late summer downpours find little purchase on the piñon/juniper slopes; their precious lifeblood, precious in its rarity, slices sharply through ancient washes on its journey to the Arkansas river some ten miles below.
Tempestuous winds that annually mark the transition from winter to spring have finally hushed. Tranquility and a sweet, misty silence envelop faltering rays of daylight as dusk descends upon the forest. Transitioning from day into night, light into dark, dusk tonight is silent, interrupted only by the faint voice of water percolating up through sodden rock and sand in the ravine below my cabin.
The “voice of water” is no metaphor. This land speaks, as do all of its inhabitants including water… if you will but listen. Understanding what is said is, of course, another matter. But speak it does. Tonight it whispers long-forgotten memories of another time, another place…
I am ten years old walking naked and barefoot through freshwater springs, a secret place I have discovered behind the lake where I spent my summers as a child. Naked why? Only the jaded, cynical adult thinks to question something so natural, so innocent and pure. It just feels right. I came into this world with nothing and will leave it just the same. Why cloak myself with barriers to All That’s Real in-between?
Pure, chilling water at my feet, streaks of sunlight punching through a dense canopy of sumac, pines and assorted hardwoods… the details escape me but the feeling remains, the purity, the connectedness. This is my personal oasis, shelter from a world of people I just don’t understand. And who don’t understand me.
I am different. They are one religion, I am none. They speak effortlessly, I struggle. They hit balls with sticks, I stroke my fingertips over the damp, bumpy flesh of frogs. They are together, I am one. I know that I am different, awkward, the odd duck. I’ve learned to play the fit-in game but at what cost to my soul? Alas, this is what we do to survive the brutal onslaught of a world built by man, subversive to all that is real and natural. Sell your soul, conform or die.
I refuse. I will walk away and bide my time, sheltering my true Self until I find my place, my home. I’m sure of only one thing: that I belong here, alone, cradled in the nurturing arms of Nature. I lay down and let pure water wash away the sins of man, baptizing myself with real, pure Life. I care nothing for fairy tale gods who live in the sky and the angry, bitter men who pretend to speak for them. This is my church: the water, the air, the earth and sun. I want only to be the boy I read about, my hero, Jean Craighead George’s “Sam,” living in harmony with the land on my own side of the mountain.
Far off in the horizon, a stab of lightning pierces the San Juans, shattering my reverie, transporting me back to the present. I hike down to discover a seasonal spring gurgling from beneath an enormous rocky outcropping sheltering a favorite haunt of ghost-cougar, an old tom I’ve heard and whose wraith-like presence has raised the hair on my neck… whose ephemeral form I’ve yet to behold, even more elusive than my own true Self.
I step into the cold pure spring and my spirit begins to tremble, vibrating frantically between two worlds, the line between past and present blurred. Now I am the boy and the dream. Now I am the man and the dream fulfilled.
I’m sure of only one thing: that I belong here, alone, cradled in the nurturing arms of Nature.