As the sun strengthened, temps rose, and I’d started to circle back to places I’d been, the shelter of house-sit prospects lured me back to Santa Fe, despite significant pollen counts and the other ways that time in AZ allowed me to forget how Santa Fe affects me.
I left Oak Flats Campground Wednesday and looped a few miles east first, to make a visit to Boyce Thompson Arboretum, a favorite haunt over the years. BTA is “Arizona’s oldest and largest botanical garden and one of Arizona’s top tourism sites and now holds collections of desert plants from the United States, Mexico, Australia, Madagascar, India, China, Japan, Israel, South America, the Middle East, Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Arabian Peninsula—all told 4,025 taxa and 20,000 plants within 135 acres of gardens.” (See their website: https://btarboretum.org )
It’s always tempting to go commune with the Boojum trees, but I didn’t pay admission and walk the gardens this time; I simply visited what remained of their March plant sale, greeted all the baby cactuses I’d love to adopt (should I someday have a place for us all to live), and perused the gift shop. I learned from the manager that they were celebrating their centennial year. So, I bought a commemorative postcard and an irresistible giftie or two.
Then I retraced my course, through Globe, which despite it’s rep as an armpit of the world, was as glorious as it gets with a marigold palate of poppies densely adorning the road sides. They were even making their way onto Globe’s grandfather tailing pile, a man-made mesa that zig-zags along the highway maybe a quarter mile through town, and on whose grassy steps cattle have grazed for as long as I’ve known the place. Globe actually has a Poppy Festival at this time of year. Life persisting around the Walmart:
Then I backtracked down Hwy 191 to Safford, for a couple of nights camping and soaking– detoxing the food poisoning– at Essence of Tranquility hot springs (see the so-named January post), where I had my first shower in several days. My last stop on the Arizona recap loop was the Research Ranch (described in another recent post), where I met some locals at a potluck followed by a talk on Mountain Lion language.
Afterward, once the chocolate insomnia gave way to sleep, I was blessed to spend the most silent night I’ve enjoyed in years. They’d offered me use of a casita (a few turns of the road from AWRR headquarters), but I still slept in the van to take in the stars and grassy murmur of the surrounds. I rose at 4:40am, not to hasten off, but to savor being there. First sunrise on those graceful hills since my teens.
Once the sun had crested the hills and got the grass and trees bobbing in the breeze, it focused its warmth on me as I journaled in the courtyard:
Morning drifts by carrying sun on puffs of purpose, cottonwood fairies flock north, a sky river among sky islands. They careen around my form to explore the gravitational rapids around the odd tree of me smelling of wonder, sunscreen and uncertainty of which they fathom nothing. In a swirl of glee they draw a trickle from my nose and leave their weightless teaching: how to drift free of worry.
The doves punctuate the moment with the pulsing ellipses of their song. Sun warms the bullseye of bricks under feet pointed toward center, toward Here, where contradictions intersect and choose their uneasy peace. Shadow and light, sound and silence intermingle as the web that holds all. Here. Although I must go ‘there,’ Here will always be. And I carry that with me, in me, as me.
Words cannot convey, cannot even touch, the gratitude… and the quiet acceptance in this moment that the realm of spirit I AM and seek cannot be reached by the one who craves it.
I am not abandoned, but I must stay in my lane, on my side of the Temple Door. Not because I am unwelcome, but to preserve the purity of that which radiates from the inner sanctum and guides me blind, to greet all comers, to greet each comer, including my ever wandering mind, who returns over and over, believing itself unworthy for having followed its nature; believing itself lost, wanting only to be found, but with no way to know home nor the unconditionality of it’s worth and that of all it perceives.
I got on the road north at 8am, having let the sun rise above eye line so I could enjoy the vistas as I drove east. My next destination was Truth or Consequences, NM, where I would drop off the Aqua Chi foot bath I had picked up on the way down. Anna had given it to our friend Shelby, a luminary reflexologist friend of ours there, who’d been a bit intimidated by its operation. I already had experience with them, so Anna had me bring it to Benson, to refresh on this model’s operation, to enjoy a few foot baths myself (maybe offer some to others), and eventually bring it home to Shelby and train her. The latter I did Saturday evening. Then I parked in the back compound of her charming house and slept, shuttling the last couple hours to Santa Fe Sunday in relatively mild morning light.
I’d had a generous few milligrams of chocolate to lift me through re-entry and watched with meditative remove the feelings, meanings and undertow that infiltrate my experience as I climb into Juniper country. That meditation continues as sensation builds, and I practice getting on with it and believing relatively little of what I think in a soup of thoughts that are neither objectively ‘true’ or exclusively ‘mine.’
Someone slightly different is falling into the familiar routines here. The cedar fever is formidable, but so far I’m able to take the pain a little less personally. Chocolate helps; and so does Chaparral. Before I left Benson, Anna presented me with a little tub of home-made chaparral (creosote) salve. I tucked it into a box. But as I travelled from hot water springs to high and dry Santa Fe, my feet cracked open painfully. With thanks and praise, I ow anoint my feet with that golden unguent, anointing these feet, which continue to carry me step by step on this road of arid uncertainty, with the transporting perfume of a desert quenched with rain. Smells like home.
taodaughter 